But Wait…There’s More!

But wait, there’s more. Not satisfied with what the dictionary had to say about love, I took a trip to wikipedia to see what they had to say about it. Wow! That was a lot of information… Here’s their simplest explanation:

Love is an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment. Love is also a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection; and “the unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another”. Love may also be described as actions towards others (or oneself) based on compassion, or as actions towards others based on affection.

In English, love refers to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from pleasure (“I loved that meal”) to interpersonal attraction (“I love my partner”). “Love” may refer specifically to the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love, to the sexual love of eros, to the emotional closeness of familial love, or the platonic love that defines friendship, to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love. This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.

Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.

Love may be understood as part of the survival instinct, a function to keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species. People with developmental disorders may have a limited or minimal capability of experiencing love.

I also like this definition of love . I think it might even be true:

Psychologist Erich Fromm maintained in his book “The art of loving” that love is not merely a feeling but is also actions, and that in fact, the “feeling” of love is superficial in comparison to ones commitment to love via a series of loving actions over time.

In this sense, Fromm held that love is ultimately not a feeling at all, but rather is a commitment to, and adherence to, loving actions towards another, ones self, or many others, over a sustained duration. Fromm also described Love as a conscious choice that in its early stages might originate as an involuntary feeling, but which then later no longer depends on those feelings, but rather depends only on conscious commitment.