Do you know actual meaning of love?
Love is an emotion of a strong affection and personal attachment.Love is also said to be a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection —"the unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another". Love may describe compassionate and affectionate actions towards other humans, one's self or animals.
In English, love refers to a variety of different feelings, states,
and attitudes, ranging from pleasure ("I loved that meal") to interpersonal attraction ("I love my partner"). "Love" may refer specifically to the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love, to the sexual love of eros, to the emotional closeness of familial love, to the platonic love that defines friendship, or to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love, or to a concept of love
that encompasses all of those feelings. This diversity of uses and
meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes
love unusually difficult to consistently define, compared to other
emotional states.
Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.
Love may be understood as part of the survival instinct, a function
to keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the
continuation of the species.
Although the nature or essence of love is a subject of frequent debate, different aspects of the word can be clarified by determining what isn't love. As a general expression of positive sentiment (a stronger form of like), love is commonly contrasted with hate (or neutral apathy); as a less sexual and more emotionally intimate form of romantic attachment, love is commonly contrasted with lust; and as an interpersonal relationship with romantic overtones, love is sometimes contrasted with friendship, although the word love is often applied to close friendships.
Fraternal love (Prehispanic sculpture from 250–900 A.D., of Huastec origin). Museum of Anthropology in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico.
When discussed in the abstract, love usually refers to
interpersonal love, an experience felt by a person for another person.
Love often involves caring for or identifying with a person or thing
( vulnerability and care theory of love), including oneself (cf. narcissism).
In addition to cross-cultural differences in understanding love, ideas
about love have also changed greatly over time. Some historians date
modern conceptions of romantic love to courtly Europe during or after the Middle Ages, although the prior existence of romantic attachments is attested by ancient love poetry.
Because of the complex and abstract nature of love, discourse on love is commonly reduced to a thought-terminating cliché, and there are a number of common proverbs regarding love, from Virgil's "Love conquers all" to The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love". St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, defines love as "to will the good of another." Bertrand Russell describes love as a condition of "absolute value," as opposed to relative value.
Love is sometimes referred to as being the "international language", overriding cultural and linguistic divisions.
Grandmother and grandchild,
Following developments in electrical theories such as Coulomb's law,
which showed that positive and negative charges attract, analogs in
human life were developed, such as "opposites attract." Over the last
century, research on the nature of human mating has generally found this
not to be true when it comes to character and personality—people tend
to like people similar to themselves. However, in a few unusual and
specific domains, such as immune systems,
it seems that humans prefer others who are unlike themselves (e.g.,
with an orthogonal immune system), since this will lead to a baby that
has the best of both worlds.In recent years, various human bonding
theories have been developed, described in terms of attachments, ties,
bonds, and affinities. Some Western authorities disaggregate into two
main components, the altruistic and the narcissistic. This view is
represented in the works of Scott Peck, whose work in the field of applied psychology
explored the definitions of love and evil. Peck maintains that love is a
combination of the "concern for the spiritual growth of another," and
simple narcissism. In combination, love is an activity, not simply a feeling.
Psychologist Erich Fromm maintained in his book "The art of loving" that love is not merely a feeling but is also actions, and that in fact, the "feeling" of love is superficial in comparison to ones commitment to love via a series of loving actions over time.In this sense, Fromm held that love is ultimately not a feeling at all, but rather is a commitment to, and adherence to, loving actions towards another, ones self, or many others, over a sustained duration. Fromm also described Love as a conscious choice that in its early stages might originate as an involuntary feeling, but which then later no longer depends on those feelings, but rather depends only on conscious commitment.
Definitions:
he word "love" can have a variety of related but distinct meanings in different contexts. Often, other languages use multiple words to express some of the different concepts that English relies mainly on "love" to encapsulate; one example is the plurality of Greek words for "love." Cultural differences in conceptualizing love thus make it doubly difficult to establish any universal definition.Although the nature or essence of love is a subject of frequent debate, different aspects of the word can be clarified by determining what isn't love. As a general expression of positive sentiment (a stronger form of like), love is commonly contrasted with hate (or neutral apathy); as a less sexual and more emotionally intimate form of romantic attachment, love is commonly contrasted with lust; and as an interpersonal relationship with romantic overtones, love is sometimes contrasted with friendship, although the word love is often applied to close friendships.
Because of the complex and abstract nature of love, discourse on love is commonly reduced to a thought-terminating cliché, and there are a number of common proverbs regarding love, from Virgil's "Love conquers all" to The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love". St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, defines love as "to will the good of another." Bertrand Russell describes love as a condition of "absolute value," as opposed to relative value.
Love is sometimes referred to as being the "international language", overriding cultural and linguistic divisions.
Psychological basis
Further information: Human bonding
Psychology depicts love as a cognitive and social phenomenon. Psychologist Robert Sternberg formulated a triangular theory of love
and argued that love has three different components: intimacy,
commitment, and passion. Intimacy is a form in which two people share
confidences and various details of their personal lives, and is usually
shown in friendships and romantic love affairs. Commitment, on the other
hand, is the expectation that the relationship is permanent. The last
and most common form of love is sexual attraction and passion.
Passionate love is shown in infatuation as well as romantic love. All
forms of love are viewed as varying combinations of these three
components. Non-love does not include any of these components. Liking
only includes intimacy. Infatuated love only includes passion. Empty
love only includes commitment. Romantic love includes both intimacy and
passion. Companionate love includes intimacy and commitment. Fatuous
love includes passion and commitment. Lastly, consummate love includes
all three. American psychologist Zick Rubin sought to define love by psychometrics in the 1970s. His work states that three factors constitute love: attachment, caring, and intimacy.
Psychologist Erich Fromm maintained in his book "The art of loving" that love is not merely a feeling but is also actions, and that in fact, the "feeling" of love is superficial in comparison to ones commitment to love via a series of loving actions over time.In this sense, Fromm held that love is ultimately not a feeling at all, but rather is a commitment to, and adherence to, loving actions towards another, ones self, or many others, over a sustained duration. Fromm also described Love as a conscious choice that in its early stages might originate as an involuntary feeling, but which then later no longer depends on those feelings, but rather depends only on conscious commitment.
