What is Love?

Definitions of love are easy to come by, and they are many and diverse.  What we experience as love sometimes forms our definitions of love. What you experience as love and what another experiences as love
can be radically different. And there are many things that love is not, which masquerade as love, and which
we call love or identify as part of loving. We will explore many of those in this blog.



But let's start with a wonderful definition of love from The Art of Intimacy by Thomas Patrick Malone, and Patrick Thomas Malone.

"The experience of loving is unilateral. It asks no response, nor does it demand the other to be deserving. Any and every human being deserves love. It is not earned; one deserves it. So every human being offers us the opportunity of loving them. The loving rewards, not the being loved. Being made in the image of God, each of us deserves love. Our loving is our striving toward godliness. It is our privilege, not our duty. Love has no rewards beyond the experience of it, nor does it require any.

"'I love you' is most deeply a feeling, than an activity, and least of all, words. As words, it is often used to stop loving, or reassure, or push away. When the feeling forms the words, the words are not merely heard, but are seen and touched. As a feeling, it brings the loved into being and the lover to the experience of another being. Alone, each is beautiful; experienced together, they create.

"The feeling of love arises out of your person, unreasonably and wonderfully thrusting itself on, and contagiously evoking response in the other. When felt unreservedly without hesitance, shame, or fear, the loved has no choice but to love. The slightest hesitance or most meager reservation in loving can undo. If the love feeling in you does not wake a love response, do not chastise the other, but look into your own heart to find wherein your loving lacks fullness or is crippled by your hesitance.

"Many good and bad feelings are mistaken for love. Caring for, forgiveness of, tolerance of, infatuation with, dependence on, feeling close to, being friendly with, going to, accepting from, sacrificing to, being excited by, understanding of, and countless others. They are part of living with, but not loving of.

"'I love you' means something very special and very concrete. It means that I surround you with the feeling that allows you--perhaps even requires you--to be everything you really are as a human being at that moment. When my love is fullest, you are most fully you. You may be good, or bad, or both; tender or angry, or both; but you are you, which is the very most I could ever ask or expect.  And so I experience you in all your beauty and all your ugliness. But you, not what I expect, or want or what you feel you should be, or were fashioned to be, but really you. I do not love you for what you are. My love enables you to be what you are.  Love shatters roles and illuminates persons. The acquired masks are discarded, and we face each other as we are--really and usually wonderfully. Because being loved allows the other to be what he or she really is, it is much easier to know when you are loved than it is to know when you are loving."  (The Art of Intimacy, page 10)

This is a beautiful definition, but will lead many to believe that it is not possible for humans to achieve this level of love. While this may be true, can we experience loving of another in this way even for just a few seconds? If we can then we know it is possible, and the more we can love without expectation or reward, the more frequent will be our experiences.

Love is not, however, in the definition, but in the experiencing of it, and in not confusing what is not love or even part of loving, as love.

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