What Love Means

© 2010 Peter Free

 

Defining love is important.  Without a definition, it is easy to go off the rails in relationship.

 

The following profoundly useful description of love is taken from an email conversation with one of my wisely insightful writer friends, Dave Stolz.

 

Dave’s evocative definition of love

 

What love means to me.  Being accepted.  Being trusted by another person.  Feeling the elation of commitment that can withstand trouble.  Feeling unguarded.  Being sexually attracted.  Trusting in the mutuality of these feelings.  Responding to change together.  Feeling strength enough in the underlying bond.  Appreciating the dissimilarities of character and interests that boredom is abridged and arguments lead to new interests and laughter.

 

© 2008 David Stolz

 

 

Peter’s response:

 

Yours is an outstanding definition of what articulate and sensible people would say about love.

 

But notice that it lacks an active guiding element.  Absent such, you and your loved one will have trouble gauging whether (a) you are receiving and dispensing enough of these elements and (b) in the proper quality.

 

I propose adding the following to what you wrote:

 

Pete’s active definition of love

 

Love combines the emotions and the actions that actively and fully support another person in his or her spiritual development through life.

 

It requires either that:

 

(a) actions and communications be framed in ways that the other can hear, or

 

(b) that actions and communications be effective (even if unheard), in moving the loved one away from the cycle of suffering toward fulfillment.

 

My definition is constructed around the action-guiding element that is missing from a purely descriptive definition.  It implies delivery of the products you have listed.

 

The more active definition of love allows one to evaluate love products and love motivations.  It provides a responsibility principle that calls the lover to the spiritually highest behavioral standard, no matter what stage of psychological development he or she is in.

 

The active definition also implies that there will be times when the give-receive love balance is grossly out of whack.  When so for extended periods, the short-changed person must assess whether his or her self-love needs to assert itself more forcefully.

 

Of course, one could argue (and many do behaviorally) that romantic love is not spiritually-defined Love, but something that is predominantly predicated on lust, comfort, ease, diversion, and entertainment.  This is a consumer’s view.

 

My objection to the consumeristic love hypothesis is that such a shallow definition is profoundly not useful as a guide to the human potential for psychic development.  The shallow, non-spiritual definition of love contributes to the self-destructive, unloving insanity that engulfs our civilization.