What is love?

The simple definition of love I like is putting someone else's welfare above your own.

My father once asked that question. I can still see him and my stepmother standing in the kitchen of our apartment. I had been summoned and was seated at the kitchen table.

"What is love?" he demanded.

In that moment, all that came to mind was what I had recently learned in my high school English class. "Love is an abstract noun," I replied.

I won't bore you with the rest of that conversation. Just imagine you are fourteen years old being raised by a couple of crazy and vicious drunks.

To answer your question, I paraphrase Forrest Gump: "Love is what love does." Much thanks to everyone who has invested the word with meaning over the years.

The simple definition of love I like is putting someone else's welfare above your own.
Posted by: jmb57

Not always. If I don't take care of my own well-being, I can't take care of anyone else.
I'd say that love is putting someone else's daily welfare on an equal standing with your own, and putting their welfare in dire circumstances above your own.
So if neither of us has eaten in four days, and I procure one sandwich, I'm not going to give you the whole thing. But I will split it with you.
However, I would gladly stop a bullet to save my daughter, my husband, or my dog.

My mentor, Daisaku Ikeda states, "love is NOT gazing into each other's eyes, but it is two people gazing in the same direction.

Love in reality can not be compared to some other worldly type of love, I believe.

The only True Love is "God Our Heavenly Father". We people here on earth can't fathom his love for us. Love on earth is fleeting it comes an goes an does not last forever as we are taught. Life lessons from our parents or the lack of there of was showing the wrong kind of love. So it makes children inempt at Love. Thats my take on Love, I want it I desire it but I won't really know True Love till I die.

First, love has absolutely nothing to do with god, Jesus, Mohammed or Ba'al.

Second, trying to define love is like nailing jelly to a wall...you can't do it, because love is completely different for different people.

Love is a state that exists between two human beings - and it doesn't matter whether it is a man and a woman, a man and a man, or a woman and a woman. Whether priests agree with it or not, it is still love.

And to sit in judgment on the love between two people, as religious fantacists are wont to do, supposes that Christians (or Mulsims or whomever) somehow have the right to determine exactly what love is - or should be.

But whatever it is, it still has nothing to do with some fictional god character that was only created to espouse a particular religious belief.

I doubt very much that I would ever take advice on love from a Catholic priest, for example. As we have come to know, love for many Catholic priests is as close as the next altar boy.

Love is a Being and that Being Is God.

See you all in the Kingdom.

Take care, be ready.

Sincerely, Thomas Paul Moses Baum.

To begin this "definition," it may help to paraphrase Khalil Ghibran by saying:

"Love comes through us, not from us."

Have we not noted that in the apparent affection of other animals?

So, what we sense as "Love" is that which is flowing into us, and to the extent we are its conduits of those energies, flows from us. It is the sense, that extrasensory, beyond the physical, but affecting the physical, of the flow or constraint of that "energy" that we identify as "Love."

Fr. Frank Pavone

You wrote, "Every Mass reminds us of this, as He again says, "This is My Body given up for you; this is My Blood, shed for you.""

And right after "this is My Blood, shed for you" is "and for ALL".

Sounds catholic to me, as in universal.

God's Plan is for ALL to be ultimately with God in God's Kingdom.

Take care, be ready.

Sincerely, Thomas Paul Moses Baum.

One thing that I know is that religion should not be part of that definition.

people, pagans, without so much as a whimper from religious institutions have been making love quite well.

but your blinders are getting in the way.

And I've gotten a real good dose of "god's love" from my ex-wife, the Catholic.

Yeah, that love is all in the air.

Nope - it's not !

She's a hateful person; not what I'd call loving.

How can a person love a deity, considering that there never was any "just" one, because several thousand innocent babies and children have been killed by tsunamis and earthquakes. How can any of you dismiss such tragedies and cling to some primitive irrational belief.

The religious who like to exclude for the purpose of making special their own private clubs, can't fathom that love that exists elsewhere in the world in other cultures, other languages, among people of different skin colors and even between members of the same sex. They must cherry-pick what love means like they cherry-pick their holy scriptures to preserve their own "specialness"

Love is a decision.

So far, lepidopteryx's version of love - "However, I would gladly stop a bullet to save my daughter, my husband, or my dog." - won by a wide margin. If God's love has been as good, we won't have seen so much suffering by ALL living creatures on this earth.

// How do you define love?

Na koyi ohdi chithi, na suneha aya aye
Pher kehri galon dil kabraya aye
Shaaki de kolon jaake ohda haal

Rabh ohdi khair hove
Ayevain chandre jein ohnde ne khayal
Rabh ohdi khair hove

to a muslim, love is murder, oppression and hatred.

Who cares what any religion teaches about love if the followers don't practice it, except for their own narcissistic gains, as is the case in the real world?

What you couldn't dig up a Buddhist? Whatever, wish I hadn't wasted my time looking.