What Is Love?

What is Love?

Word reference.com defines it as a great interest and pleasure in something, a person or thing that one loves, an intense feeling of deep affection: a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone. Do you know what word this is the definition for? Love. Love has several different meanings, from something that gives little pleasure to something one would die for. It can describe an intense feeling of affection, an emotion, or an emotional state. Just as there are many type of lovers, there are many types of love. Love is inherent in all human cultures. It is these cultural differences that make any universal definition of love difficult to establish. Expressions of love may include the love for a soul or mind, love of money, love for learning, love for respect, and much more. Love is essentially an abstract concept, easier to experience than to explain or define.

Love is rarely defined because everyone experiences it differently. What one person thinks is love, another may think is crush or foolish passion. How does one know if he or she is in love? How is it possible to differentiate romantic love from the love shared between friends? In order to understand love, we need to first understand the two major types of love; romantic love and friendship love.

Friendship love is a milder type of love, since it does not consume a person’s every waking moment with thoughts of the other person. Friendship love can often turn into romantic love, as it has many times throughout history, but the birth of romantic love between friends will often kill the love of friendship. In other words, lovers rarely can go back to being “just friends”. Why is that romantic love so overpowering? The love of friendship can be very strong, but it is the emotional intensity of romantic love that forever changes the simplicity of the love between friends.

For example, there is a friendship love between me and my friend Y. I love her dearly...