Love

Love

Love (l v) n. 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. A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with

whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance. (Webster's

Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc). There are many

different definitions of love. To each person it is different, but most agree it is one of

the most important emotions to the each creature on this earth. There are also many

different forms of love. For instance, love for your family versus love for a mate. It

is still a mystery to most people why people do crazy things for love, or why people

feel love “conquers all”.

Definitions of love go as far as Greek mythology. For example, the story of Cupid

and His mortal Bride Psyche. There are many explanations on how love exactly came to

mean what it does. According to John Lee there are 6 different types of love. 1. Erotic

love: romantic, sexual irrational, and largely based on physical attraction. 2. Manic

love: intense, all consuming, possessive, and fluctuating between joy and despair.

3. Ludic love: egoistic, self-serving, competitive, and based on an unequal relationship

between one partner who is highly committed and another who is emotionally

uninvolved. 4. Pragmatic love: a rational, practical, fair exchange between two carefully

matched partners. 5. Storgic love: the companionate, stable love that emerges from a

relationship between friends. 6. Agapic love: the altruistic devotion of one partner for

the other. Many people have theories, but overall love is whatever the actual individual

perceives it to be.

Through the ages, thinkers and writers have attempted to solve the

mystery of love. Myths, poetry and novels have the longest history of recording the idea

of love. For example, the Sumerian and Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh goes back to 2000

BC, Egyptian love poetry was written on papyri and vases between 1300 and 1100 BC,

and Chinese folk love songs were first documented between 1000 BC and 700 BC.

Countless philosophers, from Plato to Martin Luther, from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to

Santayana and Sartre have also devoted their writings to conceptualizing love. Freud

looks at love from the perspective of the sexual drive. According to him, love as well as

sexuality is rooted in infancy (Freud, 1905). A person's first love object is the mother.

The mother's breast provides the infant not only with nourishment but also a source of

sexual pleasure which he will later on seek from his adult lover. (For girls, the object of

love somehow later becomes the father. Freud views adult love and sexuality as an

extension (or rediscovery) of their infantile forms. Believing that