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Essay on The Meaning of Love

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The Meaning of Love 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? One definition of love in The Merriam-Webster dictionary is "attraction based on sexual desire" (439). Some people believe that love and sex are one in the same. If two people are in love, they should be having sex. And, on the flipside, if two people are having sex, they must be in …show more content…

This passage obviously alludes to sex, but sex is not completely necessary when there is love. The speaker in Sharon Olds' "Sex without Love" asks, "How do they do it, the ones who make love / without love?" (1-2). Love is deeper and more meaningful than just physical or sexual attraction. Love is a feeling--an emotion. Love is also defined in the dictionary as "strong affection," "warm attachment," and "unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for others" (439). All of these definitions are completely correct, but the dictionary does not explain how it feels to love someone. The reason that an explanation for this feeling is not found in the dictionary may be because love is so different for each individual person. In my experience, "strong affection" does not even begin to cover the sensation and emotions a person feels when he or she is in love. Love is compared to "the extraordinary sun / splashing its light / into astonished trees" in Denise Levertov's "Love Poem" (2-4). Like the sun, love is great and bright and fills a person with extreme joy. Love is greater than anything else a person could ever experience. A lover can even be better than a summer's day, as the speaker in Shakespeare's poem suggests. He compares his lover to a summer's day by saying that she is "more

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