What is Love? Sharing Your Thoughts on What Love IS--->

Please feel free to share your thoughts on What Love IS and what Love is not in this thread.

LOVE - Real Love is caring about the Happiness of another person without any thought for what we might get for ourselves, Selfless Love, True Love.

LOVE
PEACE
CARING
GIVING
RESPECT
SHARING
HELPING
SELFLESS
PATIENCE
HONESTY
KINDNESS
DILIGENCE
INTEGRITY
GRATITUDE
SENSITIVITY
PROTECTING
GENTLENESS
COMPASSION
FORGIVENESS
THANKFULNESS
UNDERSTANDING



Wishing you all Love and Peace in it's truest meaning and purest form.
Best Wishes --- Sincerely and Respectfully, Thanks.

reply to post by ET_MAN


To add:

Love is doubtless.
Love is power.
Love is existence.
Love is spiritual.

I know it is described in the bible. I googled a random site and got this: What is love?

Love is patient and kind.

Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude.

Love does not demand its own way.

Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged.

It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.

Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

And that pretty much sums it up for me.

Love is empowerment of others. The Love of Power versus the Power of Love. Its the basic, writing in our hearts, way to pass the tests here.

Love is service to others, all that I have is yours, we are family, yearning for equality, walking in the moccasins of everyone and seeing with true understanding, judging not, but helping all one can, to shine light. Love = the other.

Love does not blame the weak or vulnerable, which are the majority, but sees through the world and puts people and equality, safety, wellbeing and happiness of all before any worldly traps be they economic models, religions/divisions, political models, it takes the best of everything and ignores/shelfs the rest.

Love is the " exact opposite " of what is going on in the world today.....

Love is an action, a verb. The feeling which we associate Love is the product of the action, it follows the deed.

reply to post by ET_MAN

What is love?

Well that's easy ...

1. Love is fleeting

reply to post by ET_MAN


In my opinion, love is basically the sacrifice of your own desires/interests for the benefit of others (altruism).

I've always enjoyed the summary from I Corinthians (ch.13), as I think it covers all the bases:

1Co 13:4-8 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends...

Be well

The Greek language (which the New Testament was written) has four words for Love.

Agape,
Eros,
Philia
Storge.

Love is enduring, its a state of soul. Being the sun, the Light, and seeing the light in all. Unconditional love walks in everyones shoes with understanding, but not without wisdom, discernment, it knows what helps and what harms. The Sun is the Good Parent Figure of the solar system and shines its light on everyone in all walks of life, even those doing harm, but enlightens and inspires Love to shine. If you noted in a journal all the times the sun will cut through clouds and flood your room for positive thoughts and inspiration, you'd have a book depicting the miraculous/magical universe we live in and understand that there is Light and its opposite.

Love is enduring, steady, doesnt fail, protects and supports. Live through the heart. Connect to the heart. The mind has all sorts of programs in it, some very negative, so bypass it, and live through the heart and let your inner sun shine.

To me, Love is simply putting someone else's needs above your own.

I know that's somewhat simplistic, but it works for me.

love is letting go of yourself and accept others without actually doing so.

but at the same time, love is treating others the way you treat yourself, and treat yourself as you treat others.

nobody is better or lesser. neither are you. you are just as important as everyone else.

I don't know that you can distill "love" down into a few keywords or even a short phrase. It's very, very complicated in my opinion. I think our perception of what "love" is changes a lot throughout life, I know that now at my age and at 20 years of marriage it means completely different, much more utilitarian things than it did when I was in my teens and 20's. I think that people often confuse other emotions (like passion, desire or lust) with love. It's none of those things, in fact it's not even related to them. Love is not something that just happens, it's something that you have to do, and it is a lot of work. You don't stay married for 20+ years without love in your relationship, but it's not the kind of doe-eyed call-them-every-10-minutes love that many (if not most) people think that it is. Steven Covey says that when people come to him for marriage advice and they say they don't love their spouse anymore, he tells them "well start loving them again". And they say "you don't understand, I DON'T love them". And he says "well then start!" Love is CHOICE, we choose whether or not to love. And like I said before, it's work. We have to work at it, whether it's loving an individual, or your children, or strangers, or work, etc. Unfortunately most people don't want to devote the efforts to keeping it going. If you "love" something or someone today and not a year from now, then it was probably just lust. Love, above all else, is something that endures.

reply to post by ET_MAN


Love is a deeply satisfying feeling that begins with empathy, develops as a compassionate bond, and expresses itself as generosity.

Edit: I think pondering the meaning of words is a very great learning experience. We think we know something but then when we go to define it we find out we don't really know much about it.

reply to post by ET_MAN


Love is an interesting thing. i think the idea of love is a human representation for an experiential concept, just as math and physics are to the universe. However, where we know what math is a representation of, just what is that experience we conceptualize as love (or Love) represent? what is that feeling and how can it have such sway?

In this ones perspective, the experience is a simile to all of those you mention in your OP. Different words are applied in different contexts, but in my own perspective, they are the same experientially. So, perhaps Love (capitalized as to describe the experiential concept instead of the directed emotion, the greeks did this too as mentioned above somewhere ), is not solely sourced from humans, but is a fundamental motion of the universe itself that we conceptualize and compartmentalize as all these different facets. In this context, Love is the actual movement of the universe itself, perhaps overall or at a specific level (say, atomic).

That is, at least, one perspective amongst many on a topic explored for centuries.

Hi Blueracer,

Originally posted by Blueracer
I know it is described in the bible. I googled a random site and got this: What is love?

Love is patient and kind.

Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude.

Love does not demand its own way.

Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged.

It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.

Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

And that pretty much sums it up for me.

edit on 4/22/2011 by Blueracer because: (no reason given)

edit on 4/22/2011 by Blueracer because: (no reason given)

That sums it up nicely, should have used that in the original post.

Thanks for sharing,

Love & Best Wishes!

reply to post by ET_MAN


Love to me is the complete surrender of your own feelings, wants, needs, ect. to be beside one whom you would sacrifice all for. And that person is willing to do the same. Love is holding the hand of your dying wife, or husband, never leaving their side, bringing comfort unto the very end.

reply to post by ET_MAN



What is love but the first time you look upon your newborn's face, into their eyes, straight from heaven? That is love, pure love.