Definition of "Love"

Jun 04, 2008 - 21:48 PM PST

Jino Garcia
05/15/08
English 1A
8AM
Love is Broad
Everyone needs love in their life. I could remember back in my senior year of high school, in my film literature class, the theme of the year was love and growing up. My film literature teacher by the name of Mr. Burrows was a really deep thinker. He would explain how and why people need love in their life. “The one thing that people need in life to keep on moving is love.” Mr. Burrows was just one of many people in the world that tried to define love, but what does love really mean? There are many thinkers in the world that try to define love in their own words. All the people that try to define love are all different type of thinkers from singing artists, to preachers, to philosophers, to book writers, and to psychiatrists. It is important to keep in mind that all who try to define love are similar in one distinct way; we are all human. All humans could feel love, and have their own perspective and thoughts on what they think love is. A smart thinker by the name of M. Scott Peck, in his book The Road Less Traveled, defines love and explains what he thinks what love is and is not. Peck says that falling in love, nor romantic love, dependency, or self-sacrifice, or a feeling of love, is love, but he does explain how people love and it is by nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. I agree with Peck’s definition on what he thinks love is, but I also think that love can have a variety of meanings along with elements of meaning. The things that Peck says what love is not, I believe are elements of love. I define love as an emotion giver, caring for oneself and another, and intimacy.
Love is a really great emotion giver. Of course love makes people feel great about life, but it also makes people feel negative. People have such negative emotions such as sadness, heartbrokenness, disappointment, anger, jealousy, and incompleteness. People do not want to be sad about life. That is worst feeling in the world of emotions, not being happy. When people that date or are in relationship separate, they become sad. They feel sad because they have a feeling of being incomplete because their significant other is not with them and the love is not there at that time. My girlfriend and I separate not often, but I feel as a person incomplete because the love is not there to make feel complete. People that are in relationships that happen to love each other separate because they are angry at each other as well. They get jealous, insecure, and cantankerous towards their significant other. People can say the meanest remarks to the person they love.
To every negative there is positive. Rollo May, author of Love and Will, says “To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive—to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before” (100). Love can make people feel different in many different ways. When people love and feel love, they feel good about themselves. Various feelings people can have are feelings of being happy, complete, excited, and content with life. A person’s ideal state of being would be that he or she wants to be happy with life. Happiness, like love, has a lot of meanings as well. When people are happy they have feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction. I have a family and I know they love me a lot. At home when one of my siblings or parents are not home it feels like the house is incomplete and something is missing. The smallest voices are not heard and the presence of someone you love is not there. When my parents come home from vacation our family is together as a cohesive unit. If I argue and do not speak to my parents or siblings, I feel sad, but when things get patched up I feel a lot happier. This also goes for friends and relationships as well. People that date or are in relationship, feel happy when they are with their significant other. When they break up or when someone is away for a long time, they have a feeling of being incomplete, but when their situation goes back to a positive environment they feel happy.
So how do people that love each other go from a negative state of being to a positive one? Many things can happen in the course of a negative to positive situation. People can simply brush their shoulders off and get on with their life. It may seem like people can just not mind being angry at another and forget about the situation, but there is a deeper transition. Leo Buscaglia, author of the book Loving Each Other, states that “Love is the single greatest source of forgiveness” (99). For people to go from a very sad or malicious or negative state of being to a more positive state of being, they must go through the process of forgiveness. A person forgiving someone that he or she loves can be a very easy or difficult thing to do. The smallest issues that people have are less difficult to forgive. A lot of pride with has to do with forgiving someone. If a person’s pride is too big, the process of forgiving is harder to do. But when someone forgives and is forgiven he or she feels more positive as a person. Buscaglia continues on and says:
“We strive, through empathetic behavior, to erase the boundaries between wrongdoer, and wronged, even when we do not understand the behavior. Though this process we come together, renew our faith, better understand and strengthen our present and move forward in trust again. (100)
When people forgive they mature and grow more as a person. “Nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” (81) Peck says, and forgiving is one way to do that. To nurture means to help grow or develop. When forgiving, people see the love they have in themselves. It also allows people to see the love that someone they love has for them; the relationship grows. From negative feelings of sadness, jealousy, disappointment, and anger, forgiveness brings people to a more positive state of being.
Caring for another individual is what love is as well as an emotion giver. Love gives people all of those negative and positive emotions because they care about the people they love. If someone did not care if someone was upset with them, then they do have love for them. When my girlfriend and I argue it feels like we hate each other. We get angry, yell at each other, and blame each other for things an old love did. It may feel like we hate each other because we are highly quarrelsome. As time passes by, we end up forgiving each other and putting the issue aside because we care about each other. An argument is not worth losing someone you love over. Sometimes an individual’s emotions can get the best of them. People can get carried away with being too mad or too happy. All the emotions that people show towards the people they love mean that they care about them. If people do not communicate their emotions towards the ones they love, that shows the ones they love that they do not care.
Peck says that love is to nurture one’s own or another person’s spiritual growth. His definition on love means that through love a person must grow in his or her own spiritual growth. A relationship can grow in many ways. The first step in creating a relationship is communication. People can communicate in many different ways: eye contact, gestures, smiles, emotions, actions, and talking. Buscaglia says, in his book Loving Each Other, “Communication, the art of talking with each other, saying what we feel and mean, saying it clearly, listening to what the other says and making sure that we’re hearing accurately, is by all indication the skill most essential for creating and maintaining loving relationships” (53). When people love each other it is important that they have good communication skills with each other. Their relationship cannot grow into a healthy one without good communication. Good communication is an element of Love.
There are various ways for people to show that they love someone. They can give hugs, give gifts, and even cry. Crying for someone means that a person cares a lot for the person he or she loves and it affects that person’s life a lot. People who love someone can cry for many reasons. Tears of joy, disappointment, sorrow, and sadness are few examples of why people cry when they love someone. When I cry, I usually cry because I lose someone. When I lose a relationship it hurts, and it gets harder every time. Professor Broderick, my psychology instructor, had taught me in my previous course that people cry when they break up with their boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife because they feel alone in the world. People feel as if the world is over and start to cry, but when they zone out back into reality, life goes on. I thought about what she had taught me and I agree with her. I cried because my world seemed too depressing at the time. When I was tearing it was because I cared. So tears are a sign of caring and an element of love. Losing someone due to a death I would cry as well.
Peck’s definition on love is clear but questionable. He states that “We are incapable of loving another unless we love ourselves, just as we are incapable of teaching our children self-discipline unless we ourselves are self-disciplined” (82). This is like saying if someone hates another, they have some hate for him or herself as well. When I try to think about hating someone, I do not see in any way how I hate myself. To contradict Peck’s idea, I bring up the idea of taking a bullet for a loved one. If someone takes a bullet for someone they love, that means they care more about the person they love than him or herself. So it is possible for someone to love another, in spite of having less love for him or herself.
Love is apart of a relationship. Of course, the beginnings of a relationship start off with something other than love. Peck says “We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated” (84). Peck’s point on how people fall in love is true. People are sexually motivated or at least attracted to their lover in the beginning. Peck thinks that having sexual intercourse and flirting is not love, but since love is a broad topic I think that being attracted to someone and sexual intercourse are elements of love. “It is natural for us to want to show affection. But for some mysterious reason, we equate tenderness with sentimentality, weakness and vulnerability. We seem to be as fearful to give it as to receive it” (Buscaglia 134). It is natural for humans to want to show their lovers affection. By flirting, sweet, talking, and being attracted to a lover are the first steps for a potential relationship. Having sex is not the same thing as “making love.” Anyone could have sex, but most choose to do it with their lover. Making love is a sign of love because people actually care about their lover.
“We remind ourselves that this excessive concern for “satisfying” the partner is an expression, however, perverted, of a sound and basic element in the sexual act: the please and experience of self affirmation in being able to give to the partner” (May 55).
Sex does not nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, but it does satisfy them. Sex is an element of love because a person cares about their lover. They care and want to make their lover feel good and satisfied physically. Intimacy is one of the physical ways for people to express their love. It is vague to see a relationship without some sort of intimacy.
Many do not know what love is because they have yet to think about the real definition. Love can be defined, but in many ways. The smallest things from saying “I love you”, to kissing, to holding hands, to difficult times, to good times, to intimacy can all mean love, but not love exactly. There are a lot of elements of love so that is why love cannot be specifically defined by one person’s perspective on it. Many thinkers from the past, present, and future will continue to try and define love in their own words. Love is broad and has a variety of meanings for someone to define it. For the most part, Love is an emotion giver for people, it is caring for one’s self and another, and it is an act of intimacy.














Works Cited List

Buscaglia, Leo. Loving Each Other. New Jersey: SLACK Incorporated, 1984.
Fromme, Allan: The Ability to Love, North Hollywood, California: Wilshire Book
Company, 1965.
Gold, Hubert. True Love. New York: Arbor House, 1982.
May, Rollo. Love and Will. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1969
Morris, Desmond: Intimate Behaviors. New York: Random House, 1971.
Peck, M. Scott. The Road Less Traveled. New York: Touchstone, 2003.
Weiner, Jonathan. Time, Love, Memory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 2000.
West, Uta. If Love is the Answer, What is the Question? New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977.