Love..seems everybody have their own definition for it. Everybody wants to love and get it back in return but the question still remains- what the hell it is?
It is a pleasant emotional feeling some say as it gives a high. Science research says that when you are in love a particular part of brain is activated giving a pleasant feeling. Same part is activated and gives pleasant feeling when you sniff cocaine. Sure, love is a cycle of pleasure and pain just like pleasure when one is high on cocaine and pain when cocaine is unavailable. So love is an addiction just like an addiction to drugs one can say.
Sometimes one wonders how love can be defined and whether it can be shown in a physical form.
Love sometimes erupts like a volcano only to subside later. Love is neither breathlessness, nor it is an excitement. Are you walking in the shadows of trees holding hand of your hearthrob and feeling loved? It is not. It is an illusion like a deer sees a mirage in the sand. It is not even promise for eternal passion, to mate every minute of the day. Love is a not a beautiful woman, neither it is her well manicured hand.Building castle in the sand with your loved ones doesn’t define love nor surfing on the waves of a wild sea is love. Love is not a beautiful bouquet, not even a nice smile. If you think love is a romantic evening, you are wrong, as wrong as if you think rainbow is love. A seductive glance is not love nor a tearful song. It is not a butterfly with colourful wings nor it is a blue sky meeting an ocean at the horizon. Are you walking in the shadows of trees holding hand of your hearthrob and feeling loved? It is not. It is an illusion like a deer sees a mirage in the sand.Lying awake every night imagining that he / she is kissing every aperture of your body is also not love. If you think that a solitary canoe moving slowly in a lake on a moonlit night is love, you are making a mistake.
The Greeks broke love into four categories:
(1) “Storge” is Kinship love
(2) “Philia” is Friendship love
(3) “Eros,” is Sex and Romance love
(4) “Agape” is Divine Love
Hence Greeks can say “I love you but I don’t love you, but still I have a love for you” ( I feel PHILIA toward you but not EROS but still I have AGAPE) Plato said “Love is a serious mental disease,” and coined the word LOVESICK. Socrates said “Love is a madness.” Love can make you do stupid things.
Truth is our idea about love comes from Facebook posts, romantic stories, romantic songs and movies. They all show superficial ideas of love which lead to pain and anxiety . True pleasure and happiness is absent. The idea of love is mostly based on ownership and selfishness and comes with strings attached. That is why love immediately turns into hatred if there is a threat to the ownership.
Couple who share tender kisses start confronting one another when someone goes wrong and then hate each other out of jealousy and obsession . It is not love. It is compulsive attachment.
When expectation of something by each other crops up in a relationship and that expectation does not come up as desired, the cracks start showing. Couples when do not love each other for who they are and expect who they can become,the decaying process starts.
Bertrand Russell says ” Love is a word which covers a variety of feelings; I have used it purposely, as I wish to include them all. Love as an emotion — which is what I am speaking about, for love “on principle” does not seem to me genuine — moves between two poles: on one side, pure delight in contemplation; on the other, pure benevolence. Where inanimate objects are concerned, delight alone enters in; we cannot feel benevolence towards a landscape or a sonata. This type of enjoyment is presumably the source of art. It is stronger, as a rule, in very young children than in adults, who are apt to view objects in a utilitarian spirit. It plays a large part in our feelings towards human beings, some of whom have charm and some the reverse, when considered simply as objects of aesthetic contemplation. ”
Love is not voice, love is not sound either.
It is silence that listens and says something which doesn’t halt nor stops anywhere, but drops of glow that it is , pours down for many a year. It spreads in eyes making the pupil diluted and smile, and on eyelids it droops by its luminescence because the lips do not say a thing but eyes do so, silently those tales for ages to come.Only few can feel the fragrance emanating from those eyes. It is only the realization that is to be felt with your soul. Do not blemish it by tagging it as a relationship. Let it be free from societal norms and other expectations; let it be pure. Let love be love, do not give it a name nor define it.
Welcome Dr. Satish Bendigiri adultsmart expert! With a rich academic and corporate background, he passionately explores love, marriage, and growth in his articles.