Love

I was recently with a group of friends at a party. We played and talked around, somehow leading to love lives (as is usual at parties, I think). Skipping forward to the main topic here, a friend asked me "What is love?" (he was having some problems with his feelings and wanted to know if he was indeed in love). That was stunning...so simple, but how to answer? "Er, it's a feeling, la! You'll know it when you've felt it". I'm not even sure if my definition was correct...it sounds true enough to me, though it didn't work for him. It made me follow up with "It's when you start to feel for someone, and it's not just an excited or 'desperate' feeling". I think that's even more wrong:\ It made me think for some time about that question. Leads me to today, when I looked up the meaning of 'love' on the internet:


Definition of love as from http://www.answer.com/

noun
1. A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.

2. A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance.

3. a) Sexual passion.
b) Sexual intercourse.
c) A love affair.
4. An intense emotional attachment, as for a pet or treasured object.

5. A person who is the object of deep or intense affection or attraction; beloved. Often used as a term of endearment.

6. An expression of one's affection: Send him my love.

7. a) A strong predilection or enthusiasm: a love of language.
b) The object of such an enthusiasm: The outdoors is her greatest love.

8. Love Mythology. Eros or Cupid.

9. often Love Christianity. Charity.

10. Sports. A zero score in tennis.



In the thesaurus, it gets more vague:

noun
1. Deep and ardent affection: adoration, devotion, worship. See like/dislike, love/hatred.

2. The passionate affection and desire felt by lovers for each other: amorousness, fancy, passion, romance. See love/hatred, sex/asexual.

3. An intimate sexual relationship between two people: affair, amour, love affair, romance. See love/hatred, sex/asexual.

4. The condition of being closely tied to another by affection or faith: affection, attachment, devotion, fondness, liking, loyalty (used in plural). See connect.

5. A person who is much loved: beloved, darling, dear, honey, minion, precious, sweet, sweetheart, truelove. Informal sweetie. Idioms: light of one's life. See love/hatred.

6. A strong, enthusiastic liking for something: love affair, passion, romance. See love/hatred.


Obviously, some of the 10 definitions don't meet what I wanted and the thesaurus just gave synonyms. Maybe I wasn't looking for a right definition, because dictionary definitions 1 and 2 may be close enough. More accurate answer might have been to explain and describe it to my troubled friend, but I can't describe it either. There's no standard 'love symptom' to diagnose if someone is in love. Feeling it is the only way to find out, I conclude, but that's not very fair either, because every feeling can be accounted for.

The question... What is love?

Explanations, descriptions, please? Those who explain get chances to be social professors and modern philosophers ;)