What Is Love?

I grew up in America, and now live in Australia.  In the USA and overseas, I meet people born all over the world.  If I ask people, no matter where they were born, what love is, their definition gravitates to romantic love.  This is the special love two people find in each other.  We become one soul even though we are two bodies.  Love has an enormous and inescapable impact on not only individuals, but whole cultures, industries, and periods of history. 

Think of your favourite movies, novels, and “love songs.”  Then, there are spiritual teachings in all their forms.  How many have heard in a church that we are to love our neighbour.  The amount of time spent on just this one love topic is astounding. 

Of course, there is the quest to be touched by love.  Think of all the time, flowers, cards, sacrifices, energy, moods, angst, poetry, beauty products, and anxiety that people of all ages go through in the experience of “love.”   Once we move out of the experience of love into a more philosophical treatment of love, there are views that basically treat love as either physical, emotional, spiritual, or some combination of the three. 

An expression of love is a response to another whom we are physically attracted to.   The action of loving encompasses a broad range of behaviour. Caring, listening, kindness, “giving up a kidney,” or running into a burning building and so on are behaviours of love.  Others reduce love to the physical motivation of sex and eroticism toward a potential mate or object of sexual gratification.  

The ancient Greek philosophy of love is the treatment that most explains the very nature of love to me first encountered this in the writings of the British Christian philosopher C.S. Lewis in “The Four Loves.”  The classic Greek triad on love is Eros, Agape, and Philia.  The ancients developed this to as many as eight loves!  

In my life, I have known love in its many forms.  I have taught on it.  I have written about it as I am in this post  I have lost it.  I have fallen out of it.  I have sacrificed because I love my children.  I have been love sick and brokenhearted.  In the next few posts, I will aim to write a series of thoughts, reflections, and stories about love in its many forms.

I hope you love them.