What is Love?
 

Please choose one, or more. I would like to hear your thoughts on the matter. If you choose a write in option, say so and expand on it.

love is a cupcake given to a stranger

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
-- Matt Groening

Baby don't hurt me.

MORE THAN A FEEEELINGGGG!

\m/ Boston.



In all honesty, I don't know, but I know I like it.

no, that's Rock -n- Roll you're thinking of

You're asking the same question that every love-lorn poet has been asking for centuries if not millenia.

I have to say it's at least all of the things listed as options in the poll. For some it might be less, in some it's more. Love is one of those things best defined on an individual and case-by-case basis.

For me love is different for every person I love.

I love everyone.

There are many good people, most of whom I'll never meet, and I love them. There are a few evil people and they deserve to die and the most perfect expression of my love is to do what I can to help them do so (I'm thinking the Hitlers and child-molesters of the world, not "the gays" or anything like that). I love her more than life and would give it up freely if it saved her pain. I love myself, I love my family, I love every living creature. Most of all, I love lamp.

All of these loves are defined differently. They're felt and expressed differently. They are all bound by different rules.

My favorite cheesy answer is, "Love is your souls recognition of it's counterpoint in another."

Are you just looking around and saying you love things?

A many Splendord thing. Since a thing should be a noun, I don't know anymore. :cool:

All you need is love! BAH bah-da bah-da...

Love is all you need! love is all you need. Love is all you need....

What is love?
Its something we make
In those few quiet hours
before the day can break.
Drawing designs on the lives that we live
Both just wanting to take...forgetting to give.

Love takes no less than everything. -Vanessa Williams in her duet with Brian McKnight "Love Is".

Just thought that's the true definition.

Love is, what you want it to be.
Love is, heaven to the lonely.
(can't remember the rest of the words)

Love for me is the attachment I feel for my family, which can be battered by short term events but will never change long term.

Everything else I've felt I can only assume is lust/ passion/ obsession as it hasn't lasted.

I was about to try to say this, nicely put.

Love is caring about something or someone more than you care about yourself.

I chose nothing on this list.

Love is a choice. Sometimes it is a painful choice, in either direction, but it is a choice.

(OK, that's what some psych told me years ago. I don't really know what love is. Romantic love, that is. I am sure what love means when it applies to my family.)

What is love
Oh baby, don't hurt me
Don't hurt me no more
Oh, baby don't hurt me
Don't hurt me no more


Other than a Night at the Roxbury, love is what I feel for my two sons. It is an unconditional mixture of feelings that manifested when they came into the world.

the really amazing thing about children (at least to me) is how they do come into this world with their own distinctive personalities already intact! It blows me away--my sons are sooooo different and i knew who they were the moment they got here!

Anyway--love is my two boys. I love them. They are the most incredible, wonderful human beings. They are mentally and physically gorgeous. I don't talk about my boys here in the cellar...I guess because I can't really articulate how much they mean to me, how much I love them.

I don't talk about my boys because they are the most vulnerable part of me. The most "real" part of me.

Love *is*

Prepeare yourself for extreme cheese- buy, hey, you did ask for a definition of love!

Love does have various levels, intensities etc, but I have to agree with Sundae here: my love for my family beats all.

When I'm away from them I miss them and think of how fantastic they are, and how amazing it is that despite all our faults and differences, we still fit perfectly with eachother.

When I'm with them: the mixed irritation and comfort of having someone know you so well; the safety of knowing you can behave towards them, in ways that others would not accept, and they will still forgive you; the happiness in the smallest thing shared with them; being able to speak frankly with them again in ways you couldn't with others (here I'm especially referring to my sisters), knowing their faults and accepting the way they are, which, if I saw in others would turn me off completely; defending them to the back teeth through everything but at the same time telling them where they went wrong; wanting the best for them without jealousy

These feeling and situations have happened with a few friends, but never to the same extent to those that relate to the family I have grown up with.
I don't know if I'll ever feel like that for a partner/husband. Do you think the love for your partner reaches those levels? I hope so.

As for my future children, I know how strongly I feel for my nieces and nephews, so I assume the love for my children will probably surpass anything I've described above. Brianna summed it up well.

//end of cheese

I feel grossly cheesy now- I need a shower...

Love is a bond:

You can break all of the bonds some of the time,
You can break some of the bonds all of the time; but,
You can't break all of the bonds all of the time and still be human. :heartpump

Psyching up for Valentines day a little early this year aren't you BigV?

I have to agree that love is a bit of everything on the list. Or can be. Love is respect, esteem, dignity, tolerance, a bond, caring about someone's feelings (your own or other's), and wanting to be near those you love because being with them replenishes both of your emotional buckets. Love is a two-way street.

Stormie

Which side of the road are you supposed to drive on?

Remember children: don't forget to look both ways before you cross.

Love is like a butterfly, as soft and gentle as a sigh.

I actually wrote this some time ago.

What is love?

Love is not fireworks and campfires.
It’s not that first rush every time you see the girl at the video store you’re too scared to talk to.
Love may have something to do with those long nights wrapped in short arms on the backseat but odds are that has a lot more to do with lust.

No for me, a bitter middle aged, realist love is actually something deeper. It’s being woken up at two am by the snoring and not caring. It’s watching your favorite movie with someone who always falls asleep during the second act, and not minding.
It is the request for a drink when you just came back from the kitchen and they could have asked while you were there, but you go back anyway to get them one.

When you are younger, its hot passionate nights on your parents couch praying like hell it won’t end and that your parents won’t wake up. When you’re my age it’s cuddling together on the couch holding hands quietly praying like hell the kids don’t wake up.
Is it because love is so different as we get older? No. Our needs change, but at the same time there is still the exact same needs that were there when we were young. We want acceptance. We want someone who understands us. Love isn’t spending every waking moment together trying to be in each others skin. That gets old and worn in time. Love for me is even when you’re sitting in different room and you hear the small noises they make as they go about their routine, you think how much you love them. It’s a voice on the phone in the middle of the afternoon asking what you’re doing when they know damned well. Its arguing over what’s for dinner and when you finally decide it’s not what either of you wanted.

Its being there, not because you feel obligated to do all those little things that drive you mad, but to be there to do all those little things that drive you mad because you want to do them for that person.

Love no longer is fumbling in the dark for the things that make the baby, its fumbling in the dark for your glasses to go get the baby before it wakes you partner. It’s knowing every single irritating thing your partner does but missing it when they don’t do it.

The future is never what it looks like no matter how old you are. The future is in constant flux and usually has other plans than you do. That is why it’s nice to have love. It makes the surprises a little nicer to deal with.

Too many things to name, all at once.
I can love more ways than I can describe. How I love a stranger, my wife and my son... none can be explained.

Love is like popsicles
You get too much you get too high
Not enough and you're gonna die

Misheard lyrics

Sometimes love is a bond. A junk bond. Cheap as the paper it is written on. Love is a sales pitch to enter into a bond you may regret. Kinda like buying a car.Too stary eyed to read the fine print.


just kidding...

I said love was a verb. It is action,although when I love it is a mysterious bond. Like tiny gold thread attaching one to another.
Where that tiny gold thread is attached could be anywhere. To me it could be the head or the heart. I am not sure if lust can be a type of a love bond or not. ( No Mercy- Kiss you all over)

Your love is like, a rollercoaster baby.
I wanna ride!

The Ohio Players!

Good poll!

After 25 years of marraige. The top four for me. I'm kind of nutty at times. I have an unusual sense of humor but I tend to laugh in the face of a crisis. I don't really get uptight about stupid shit. Mainly because it is stupid shit. But none of that really has anything to do with this thread.

Love? It is really cool! My wife and I have worked together on just about everything in our marraige. Maybe that is why we lasted. Actually, I would say that is probably the main reason it has. We never had a lot of outside interference from family because my vocation had me going all over the country so we had to "stick" together to make things work.

What the hell. Just my thoughts...

Love is driving 900 miles wearing diapers so you don't have to stop to pee, in order to confront your backdoor man's other girlfriend at the airport with pepper spray, rubber tubing, a bb pistol, steel mallet, a wig, trashbags, and other acoutrements of kidnapping and disposal.

To be fair, the nut job only took the bb gun, pepper spray, and wig with her to the airport. The other stuff she left at the hotel.

Probably hoping to lure the other woman back to the hotel room before snuffing her...

Slander! She was just going to get her to "talk" about stuff.

Elspode, you actually made me laugh out loud!

Awesome! If they had an award for "Post of the Month" I'd vote for you! Truley awesome!

I gotta go pee...

My mother once told me when I was a kid that "Love is never having to say your sorry." I think she believed it, too, even though it did come from a sappy movie from the late 60's or early 70's or something. I never heard her once apologize to my dad.

Love is complete acceptance.

love sux. it holds you back from everything you could be and the stupid thing should be knocked out of our stupid heads.

oh happy valentines everyone.

The movie was Love Story. A classic. I don't agree with the line though. I understand the idea, but I don't think it's fair to limit yourself that way.

"I'm sorry I crashed the car honey"

"That's ok darling. I know it was an accident"

"Yes, but I'm still sorry because it's going to be an inconvienience to us till it gets fixed"

"Well I'm sure it will be. You don't have to be sorry, but I'm glad you appreciate how this will put me out"

I think there's different reasons to say you're sorry. It doesn't have to be a concilliatory thing. It can simply be an acknowledgement of anothers patience.

Yeah, yeah, yeah......until the next time you're smitten with some tight buns.:lol:



aside, would smitten be derived from smite? Way different meaning.

Smitten is an inflected form of smite. Which is from the Old English word for "smear or defile."

That's nuts, looking at 19 dictionaries, probably 2/3 of them have the first definition of smitten one I'd never heard. :eek:
I'd only seen, and used, smitten as meaning, "to impress favorably; charm; enamor", or, "having suddenly started to like or love something or someone very much".
Until my last post here, I'd never made the connection between smite and smitten. Learn something new every day.

Now I'm wondering if there's a connection between kite and kitten...hrm...

Love has two components, behavior and emotion. As an emotion,...well hell, how is anyone supposed to define something that everyone claims is their own and no one else's? As a behavior love is chemistry, and is ruled be regions of the brain very close to those involved in addiction. Actually, scans of a heartbroken lover's brain will reveal patterns nearly identical to someone in drug withdrawal. Go figure. Scent has a great deal to do with this. Case in point, a recent study showed that a very high proportion of women smell the clothing of their husband/boyfriend during periods of separation.
I'm not trying to downplay the emotional side, but isn't something with a huge number of equally correct definition undefinable? As such it's kind of a silly question, sort of like "what is inside this black box that you cannot open, touch, smell or listen to?".

it's so funny when science geeks try to answer philisophical questions empirically.


I'm telling you. it's a cupcake given to a stranger.

I don't usually try to mold an answer to a purposefully unanswerable question, but this is actually a concept that gets batted around from time to time in the neural engineering circles here. Emotion as a discreet series of interaction in isolated portions of the brain is something getting more and more research time and funding, mostly anger and emotions that lead to crime, but love is thrown in there because it consumes so much of our time. So I threw it in there as more of a representation of how we address the issue here, rather than a response to the spirit of the question.

I don't watch enough sappy movies to pull a funny quote from memory, and any attempt at making one up would probably be pathetic...

i think ill go philosophical on this one... love is ones consciousness acknowledging the consciousness of another human without the need for proof. im a fan of Descartes so if u know anything about his work u know exactly what a big deal love is...

Enlighten us?

That's the "cgto rgo sm" guy. :rolleyes:

Sounds like 'namaste' to me..."The divine in me acknowledges the divine in you", or some variation along those lines.

Love hurts, love scars,
Love wounds, and marks,
Any heart, not tough,
Or strong enough
To take a lot of pain,
Take a lot of pain
Love is like a cloud
Holds a lot of rain
Love hurts, ooh ooh
Love hurts

love is putting up with her because, well, she puts up with you

Love is appreciating every piece of an individual...and appreciating the bad parts the most.

Here's the Calvin and Hobbes answer (OK, so it's only the Hobbes answer) ...

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2007/04/01/

All of the above.

V, those choices are somehow nearly poetry. They are like verse.

I picked three -- verb, noun, and feeling. These are the things or ways I've been there.

Love is caring about someone else's happiness above your own, that's why there are different types of love. Eros, Philia, Agape, and perhaps to some extent Storge (maybe). Eros and Agape are the two types we call love in western culture.