What is love?
Today I was thinking about love and its meaning in my life...Dictionary.com defines it as, "A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness."However, this definition confuses me. Below are few questions/thoughts:
- What about those times when you don't have a loving feeling and you're angry at an individual, but you still feel love? Is this a deeper feeling of love or is it just the individual trying to fool themselves that they're doing things out of love when they're really not. For example, sometimes when I was younger and my mom yelled at me, she said she was doing it out of love.
- Another way of thinking of the question above is asking, "Is love interpreted or felt? In other words, do feelings of love have to be interpreted as love for them to be love? If so, then is love limited to using loving ways of talking and doing loving things (kissing, holding hands, etc.)?
- Should a lover do what they think is best for the other person or what the other person wants? In other words, should a mother force a child not to have candy, watch violent movies, or play video games because she thinks that is the best thing even though the child really wants to do it. What about in a partner relationship? What if the boyfriend thinks the girlfriend should focus on solutions to problems instead of sharing what she feels?
- Is unconditional love beyond feeling? Is it accepting everything as it is? Does this acceptance have to be felt or can it be something logical (ie, I love or don't love somebody because...)?
- Is love a simple, yet complex 'knowing' that can't be explained? Is this 'knowing' love at first sight?
- Is it love physiological? spiritual?
- How did the concept of soul mates arise?
- Can one be loving to everything, always?
- Should one just let love develop or should one force/develop it?