Definition Essay-What Is Love?

Lao Tzu, one of ancient China’s greatest philosophers once said when asked to explain what love is, “[it] is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.” Since the beginning of time, writers and philosophers have been trying to discover the origins of this “attack,” and many attribute different reasons for this immense feeling. In both Plato’s Symposium, and Ovid’s The Art of Love, Aristophanes and Ovid attempt to address the genesis of love by asking: what is the feeling that drives us towards another human: Is it physical attraction? Sexual desire? Experience in the field of dating? Or is this attack of the senses due to something beyond our comprehension,

One of the most complicated experiences in life, love cannot be precisely defined, but some basic indications help to characterize the feeling. Love is a very deep, passionate affection one person has for another or a relationship of the same nature that implies a unique intensity of emotion. It requires an especially strong connection and compatibility between two people, usually identified by a total understanding and respect for each other and a fundamental similarity in ideology. Love can also be seen in the way it alters people’s normal behavior; when someone is in love, the object of their affection seems like the most important thing in the world, and they do extreme things for that feeling to be requited. Love cannot easily be

In the essay, Love’s Vocabulary by Diane Ackerman, the author describes how love is something that is difficult to command or explain. Throughout the essay, she describes how love comes in different forms and strengths. People express love with art and music. Throughout the world, love is becoming a word that is used most of the time in our daily language. People see love as something that can be crueler than violence or hatred, meaning it can be very painful. Throughout the essay, Ackerman’s use of figurative language demonstrates the tone of the essay is informative for its informing the reader how there are different parts to love.

In the essay, “Love’s Vocabulary,” Diane Ackerman communicates the idea through figurative language, that love is an emotion that is seen universally, but no one can explain what it is. For instance, the analogy about music conveys Ackerman’s idea as it suggests that every person from different time periods and locations recognize love just as they recognize music, but they cannot comprehend its meaning.

The love story is one of the oldest and most cherished traditions in any world culture. The prevalence of romantic works throughout history, whether Greek myths, Jane Austen’s dramatic narratives, or today’s dime-a-dozen romantic novels, ultimately encourages us to believe in the power of true love. We identify with the archetypal star-crossed lovers, who combat established convention in order to assert their romance, because we too yearn for our own “happily-ever-afters.” When used in conjunction with reason, love is the highest form of compassion – without it, we could not possibly interact productively with one another or develop as individuals. But when we take a new perspective and examine love as an independent,

What is Love? Does anyone really know the meaning of the word? Does it have a different meaning to different people? In Kipnis’s essay “Love Labors”, Laura Kipnis touches on many different aspects of love. This is a touchy subject simply because love brings out many different opinions and beliefs. Kipnis argues over the fact that in order to have a good relationship and love someone people have to be able to meet certain requirements, which are mutuality, communication, and advanced intimacy.

There are numerous fundamental feelings that structure the building squares of our lives. These feelings help to shape the individuals that we are. These emotions are enthusiastic necessities to eventually keep us euphoric. No bit of writing these emotions more apparent than the Odyssey by Homer. All through the course of this book there is one major enthusiastic subject: love.

Love means that one has to care for another person’s happiness more than their own, no matter how painful the choices one faces must be. It becomes a strong and emotional attachment that focuses on the heart and mind while simultaneously is a promise and the simplest way to be happy. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, William Shakespeare’s Othello, and Philip Sidney’s “Astrophil and Stella Sonnet 31”, certain characters have a distorted view on love as it is dominant and holds a heavy weight on the formation of relationships. A simple four letter word can be very influential when creating a basis of emotional availability.

Love is said to be the greatest human experience in which mankind are privilege to partake in. To love can be a wondrous experience filling life with bliss and other strong emotions. Some people believe to love is to be alive and be able to see the good in the world and others. The purpose of this paper is to examine and find a better understanding of what is love, to explore what people believe love to be, and what lies surround the perception of love and to explore and expose what the meaning true love is or at the very least the authors understanding of the perception of love. In addition to exploring the concept, deception and the truth of love,

Fredrickson’s “Love 2.0” is an eye-opening and possibly somewhat controversial reading that attempts to redefine traditional definition of love and attempts to create a new definition, which in some sense narrow’s love’s definition and in other instances makes it more complete. Fredrickson paints love as vividly as possibly, by characterizing it as a verb rather than a noun. This definition makes love more active and changing process, rather than a single state that doesn’t change.

While people are often able to identify when they feel the emotion love, love itself seems to defy definition.  In her polemic “Against Love”, Laura Kipnis argues that love cannot exist as traditional expressions of love such as marriage, monogamy, and mutuality.  However, in her argument, she defines love incorrectly by equating love to expressions of love. This definition lacks a component essential to understanding the abstract concept of love: emotion. Recognizing love as emotion helps us realize that, contrary to Kipnis’ argument love by nature transcends all expressions of love. Love is subjective and exists in any and all forms. In her argument that love cannot survive as conventional expressions of love, Kipnis ignores the nature of love as emotion in favor of equating love to different expressions of love. Love is a force which exists above expressions of love; a true understanding of love can only come from an assessment of how individuals, not societies, respond to the emotion.

Love has many different meanings to different people. For a child, love is what he or she feels for his mommy and daddy. To teenage boy, love is what he should feel for his girlfriend of the moment, only because she says she loves him. But as we get older and "wiser," love becomes more and more confusing. Along with poets and philosophers, people have been trying to answer that age-old question for centuries: What is love?

The other day I was babysitting my three-year-old niece, a most conniving little angel. As she sat gawking at my girlfriend's brother, Matthew, who was eating potato chips, she told me that she loved me "so much." She had already devoured her potato chips, but she obviously wanted more. Many more expressions of love proceeded to drip from her lips. Finally, the question came; "Reg, can I have some more chips?" At first, I thought this little show of bribery was cute and funny, but then I started to think about the true meaning of love. What is true love? Poets, philosophers, religious leaders, and the American media all have different definitions for this word. Too often, love is conceived as doing whatever it

One can love a sister, a brother, a mother, a father, grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins and friends, strangers, pets, the sunlight on a warm evening, reflecting through a prism, held by fishing line stuck to a little suction cup to a dusty window. You can love food from cake to roast beef, even those tiny individual candy bars that are never enough but just give you a taste of chocolate before you pop in the second one. One is able to love the feeling of carpet between toes or the tension in a hammocks string when you lay in that 'u' position swinging delightfully with each motion of your body. We can declare love for sounds coming from a stereo, love for that particular sound wave in coordination with other

We all have our own definition of love and there are many words out there to describe love. Love is very important and without it we become