What is love? What does it mean to be "in love" or to "love" something or someone?
Wikipedia describes love as:
"any of a number of emotions related to a sense of strong affection[1] and attachment. The word love can refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic pleasure ("I loved that meal") to intense interpersonal attraction ("I love my husband"). 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.For me, love is not one thing; it falls into different categories, and depending on the context, it means different things. For instance, I love my husband, I love my dog, I love my kids, I love meatloaf, and I love the color yellow. Not one of those "loves" pulls the same emotion from me as any other on the list. The interpretation is the same, but the meaning and emotion behind the word in each sentence is different.
As an abstract concept, love usually refers to a deep, ineffable feeling of tenderly caring for another person. Even this limited conception of love, however, encompasses a wealth of different feelings, from the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love to the nonsexual emotional closeness of familial and platonic love[2] to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love.[3] 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."
My heart yearns for my husband and children when we are apart; when I come home from a trip, I feel immediate peace and comfort when I walk into my home and see the yellow walls that hug my home in warmth and love; when I eat meatloaf, I savor each bite and yearn for more long after I am full.
Each of those scenarios are types of love. Over the next few weeks, I am going to pick things from my life that I love, and I am going to blog them.
Tomorrow, my first blog will be about my husband, my love, my equal, and my other half.
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