On the matter of love
On the matter of love.
Love was the subject of many philosophical debates since the early Greece,
and it existed since the beginning of the world. Dinosours engaged in the very primitive type of love, our ancestors - the humanoids, in a somewhat more complex type of love, and humans today are considered to have the most complex sort of love on earth today. I would like to evolve this monolog into all aspects of love, and its definition.
Let's start with a definition of love from the Oxford's dictionary:
"Love is a warm liking or affection; affectionate devotion; sexual affection or passion."
Love is so many things that it cannot be stamped by a few words. However, we, as humans, as a more developed race of animals, are considered to be the most complex creatures on earth, and the kind of love we engage in is the most complex feeling of all.
Primitive men's love was more inclined towards the physical side, it was based on instincts to continue the race. Of course, it's hard to tell now, whether or not the primitive man experienced the feelings of devotion, loyalty, or strong bonding as people do today, simply because we have no evidence of it ever happening.
All is good, however, the previous sentences aren't exactly true. I will clarify. I believe that the complexity, the strength of love depends on the intellectual level of the creature, in our case, the human. A lot of people experience love in the simplest terms - either physical attraction alone, inflatuation etc. Ignorance simply does not allow for deep, meaningful love to exist since it doesn't have a definition, an understanding of it.
Someone who is familiar with Shakespear, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tutchev and other great poets, is charged with the magical beauty of love, that person is "armed" and aware, as opposed to someone who never read a single poem in his/her life, whose childhood passed in video games and his greatest ambition is to watch a baseball game with buddies and beer on a Friday night.
On the other hand, being intelligent doesn't necessarily mean that you are capable of great emotions, deep feelings towards someone. Therefore, the opposite of the underlined statement is false.
I would like to talk about the more developed, complex kind of love that includes the passion, the desire, the sexual attraction, the warm liking,
the interest awokened by the personality, character and intelligence of the partner.
Love as a feeling had been studied by psychologists for a long time, and although we can explain the physical reactions, and psychological effects,
we don't really know why one person reacts so wildly - with such strong feelings- towards one and so calmly towards another.
There is a beautiful legend in Roman/Greek mythology that goes as following:
once people were two-headed, had four legs and four arms. Something they did angried the gods, and as a punishment a great storm came. And the lightning hit the people and divided them in two. However, since each person had only one soul, it was divided in two as well and each half of the person got half of the soul. There was great chaos after the storm and people were mixed, not knowing who is their other half anymore. Ever since everybody is looking for their other half of the soul, and if they succeed in finding it, they experience the greatest and happiest love of all.
It's a legend, but how true. We might have a certain criteria by which we judge how suitable a person is for us, but sometimes, even if someone does have all the characteristics that we are looking for, it just doesn't click. In other words, soul, undefined scientifically, does exist and it plays a major role in the formation of a relationship.
Love is the greatest and the most dangerous feeling of all. It is a very powerful and beautiful feeling if used with caution and gentleness, and can be very destructive if abused.
It is a grey area of human emotion, since there is no clear definition of what love is, there are no definite boundaries between love, being inlove, inflatuation etc. Those of us more intelligent know the difference, and know what they feel, but still cannot categorize a certain emotion.
Love becomes a webbed sphere of emotions, all interacting, all connected with each other, none being alone.
To conclude, I must say that if I have answers, they are just theories based on personal experience and knowledge and certainly aren't necessarily transferable to others.
I will put on hold this thought until later, since it's late now.
You are welcome to discuss this with me via email.