Love, The Color of Rainbow

Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me no more

In the words of Haddaway, What is love?

When you ask someone this seemingly philosophical question, people might tell you that 'Love is the most important thing there is', 'it conquers all', or even 'it's all you need'. One common thread in all these statements are that all these are comparisons with other things. Love is very easy to compare, but difficult to define. Is it an emotion, a group of feelings, a signal from the brain, a universal truth?

One thing is certain though, expressions of love, they are not very hard to find. Even then, you're not really defining love. You're comparing it in regards to other material objects or feelings.

Ranging from the innocent to severely graphic. One seemingly all-encompassing definition would be that it is the most important thing there is. But is it really? Sure love is more important than a cup of coffee. But is it more important than say, your rationale, a home, or a great cup of coffee

One thing we know about love is that it has distinct social values in different cultures. Love in the West may be demonstrated in a form of public display of affection, but in the East it relates more with the subtler parts. One culture defines a failed attempt at finding your soulmate as an heartbreak. Others define it as the heart getting bruised. Anciant Greek defined sadness as a black liquid flowing inside our body.

Let's keep it focused on trying to define love for now. We all love our parents(I certainly hope so!),
and to some extent our relationships with other people and partners are based on the relations we have with our family. Your love for your partner may be culturally or socially weird, but does that make it any less than the textbook version of love?

Love is a construct grounded in reality deriving from our set of behaviors. Sometimes you hug a person to display your love for them, or it can be the making love part of it. For some people bearing kids of their partner can be a form of expression. But then again, you can love a person who does not want kids or can't have them too. Someone who agrees both with the ideas of marriage and divorce.

For something that has been thought about so much for so many centuries, it's bizarre that we still don't have a very concrete foundation for a definition. If love is a feeling, then feelings are dynamic. They change with time. How is it possible to hate someone you once used to love?

It makes sense if you see love as an obsession, an addiction ranging from temporary to permanent for another human being. And when people fall off this addiction or grow a tolerance to it, love wears off. Maybe it is the reason some people die loving their parter and some live to see it all fall apart. Asking someone who just fell into or out of love is like asking a gambling addict who just won/lost a fortune in a game of poker to describe money.

What if love is just a way for Homo Sapiens to propagate their genes and proliferate themselves. Nature's way to keep you continuing our species. If no two people are same, then maybe what they think love is isn't the same either. One thing is for sure however, you and I are as clueless about it all as we were when the post began. If however, you have an all encompassing definition of love that unifies all its edifices and factions, then comment and let me know.

(Special thanks to Dawn for the discussion about this endless and complicated topic)

Categories: abstract, Personal, World