Human beings have a series of feelings that make us unique with respect to the rest of the living beings with whom we share the place where we live. One of these feelings is the one that leads us to open up and seek the company of others. In this article we are going to discover what love means.
In order to understand what love is and what its meaning is, we first have to start from the different definitions that we find about this word.
According to our Royal Academy dictionary, the definition of the word love, in its first meaning, refers to an intense feeling of the human being who, starting from his own insufficiency, needs and seeks the encounter and union with another being.
If we stay with this definition, we could say that human beings are unable to bear loneliness or lack of self-sufficiency and, as a consequence of this inability, they need the company and union of another human being that complements them. We could admit that this idea of love comes from our basic need to feel the closeness of another person and not from a higher feeling that would make us want to meet another being for less selfish reasons.
However, if we went out into the street and asked the question of what the word love means to a good number of people, surely the answers, for the most part, would not have much to do with a selfish feeling of the human being, but rather with less worldly, less earthly and more spiritual ideas, that is, the feeling of love for the majority would consist of something that could be born from idolatry towards another person for different reasons, among which would be physical attraction, admiration, complicity and a long etcetera of ideas closer to poetry than to the reality of everyday life.
Therefore, in order to understand the full breadth of meanings that the word love has, it is convenient that we see each one of them and break them down in order to arrive at a more or less generic meaning that can encompass the others.
A second definition of the word love explains that it is a feeling towards another person that naturally attracts us and that, seeking reciprocity in the desire for union, completes us, makes us happy and gives us energy to live together, communicate and create.
With this second meaning we take one more step to understand what love means. If in the first we found ourselves with a feeling of pure selfishness and need, now we add not only the need to find someone because we are insufficient by ourselves, but we join another person, for whom we feel some kind of attraction, to that gives us strength and energy to be able to act as the social beings that we are.
We are not inhabitants of a desert island, but we were born with the ability to communicate, to express ourselves with others, to live together following a series of macro rules that help us to establish relationships, more or less lasting, with another person with similar characteristics. Or equivalent to ours.
If we continue with the definitions of the RAE on the word love, in the next entry it clarifies that love is a feeling of affection, inclination and delivery to someone or something. As we can see, now we are already moving away in some way from our most basic social needs in order to be complete beings and we are heading towards something higher, less earthly and in some way bordering on the spiritual. Because now we no longer just bond with someone, but we can feel love for something.
I totally agree with this definition, since love is not only that feeling that catches us and brings us closer to another person, but we can feel it through a melody, through a work of art, through a landscape or even through something as material as the money. That is to say, love here is understood as an irrepressible attraction towards something in a generic way.
The human being is made up of a set of sensations, feelings, attractions, ideas or illusions that we create as we advance in this adventure called life. As we mature, grow or age our ideas become more complicated and we go from being very spiritual to being, over the years, more earthly.
And with this I end the comments on the different meanings of the word love, with this last idea that leads us, without a doubt, to a situation that has nothing to do with that first one that was based on a necessary and totally obligatory attraction. If we wanted to be complete beings. In the latter, as Sigmund Freud would tell us, love is the human being’s tendency to sexual union.
I know that many of you would argue that we cannot confuse physical attraction with spiritual, mental or even sensual attraction. You could even reproach me that for there to be a sexual attraction, there must first be another of a different kind; but you will agree that many times, especially in our younger ages, love is based solely and exclusively on a physical desire that leads us to want to relate to those people who, due to their appearance, attract us above others.
Instructions
We are going to go through a series of instructions to be able to understand, in a much more approximate way, the meaning and significance of the feeling of love.
These concise rules would make us recognize if there is love in a relationship and, therefore, learn in a practical way what love means. It is known that humans learn more with practice than with theory, so let’s go there.
If we have a feeling towards something or someone and it has these characteristics, we speak of love:
- Our feeling towards someone or something is so strong that we do not make a value judgment until we know everything about their experiences, hobbies and characteristics. That is, we are totally eager to know everything about that being.
- We realize that the person for whom we feel something has previously treated us with delicacy and affection.
- We can feel affection, friendship or loyalty towards another person, but if there is also something stronger than these feelings, we speak of passion. And when passion becomes an important part of the game, it means that there is something more than just friendship.
- Speaking of the relationship with another person, the feeling that what we lacked brings us is the sign that love is leaving its mark.
- We can feel trust for another person and that is not why there has to be love, but it could be only and exclusively friendship. But if that trust is seasoned with complicity and honesty, then we might begin to think that there is something more between us.
- It is often said that love breaks borders. Therefore, if we see that we are able to overcome any obstacle that stands in our way to be able to reach that other person, then, my friend, you are falling in love.
What do you need
After all that has been said, we need to know that there are other meanings of the word love, depending on the context in which it appears. Let’s see different uses of the word love:
- It is said that love is the value that helps us achieve everything in life. In addition, it is what forces us to do things well and with passion.
- We can also say that love is a moral feeling that makes us act correctly with others, mainly with the people we love.
- Love helps us to have a full, calm and joyful life. This helps us achieve personal well -being.
- The word love can be attached to an adjective such as platonic. Normally the meaning of this union has to do with something difficult to achieve, almost impossible and most of the time traumatic for not being able to achieve what we love. As a contribution, we can say that this sense of love comes from Plato (hence his name) who said that, in our daily lives, in our real lives we will never achieve love since it is based on virtue, on something perfect and non -existent in our reality. That is why, something ideal and unattainable.
- When love occurs almost immediately, we speak of love at first sight. That is to say, this happens when we see in the other person, when we meet them, all those characteristics that we know we need to be complete. This definition of love could be against many people who maintain that love is not something momentary but something that is built step by step and based on mutual coexistence. Therefore, we would be talking about a physical attraction to that other person.
- There is another definition of love that is based on the relationship between two people who, for various reasons, are prohibited from being together. We speak in this case of clandestine love.
- And what about that love that overcomes the circumstance of not being together. That is, the love between two people who are not living in the same geographical place. We speak, obviously, of love at a distance. This relationship may be somewhat more normal in these years than in the past due to communication technologies. I leave you here an article on how to have a long-distance relationship.
- There are people who are capable of loving so much that they give themselves completely and selflessly to another person. They do not expect anything in return because they feel unconditional love towards that person. We speak, for example, of religious people (here I leave you an article on what love is according to the Bible ) or the love of parents towards their children.
- And finally, a love that we forget many times and is essential to have a good relationship with others. We refer in this case to that love, that acceptance and respect that many people have for themselves. We speak on this occasion of self-love. If we don’t love, love and respect ourselves, who will do it for us? Learn with this article to find you.
Tips
Finally, we leave you some tips to be able to correctly define that eternal feeling that is love.
- The first thing to keep in mind is that, despite all the definitions that exist of love, the best we can give is the one that comes from ourselves, that is, that definition that we give taking into account our own perception of love, what we think this feeling may be. This would be the best definition of love.
- When defining this concept, keep in mind the different types of love that can exist: love as a feeling towards another person and in an involuntary way, the love we feel for our family, friends, children that make us feel protective and protected or that love understood as a physical and sexual attraction towards the other person.
- If we are going to explain to ourselves what love means, we should take into account whether what we feel for that person is caused by the idea that we can get some benefit from them or from the relationship with them.
- We should think about whether what we feel for that person would change if their physique, their look, their way of dressing or acting were different. It may be that we are facing a mere physical attraction.
- And finally, let’s try to define love as a psychologist would. In other words, we take this feeling and break it down into three parts: on the one hand, the passion that is closely linked to physical desire, sexual behavior and arousal. The second part is the one that has to do with intimacy, that is, the emotional aspect that is linked to the closeness, affection and loyalty of friendship. And finally, the commitment, that is, the conscious decision to be with that person in the future and, therefore, the desire for a long-term relationship.
