¶ … Love) Defining Love

"Love is not a feeling. It's an ability." -- Peter Hedges

When asked to define "love" in one word, many adjectives come to mind -- wonderful, unconditional, mysterious, and powerful. Love is considered one of the greatest emotions known to human kind and ranges from familial love to romantic devotion to the benign love that exists between good friends (Rosenburg, 2009). Love can be a sentiment or an action; a noun (love is a many splendored thing) or a verb (love like you've never been hurt). Love creates families, motivates acts of kindness, and inspires people to creativity. We view it as a protective force, such as a mother's love for a child. However, it can also move into more dangerous territory. Thousands perish in wars fought for love of God and country. Truly, there are myriad lens through which to examine this complex concept.

Webster's dictionary generally defines love as "the intense emotion that we feel when we are drawn to a person or object we believe has value, worth, or goodness" (Merriam-Webster, 2012). This description allows us to merge our intellectual understanding of love and our shared emotional experience of it as well. Perhaps the best descriptor for love is "complicated." It is an emotion that can mean many different things to different people. Thus, it is helpful to approach defining this multi-faceted concept by noting historical categorizations of love and explaining what love is "not" to get closer to a concrete understanding of what it is.

Historical Definitions

Most cultures and world religions describe love as an affectionate or passionate devotion (Mills, 2011). Plato and Aristotle posited that love is the desire and longing of the...

Hinduism makes reference to love as a primarily pleasurable, sexual experience. In Buddhism, love is described as selfish and a hindrance to enlightenment. St. Augustine is said to have spoken of the order of love (ordo amoris), which occurs when the love of God supersedes love of self. Perhaps it was the Greeks that offered one of the most expansive definitions of love, dividing it into four distinct categories: liking something (storage), friendship or fondness of another (philos), erotic or sexual love and attraction (eros), and selfless love (agape) (Elliott, 2012).
Storage, or liking, is often viewed as broad and benevolent -- a simple enjoyment such as love for dogs, baseball, sunny days or strawberry ice cream. Philos, or a love of friends and family, can be viewed as an all-encompassing, non-romantic caring for parents, siblings, extended family, and non-relation friends. Eros is love with a sexual or desirous connotation -- an erotic love that grows over time and can lead to marriage, procreation and family. Finally, agape refers to selfless love. Of all the Greek classifications of love, agape is considered the highest and the most spiritually significant (Oord, 2012).

The Christian church correlates love with agape and makes reference to the term throughout biblical texts. Its meaning in scripture spans ideas of charity, tolerance, and respect (Mills, 2011). Christians believe that through agape, God's love reaches the world. Love originates from the concern of a perfect God for his imperfect human subjects. The New Testament states: "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because…