What is love?

[Hygro]

Baby don't hurt me.

What is love? What makes love love and not other things like respect or lust or something else?

 

[madviking]

it is trusting someone else with the power to destroy you.

 

[warpus]

Without love monogamy might not have been a thing and our incredibly complex social structures would fall apart or would have never had a chance to begin forming. We are social creatures and I think monogamy and pairing up really helped us focus on things other than fighting over mates - if you have a mate waiting for you back home when you're out hunting, you are going to be able to focus on the hunt and not worry about sexual access to a female when you get back. You are also going to be less suspicious of the people you're hunting with, members of your hunting pack - so I think monogamy and love went hand in hand in allowing us to better create these social structures that exist to this day (family, town, community, etc.). Without these social structures early humans would have had a much harder time surviving.

So I think love evolved alongside with all the other things, as we were progressing from non-social animals to social ones. It makes a lot of things easier, in terms of survival.

As to what exactly it is, I couldn't tell you, but I think that's partially how it came about.

 

[Sanguivorant]

Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more.

To me, love is devotion.

 

[Tahuti]

To me, love is devotion.

Seconded!

 

[Zkribbler]

"Love is what happens during that period of time between your first meeting with a beautiful, young lady and your sudden realization that she looks like a haddock." ... Lionel Barrymore

"Love is the ability to tolerate a member of the opposite sex for a short period of time." ... Woody Allen

 

[onejayhawk]

Love is the condition where the interests of another are more important to you than you own interests. Another persons happiness and well being are necessary for your own.

"Love is liking someone even though you know them."

J

 

[Hygro]

it is trusting someone else with the power to destroy you.

This answer is my favorite so far, but is that not just saying that love is trust?

What would the difference between love and trust be?

 

[onejayhawk]

This answer is my favorite so far, but is that not just saying that love is trust?

What would the difference between love and trust be?

That one really is trust. You might do it because you love someone. You might do it because that person loves you.

Love is the eternal motivator. The other is fear. Love it compatible with fear, but trust is not. Love can drive out the fear.

J

 

[luiz]

Love is a fire that burns unseen,
a wound that aches yet isn’t felt,
an always discontent contentment,
a pain that rages without hurting,

a longing for nothing but to long,
a loneliness in the midst of people,
a never feeling pleased when pleased,
a passion that gains when lost in thought.

It’s being enslaved of your own free will;
it’s counting your defeat a victory;
it’s staying loyal to your killer.

But if it’s so self-contradictory,
how can Love, when Love chooses,
bring human hearts into sympathy?

 

[Smote]

Love is caring deeply for the well-being of another.

I think you can love someone without trusting them. It's a sad love, but it's a love nonetheless.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Love is an ill-defined term for various feelings of attachment.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I think you can love someone without trusting them. It's a sad love, but it's a love nonetheless.

My first thought was that this is absurd. But then I realized it's a reasonable description of the relationship I had with my mother.

 

[JollyRoger]

You and I are the same, Darien. We are smart enough not to buy in to the oldest myth running; love. A fiction created by people to keep them from jumping out of windows.

5char

 

[bhsup]

1st Corinthians chapter 13, the love chapter:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned,[a] but have not love, it profits me nothing.

4 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part. 10 But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.

11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

13 And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

 

[Farm Boy]

It's the point.

 

[onejayhawk]

Love is an ill-defined term for various feelings of attachment.

Why ill defined? However, love=/=attachment. Attachments are not self sacrificial.

You and I are the same, Darien. We are smart enough not to buy in to the oldest myth running; love. A fiction created by people to keep them from jumping out of windows.

The only people that deny love exists are those without experience.

J

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Why ill defined?

Because somehow philia and eros, two very different things, end up being covered by the same term.

 

[schlaufuchs]

It is being emotionally dependent on someone, having that someone be emotionally dependent on you, and both parties being totally fine with that situation.

 

[onejayhawk]

Because somehow philia and eros, two very different things, end up being covered by the same term.

Not really. Sex is not love and love is not sex, though they work well together. If you were to say philia and agape are different, I would concede a partial point.

J