What is love? I asked myself, and tried to find an appropriate definition of it. However, I didn't get any clear answer of this question, for there are too many annotations: connotative meanings, derived meanings. Therefore, I want to study the basic meanings of love, sharing with you in the below.
Love can be sexual passion, including sexual activities. It is often referred to as sexual intercourse in this sense. There would be topics like: how to make love, lovemaking skills, etc. It seems that the notion of love here is more physical than spiritual. It is so true that it reveals naked bodies of human beings. It is the nature of human beings, as eating. When we are hungry, we want to eat; when we have the sexual passion, we want to make love. If there is no such nature, there would be no generations of human beings. Love is not only related to sexual passion, sexual intercourse, and there are many more definitions about it.
Love can mean a love affair, which is the relationship between two lovers. How many stories are about love affairs? How many rumors are about love affairs? Love goes far into our life. Life needs love, and then there are stories or rumors about it. Human beings like to make up this kind of stories, and never tired of listening to new love-affair stories. It seems that there are endless stories about the relationship between two lovers. In the past, there were millions of stories of this kind; there are millions of them; I am sure, there will be thousands of millions of stories about it.
Love is “a feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person, with whom one is disposed to make a pair”- the emotion of sex and romance. This is the feeling to be husband and wife. There is romance, and there is love. In this sense, love is both sentimental and physical. There is natural attraction between men and women. So, there have to be emotion of sex and romance. This is the love here. Love makes the world colorful and worth living.
Love is “a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness”. Actually, it is not all among the relatives, and there are loves between friends, classmates, roommates, colleagues, etc. So long as there are relationships, there is a kind of love among the persons involved. Therefore, here, love is more sentimental than physical. It is a kind of feeling, a bit abstract.
An intense emotional attachment is love, too. Like the love for a pet, or something you like, the meaning of love here is out of emotion. You love your pen, and you love your dog. “Love me, love my dog.” All “love” here is emotional. I have my love for poems, and you may have your love of dramas. This is the meaning of love here.
Love can be the person who is the object of deep or intense affection or attraction to us. It represents our beloved ones. “My love, are you there?” Love here is often used as a term of endearment, right?
When we say, “send our love to them”, we use “love” as an expression of our affection. Sometimes, love can be God. See, so many meanings of love. I am a bit confused here, for I found that there are no clear boundaries among some of the meanings of love.
Anyhow, love is great, no matter what kind of love it is. That is very clear to me.
