What is love?

Message from the whole Lemmy community: we hate you for having inb4-ed our collective standard joke answer.

Signed: everyone but you 😜

English is kind of weak in this arena because we only have one word for love, but we can modify it to be more useful: romantic love and fraternal love. Any other use stems from these two, and will basically boil down to "I like ___a lot."

Another specification is when people ask "Do you love them, or are you in love with them?"

"In love" means romantic love, I think. You want to spend your life with this person, probably every day, will overlook their faults and are enamored with the things they do, the way their brain works, etc.

I love lamp 🤷🏻‍♂️

I think of romantic love as what follows infatuation, if you get there. The continued slow burn of lust, affection and respect for each other.

Friendly love is care, when you would let yourself be hurt to save a specific other person from being hurt, and are willing to be inconvenienced to do things for them, and trust enough to inconvenience them if you need something.

Agape - love, love for the world, is both easier and harder to feel. It's easier to not be annoyed by things and people you don't personally know, but hard to care so much about them. That universal love feeling , the joy of existence and care for the natural world is also love.

So yeah English in this regard just doesn't have (or doesn't use) different words for different types of love but they are different.

Baby do-oh...

Never mind.

You explained it all. What is your question.

Many people use the word without reflecting on how they mean to use it. I’ve seen many a relationship fight indirectly over the ambiguity.

Different cultures have different takes but greek and Latin define different forms of love. From impulsive maddening love (why cupids arrow was seen so harmful) to dutiful love (the kind made through obligations made through shared commitments and aspirations) to brotherly love (trauma bonds, solidarity, commitment made from shared respect). There is also paternalistic love formed from empathy and a desire to protect. And of course love to describe the deep joy something gives you and desire to have it again.

When they ask "do you love her?" Based on the context I assume either or both love as a desire for the other or dutiful love, because both can be consuming for many and mean they would struggle to have that the capacity to share that same level of love with their current partner.

If they don't and it was an act of lust* or curiosity then they're partner may feel more comfortable with the commitment to them.

• impulsive love and desire can be heavily intertwined with sexual desire but that is a whole other interesting discussion to me

Love is action.

You don’t feel love, you show it and recognize when it’s been shown to you. Saying you love someone is just words, but showing you love someone by listening when they need someone to listen or helping them in some other way is proof of love.

You answered your own question. It means different things to different people at different times. To know what people mean you must use your basic language comprehension skills or ask them for clarification.

For love as a standalone word, "value" is the most drop-in-compatible word. To say "i love you" is to say "i value you".

The form of "in love" is a far greater mystery to me, and i usually just consider the speaker to mean something like "obsessed" or "infatuated".

Baby don't hurt me.

It's how we bundle together stuff we enjoy with sexual desire and sell it as moral goodness.

Howard Jones did a pretty good song dealing with this exact issue in the 80s

I think this is a pretty good definition. Heard it on an episode of This American Life. Note that it's not just about romantic love, but other kinds as well.

The visionary feminist writer Bell Hooks says love is made up of seven parts. Wherever someone is practicing care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and open, honest communication, there is love.

I think it means you would go above and beyond for the object of your love.

Also I heard this somewhere and I agree: "Being loved gives you strength. Loving someone gives you courage."

Buddhism defines metta as loving kindness, which also requires understanding because if we don't understand another person's needs it's difficult to be loving and kind towards them.

In the show, what the person was trying to say is, I am feeling insecure that you may be more attached to her than you are to me. I.e., I'm scared you're going to leave me for her.

Which is what we generally mean by love in our culture. At least what we mean by romantic love. A sense of attachment to the other person.

This isn't always a bad thing. I can be a little shy so when I am in public I tend to show a lot of attachment to my girlfriend, at least until I get comfortable in the space. But it can be a bad thing, if someone is so attached that they let it get in the way of treating their partner with kindness. Act manipulative or aggressive when the person pulls away, for example.

I don't know. I don't think I've ever felt it.

My son always says i love you to his family and friends when leaving or ending a phone call. Then he started dating one of his friends and he felt like he had to stop saying it so she didn't think he meant he loved her. They had a conversation, agreed that the dating was just casual, and went back to saying i love you.

Downvote me for asking the Google Assistant (I know Lemminos despise Google), but this is what it had to say:

"Love seems like one of the most important things people can share."

Love means feeling like the characteristics of someone or something inspire ease.

🎵 Love is only a feeling 🎵

Loving someone means caring about them deeply. Being in love with someone means you also care deeply about them but you also can't and don't want to imagine your life without them. It also means they're the only person you want to be intimate with and you'd rather not be intimate at all with anyone, if it's not them.

At least that's what it means to me.

It's more a feeling than anything else, it's very visceral, once you've felt it you just know what it means. It's like those butterflies in your stomach, your heart beating fast, your breath catching in your chest.

It's not like that for everyone and it sounds cheesy but it's true.

Love is when you'll still do something even if it's 100% not what you want to do because it'll make them happy

Also I've never being loved outside my own family.

Ask your mother about my cock?

To love ___ means to care for ___ a lot.

Everything else is semantics or the common linguistic inaccuracy of multiple definitions for a single word.