Love

I was watching the movie Interstellar the other day, and something they talked about finally struck me. Matthew McConaughey's character described love as just a tool to support procreation. Anne Hathaway countered that we love people who have died. In her character's particular point of view, she loved someone she hadn't seen in 10 years.

So what is Love? I know, that's an impossible question, and I think anyone who thinks they know the answer may be fooling themselves. I, for example, have been in love with a woman I haven't seen in 8 years. I've even felt experiences of Love while meditating with what I can only describe as beings from other places.

I bring this up because I'm curious to know what your experiences with Love have been, not to define Love itself. So please, share

Beyond this?



Love is what you make of it. It is a loyalty, an unconditional loyalty to someone. You can be driven up the wall by someone and still love them. You can love someone you never plan on having a kid with. You can love those that have passed, or even those that have yet to come (future children for example). Does not a dog love his family and bark with joy when he sees a member of his human pack come back from months away? They cannot reproduce with us, but they love us because we are loyal to each other.

So for me, love is loyalty.

As for my experiences with love... it can hurt. Not because you wont have kids, but because love, and the loyalty involved, can hurt you when you realise they aren't loyal in return. But it is that hurt that proves that you were loyal to them, even beyond the change of their loyalties.

Love is what you feel just before I make a profit.


Look into my eyes, take my hand, and trust me :laugh:


Oh, alright, something sappy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBDbUVXXp-U



I'm not persuaded that either of the examples you gents have given are even close to "love"

And I'm sure as a sure thing that you can't love a dead person. You can have loved them, you can love the memory, but once whatever it is that a person is has returned to the whatever it is we are when we're not being people, it is well beyond where Love can go.

I think to love is to accept and appreciate someone exactly as they are, while still wanting the best for them

(Which I believe can also be done for/with/to the dead)

I don't think there is just one definition for love since there are so many ways to love someone. You can love someone platonically, romantically, the way you'd love a mother/father/sibling/family member, and amicably. I also believe that it is completely possible to love someone but NOT be in love with them. A lot of people tend to confuse the too and make mistakes that end up hurting someone.

I see love as a mixture of things. I agree with Ari when he says loyalty, along with that, I would add Honesty, integrity, compassion, patience.....and many more. I read somewhere a long time ago that being in love was technically a mental disorder or something of the sort, and I can agree. When we are in love with someone, we sometimes make wrong decisions because we don't think clearly. We become so obsessed with a person that you put aside your friends, family, and even personal matters just to please the other person. It's clouds your visions and it makes it all about them. I've been there before and now that it's gone, boy do I look back and think "damn, what the hell was I thinking?????"

it's a good discussion, I love seeing everyone's opinion on it ^^

As, interesting, vladucard. The virtues you've listed as being a part of love I would consider a way to behave once you have love. An interesting topic, indeed!

I think for me the different types of love, like romantic, platonic, parental, self, whatever... they share the same Acceptance/ wanting the best that I described in my last post, but with an added bit. "I want the best for you and accept you exactly as you are, and also you are hawt" or "...and also, I will teach you things as a way to help you toward better things" or whatever.

Love is unconditional attachment, nothing else. And as James says, you can't love the dead, only the ideas and experiences that dead thing represents to you personally. So to take that further and to answer the OP question, I have loved a furry horse that I met on the internet. It was not the person I loved but the concept he represented.

When I originally posted here, I wasn't sure how to talk about my experiences of love without first finding and sharing my own definition of love.

Now that I've done that, I'm not sure how to share my experiences.... heh...

Kyrin Wyldstar wrote: Love is unconditional attachment, nothing else. And as James says, you can't love the dead, only the ideas and experiences that dead thing represents to you personally. So to take that further and to answer the OP question, I have loved a furry horse that I met on the internet. It was not the person I loved but the concept he represented.

I'm curious about what I'm seeing as a bit of duality here (though of course it's entirely possible I'm just not understanding properly). How is it that you believe it's possible to love a concept, but not someone who has passed on from their material form?

Streen wrote: Anne Hathaway countered that we love people who have died. In her character's particular point of view, she loved someone she hadn't seen in 10 years.

So what is Love? I know, that's an impossible question, and I think anyone who thinks they know the answer may be fooling themselves. I, for example, have been in love with a woman I haven't seen in 8 years.

I've been deeply 'in love' with someone for about 12 years. Over the last 10 or so of them we've only seen each other a small handful of times, and barely spoken. And yet, I ask myself every single day - can you actually know someone you haven't seen in a long time, or someone you see very rarely? Can you really be in love with someone you don't know? Or are you just in love with the idea of that person?

When we have that depth of feeling for someone we can fall into the trap of thinking that we are connected to them on some sort of spiritual soulmate level where we just magically 'know' them without perhaps much interaction needed. In the case of someone we haven't seen in a long time, this feeling is rooted in what we once felt that we knew about someone (which may not even have been accurate in the first place) and tricks us into forgetting that people change. Not just in terms of our haircut or our views on a particular subject - when I look at myself I see someone in many ways very different in essence to the person I was 10 years ago, as a result of the experiences I have undergone, so how on Earth would someone else who has racked up 10 years of unknown experiences in the interim not also have changed hugely?

Surely the only way we can truly know someone is through sustained open and honest dialogue, perhaps combined with lengthy observation of their behaviour and actions - strong familial/platonic ties notwithstanding, if we have not had access to those things, can we really be in love?

In my case, although I feel that I am in love and my theorising seems to make little difference to that feeling, I suspect that I'm in love with a fictional person and that if I was to have a chance to exchange some of that open and honest dialogue with her, I would find that the person I've been thinking about all these years is simply a bundle of redundant memories tangled up with 10 years of mental embellishments. Although the distance (of space, time or both) usually feels like a curse in these situations, perhaps it is the very thing that facilitates the 'love' - if we had remained close to them we would have been more exposed to their flaws, less able to cherry-pick the things that contribute to our fantasy image of their being on some pedestal of God-like perfection. Sometimes in order to get closure on something we need to feel that we have been hurt, we need to feel aggrieved - although the situation might hurt us, it's conveniently difficult for someone to hurt us (and thus for us to 'get over it' and move on) if we have no real interaction with them.

In the case of loving someone who has died - I guess that their character hasn't changed over time in that same way? But the longer that time goes on, the more unreliable our memories become - the more those mental embellishments creep in, a little like Chinese whispers - so although our loved one may not have changed, can we trust that it is still actually an entirely accurate version of that person that we are remembering? I've not yet lost anyone that I've been extremely close to, so I'm just hypothesising and certainly not asserting that anyone who does remember their lost loved ones with crystal clarity is mistaken. And similarly to vladucard, I wonder if there is a difference between loving someone who has died, and being in love with them? When you are in love with someone who then dies, does the love change into a different kind of love?