Love is a subject that is not easily discussed. The emotions and memories behind this sensitive subject are inherent in all adults. It is a universal feeling that I believe is essential to human existence. It is food for the soul and lack of love for the soul has the same effect as lack of food for the body, it will wither and begin to die.
Everyone has an opinion on love because it pertains to them. My own definition of love is from Robert A. Heinlein who states that “'Love' is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” I use this definition because I feel that love and relationships are based on happiness; happiness caused by the other person. Of course this does not mean that everyone should be happy all the time. Happiness only matters when there is sadness and other emotions to balance it out and make one's state of happiness so much sweeter. How would we know the sweetness of honey without the bitterness of a lime, or the spiciness of the pepper? The world also is not completely conducive to happiness. Maybe it is entropy that causes times of discontent and that is why we must work towards happiness when all other emotions just seem to come to us. It is like Newtons second law of thermodynamics that entropy always increases. Entropy, the chaos of the universe, is likely to cause much of the range of emotions we do not like to feel; rage, anger, sadness, disgust.
Love helps us sort out the entropy in our own lives. It gives us a base from which we can do the operations of our normal life. Outside the house can be a hectic and unpleasant place but once you are home, in your lover's arms, there is nothing but that moment, that happiness, and all else is unimportant because you are there, living in that moment. Those are the moments to cherish and the moments you will remember. I don't remember all of the bad things that have happened to me, but the good things live forever.
I suppose there are people who hold on to those bad moments for their entire life. These are people who have felt love and lost it, but never went after it again. They saw it as a lost cause so they turned their focus towards inner feelings of rage and sadness, which made their souls unhealthy and made them into the type of person they are. This brings up another point in the phenomenology of love; self love. I think that a person must love themselves, to some point, to be able to love someone else. I'm not talking about narcissism, this is unhealthy as it can prevent loving other people, but rather a state of contentment and acknowledgment of yourself as a unique individual; an individual with needs, wants, hopes, dreams, desires, who can love, and be loved and is existing among other individuals who also have similar qualities.
Acknowledgment of self is important. In love one must be able to reach out to other people and feel them, see them for who they are, and them form another being who is so much more than the the selves. This connecting of souls is central in many writings about phenomenology in any sense because it is the connection betwixt two people. I think that life is all about the connections and relationships that you make in your life, the people you meet, like, love, hate, this is what defines a person. The moments between one's self and all other selves that that self makes connections with are the achievements that people should focus on.
In any connection between people there is a compromise made between all the people in that relationship. These compromises are one thing that defines relationships. There is no such thing as completely compatible people. Everyone must come to some sort of agreement in a relationship that they are in. This is not exclusive to romantic relationships. It is evident in friendship, partnership, parental love, love of your child, and all other sorts of relationship-contracts that people make. Comparing a relationship to a contract may seem like a cold and impersonal way of discussing what I have called the definition of our lives, but let us examine some examples. In most romantic relationships today, we believe in monogamy. In looking at monogamy it seems to come from some belief that one person cannot love more than one person at a time and be able to give themselves fully to each person. But I digress, in today's relationship with it's belief in monogamies if one person leaves this path then it is taken as a breach of contract and is grounds for termination of that relationship. Of course people don't always use these breaches to break off the relationship but it is a valid reason. On the other hand, if a romantic relationship is broken off for reasons seeming inefficient, the person who has broken it off is looked on as(pardon my colloquialisms) a bitch or an asshole, depending on their gender. This idea of contractual relationships spans all connections between people. People have things that are important to them and feelings that can be hurt, attacks on either of these are breaches of the relationship that two people share.
Love, in it's inherent goodness, can be, and often is, perverted by people in the world. A perversion that happens often in romantic relationships, but is also evident in friendship and other sorts, is jealousy. Jealousy is contrary to love because it is usually aimed at things that make the non-jealous person of the relationship happy. Since I believe that happiness of the other person is essential in a relationship, jealousy is contrary to love. Jealousy is all about attention of the other person in the relationship, however, constant attention is not essential to a relationship between two people. People have an endless ability to love and like so enjoying something else or time spent with another person does not detract from the love of anything else. This issue also arrives from not living in the now. Living in the now demands your attention to be mostly focused on the events, people, and relationships that are with you at that time. If you are in a good situation with good people then this will bring a time of great happiness to you situation. Jealous people will not focus on what they are doing but rather on what someone else is doing and what someone else is feeling. They are not focusing on a realization of self. They don't want to be happy, which is alright because they are master of their own life, and they don't want the other that they are in a relationship to be happy either, and that is not love.
Love takes many forms in our life. Be it love of life, love of a person, love of an idea, love for something, it is essentially the same thing in that it is makes us happy to be with that beloved. Beloveds are evident in all lives because of love's scope. In my life friends and romantic lovers help define my life. All the people I have loved, and those who have loves me, are essential to my being and to the person that I am today. I think that loving is the most divine of emotions and even that it might be the divine. When John says “God is Love” I take it literally and feel like the divines presence among us is the love that we feel for others and that others feel for us.
