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What is love?

Leader1776 6 June 24
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What is love?
Those who don't know,
call it as risk.
Those who play,
call it game.
Those who don't have it,
call it dream.
And those who understand,
call it life.

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According to Oxford

"a strong feeling of deep affection for someone or something, especially a member of your family or a friend"

Good enough for me.

If you want a discussion you are going to have to advance your own theory.

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A deep question.

But maybe you need to be more specific. What I mean is we have different kinds of love. Erotic love, agape, empathy... I love a good steak and a beer, but I love animals and nature. I love my Mother and my siblings, but I love a good woman. I love them all but in different ways.

Well, you get the picture. There are different kinds of love.

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Human nature is preserving oneself and looking out for the interests of oneself first and foremost. Love is when you put someone else’s interests before your own even when you aren’t getting anything out of it. The biggest example of love is a parent to an infant child. A mother sacrifices sleep, time, energy, food, comfort, life, etc. etc. without expecting anything in return because the child can never repay her. I’d say what isn’t an example of love is most marriages. For example, why do women get attracted to men? Oftentimes it’s because the woman feels the man can protect her and take care of her. In other words, he can do things for her. At the end of the day, it’s always about looking out for your own interests.

I like your example, but! Does it suggest that the child's affection for the mother is not love?

I've often said a successful marriage is of two people devoting everything to the other with no expectation in return... which is comparable to your example.

I think there might be something to the idea of 'completeness' - that the object fulfills or completes what was missing.

@tracycoyle “Does it suggest that the child’s affection for the mother is not love?”

Honestly, I think it does. Let me explain. If I asked a roomful of people why they love their mothers, I can imagine many would say it’s because of everything their mothers have sacrificed for them. My mother is a schoolteacher, and for Mother’s Day, the kids make gifts to show their appreciation for their mothers, and write down all the reasons they love their mothers. Many of those reasons are things like “she feeds me”, “she takes care of me”, “she drives me places”, etc.

It seems children don’t reciprocate the agape love of their parents. What do you think? You make good points btw.

@Tati I think it is an inability to articulate concepts they haven't begun to understand so they use terminology they DO understand. This topic hearkens back to a similar conversation held elsewhere on this site last week when I asked "what do I mean when I say I love her" as YOU understand my statement. I focused on the word LOVE and how do we know what I feel is the same/similar to what you feel if we both use the same term (in the same context).

This discuss seems to take that and focus on the term love more. I love the discussion (!) because it goes to the heart of our ability to understand each other. Love being not negatively charged it lets us discuss how we can relate to each other.

Puppy love - is a phrase we use when teens begin the process of using a term the way adults do (contextually accurate) without understanding the implications...

So...(spitballing here)...is it about consequences (which relates to the actions taken via the reasons for doing so)?

Interesting you use agape - I would argue that Scripture (religious) suggests that the love from a child is 'pure'. There is something about children's love of parents (sibs and others) that seems devoid of context and therefore 'just is'.

@tracycoyle Interesting idea... What do you mean by consequences?

It’s fascinating how you bring up the idea that a child’s love is pure. It brings me back to the times as a child that I told my siblings “I hate you” when they did something to anger/ hurt me. Now that I look back at it, I know that I didn’t really hate them. But it makes me wonder what hate really is as well.

@Tati Any act has consequences and it is those consequences that generally defines the act in positive/negative terms and therefore, over time, defines the act in a way that can be understood in context. (Hmmm, that has a lot in it that I think "I" need to unpack for myself in the near future, but let me see if I can do a little here)

A tradition is a way to codify an act whose consequences are well known and considered positively. It is why traditions persist and are strongly defended. There tends to be lots of evidence of the benefits of the actions over generations. It is also why it is hard to change traditions - as values change.

Example: For someone to say that gay marriage is wrong because traditional marriage has 10,000 years of positive history behind it ignores the history of marriage overall, and that any attempt to change it in the past has been with, often fatal, animosity. But if the institution of marriage is good, increasing it's use in non-standard couples would seem to be a GOOD thing. Given a strong position in support of individual rights, gay marriage was a slam dunk positive. But the Right raised hell about it's corrosive effect on SOCIETY. The tyranny of the majority from John Stuart Mills' analysis.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions" recognizes that intent is not the factor but rather then consequences that matter. (Don't bring up 'ends justifying the means' right now, I'm on a roll!)

What is the 'consequence' of love. The gaining of some material (food, housing, clothing) for the child from the parent? or the well being of the child? For the parent, the joy of parenting isn't in the giving but in the growth of a new person. I can think of a lot of examples between a couple that are illustrative of love - but don't necessarily define it. (Another example: rights. Define them without using an example...)

Scripture says "by their fruits will you know them" which applies to actions too: by the consequences will you know its goodness/evil. The childish 'I hate you' is about an emotion, not an action. Now, if you hit your sib with the intention of harm...well, that would be bad. But again, for kids, words and understanding often are not well connected.

You are right to wonder about hate. Another emotion that has lots of contextual and comprehension issues.

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The main thing about love, I think, is it is never about oneself, but always the other.

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

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