Love

Love is a great affection towards others, objects or beings. Based on the intensity of feeling and purpose, there are:

Love between friends or friendship
Filial love: love that occurs between family members.
Love for things, places, animals ...
Love of an ideas
Love of patner
Love toward God

Historically, love is greatest human theme. There are mixture of felling about love. Love is also the great themes of literature. The characterization of this love can be:

Platonic love
Courtly love, typical during Middle Ages
Romantic love
Passionate love
conjugal love

The most common symbols of love are "heart" and "ring". Dating and seduction are generally the preliminary stages of love between couples, phases which are chemically related to pheromones.


A perspective on love

The heart is a very common representation of love. The term usually associated with romantic love, a passionate relationship between two people that have a major influence in their mutual relations. Love also influences other parts of life, such as love of family, love of God, humanity, nature, art, beauty, and even love that is associated with empathy, skills, and abilities.

According to Gottfried Leibniz, "love is seing and feeling other people happiness as your own happiness." In most cases, this means that you have a great affection for something that brought happiness and pleasure.

Especially in the Western world, often contrasting, to prevent or counteract hatred, contempt or selfishness. Based on opinions, not love of humanity is the owner, but also includes all beings that can develop linkages emotionally with others, as, for example, animals such as monkeys, dolphins, dogs, elephants, etc.. There are even those who believe, no scientific criteria under which the plants grow better if they receive the love.

In humans, contrary to the love of animals and a contemporary design fundamentally secular and western, love is considered a real feeling. In the most common is the result of an emotion based on the attraction and admiration for one individual to another, which may or may not be reciprocated. This strengthens the relationship between an individual and another, his own failure, and the union wants to meet someone who has tried to add their existence.

In some cases, love can be interpreted as a result of hard work, effort and expertise to build and develop an objective, fullness and happiness to see what has been achieved desired and worked for a long time. This is the kind of love that a parent can feel toward a child's voice when grown and able to face life with full maturity, imitating his father in things that are transmitted by practical wisdom. In this case, love is the position based on the principles that have guided the work and effort and corroboration that the beliefs that have struggled to get their reward. It differs radically from that feeling of unconditional love, often professed by the mother, who was directed only toward their child, regardless of any principle.

Christian Perspective

The Bible provides a definition of love in very inspiring perspective:

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It is not rude. It is not self seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects. Always trust. Always hapes. Always perseveres. Love never fails.
- 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

"He that does not love does not know God, because God is love." I John 4:8

Budha Perspective

From the perspective of Buddhism, love is a state of spiritual purity to which man can pass through the release of so-called disturbing emotions (desire and affection, hatred and anger, ignorance , pride, envy), material world inherent or Samsara. With compassion and altruism of the material world, you can gradually increase the operating capacity of all the chakras, including the heart chakra, so it is possible to love consciously and eliminate the pain associated with love to reach the state of light, which is an unconditional love for all sense and meaning of things, like, for example, refers to a mother for her child at birth. According to this idea has joined Love all things, and our consciousness creates the universe itself. For Buddhism, all religions are valid if they are based on love and compassion.

Thus, Eastern philosophy has a different approach to spiritual love. According to Western philosophy : the suffering itself is not what makes us virtuous, but a means to virtue, so the closer to illumination involves the phasing out of the suffering and increase joy (including spiritual love). Like Christianity, suffering is a catharsis (or route of Atonement), which leads to enlightenment (or God).

However, the concept of the East, to worry about finding a goal would be an additional mode of suffering (setting a goal is kind of attachment to one thing and ignorance to the other things). According to this philosphy the desire to achieve is a synonym of earthly love. Thus to be free from suffering, someone must not attach himself/herself to possession or achievement.

Psychological Perspective

Following investigations carried out on love, Robert J. Sternberg proposed three components:

Intimacy, understanding how these feelings in a relationship that promote closeness, the bond and connection.

Passion is a state of intense desire for union with another, as an expression of wishes and needs.

The decision or commitment, the decision to love another person and the commitment to maintain that love.

These three elements are linked together forming the various forms of love: intimacy + passion + passionate commitment, intimacy + commitment, etc.

Meanwhile, analysis of the predominance of one or other of these different priorities that drive relationships, as some authors suggest a number of styles.

According to Erich Fromm, to love is an art, a voluntary act, willingness to get things done and learn. Love is not a passion that is imposed against the will of those who live. Love is therefore the decision, the choice and attitude. According to Fromm, most people identify love with a feeling of pleasure. He believes, however, that love is an art, and, therefore, requires effort and knowledge. From their point of view, most people fall into the error that there is nothing to learn about love, motivated, inter alia, to consider that the main objective is not to be loved and love, Then come to value the superficial aspects such as success, power or interest to cause confusion during the initial phase of love, but did not affect when people cease to be unknown and lost the magic of the original mystery. Recommended to make love in the same way that you learn all the other arts, like music, painting, carpentry or medicine. Love therefore must be distinguished, as in any learning process, two parts, theoretical love and practical love.

Love is an organic mental state that grows or decreases depending on how the feed back that feeling of connection that make up the core of love. The reaction depends on factors such as the behavior of a loved one, the needs of their particular characteristics or involuntary the person you love (sexual desire, an enterprise needs, unconscious desire for upward mobility completeness suction constant etc.).

There is an extreme polarization of the mind showing a disordered love, without thinking about the limits of self, and even perhaps threaten its very existence or the person to experience a state of polarization of the obsession. In this case, he loves, and aspires to the will and happiness of being loved, and before all. Giving without receiving in return, and the sacrifice necessary to prevail on loved ones of the same without it deems as a sacrifice but as an opportunity to propagate in the sentiment, widely considered a precursor of emotional disturbance that object of our obsession person does not meet our expectations and cannot thank our effort and demand even more. However some extreme polarization confused with "real" or "healthy" love and require the other person the same behavior, and expressing this extreme frustration through violence. The results are evident in the daily news, we see a growing trend of domestic violence, in which psychologists refer this current obsession as polarized pathology that trigger conflict.

Philosophical Standpoint

Empedocles believed that the entire cosmos was governed by forces of attraction and repulsion, or love, so people are attracted like any other organization. For Plato, love is a means of acquiring knowledge, as they sought to record the beauty of the idea that the supreme soul and spirit through the passion for beautiful things has increased. The medieval believed that love is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit on earth who causes men to look good. According to moderns philosophical thoughts, by contrast, is one of the pillars of happiness because it covers the psychological needs of the individual.

Need of Love

If the attitude of love must join at some point, the descriptions that follow the guidelines of experimental science, must be set so that it can be observed and quantified with some precision. Baruch Spinoza gave definition that can fit into the requirements of humanities and social sciences. According to Spinoza, love implies the attitude to share the joys and sorrows of others. This definition does not differ essentially from the biblical definition of love because the term suggests to "share the joys and sorrows of others as if it was associated, to love your neighbor as yourself". Not only does this definition refers to observable aspects and contrasts with the reality, but also the ability to quantify the degree of love, because it indicates that a condition be broadly shared, while varying degrees of joy or sadness associated to be loved.

From the above definition draws some immediate, as are the feelings that arise in third countries. Spinoza writes: "If we imagine that someone is suffering from happiness that we love, we will be affected by love towards him. If we imagine the opposite, affecting sadness, we have, however, also affected by the hatred against him. We note in this expression, the attitude seems to be a hate to love, one tends to trade (and third mentioned) the role of shared pain and joy and suffering.

Materialistic Point of View

According to a purely materialistic point of view, love is considered a set of behaviors and attitudes that occur involuntarily in people and selfless able to develop emotional intelligence or emotional. Notably, the current use of the word love to describe having sex by using the phrase "make love". Until the mid-twentieth century, this term was reserved for the court.

Currently, there is another school of thought on what is love. According to studies by American scientists and neurologists love "is not registered as a sensation, like joy or hatred, but as a necessity, very similar to how the brain define hunger. Love is the basic necessity or life.

Expressions of Love

On the relations of the person with their environment, love can be one or more of the following events:

Self Love / self esteem. Self-esteem or self-love is love itself. Is it good for personal development and essential for good relations. It is based on the acceptance of the virtues, the ability to see weaknesses with moderate  perception. Not to be confused with narcissism, which is an egocentrism kind of love as the result of low self-esteem. Narcisim is generally misunderstood concept of self-esteem, which is often refer to pathological narcissism that "estimate oneself too high" or "too much pride." Self esteem is totally different from narcism. Self-esteem is a prerequisite for the existence of true love in all its manifestations.

Filial love: between parents and children (and, by extension, between the ancestors and descendants). More specifically, the love of the mother or the love of mother to child, by tradition, is seen as motivated by a strong instinct that makes it particularly difficult. However, there are those who question the existence of this instinct.

Brotherly love: in its strict sense, is the love between brothers, but extends to other parents, but parents and adults. Born with a deep sense of gratitude and thanks to the family, the emotions of this coexistence, cooperation and the identification of each object in a kinship structure. Even as filial love, and the point of view of psychoanalysis, the scholarship is sublimated, it is based on the prohibition of incest.

Friendship: Nearly brotherly love is a feeling that arises from the need of humans to socialize. Love your neighbor comes to his turn to use the power of the spirit of empathy and tolerance, and the abstraction of friendship. Erich Fromm, is the equivalent of love of neighbor and love preached brotherly love in the Bible by the phrase "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

Romance: born in expectation of what a human being next to a life full of satisfaction and happiness. This feeling any person subject to this idealized expectation, as defined in the psyche.

Confluent love: love between people who can build relationships of torque defined in the middle of the twentieth century. It seems, as opposed to romantic love: it must be unique, must not be forever, not an unconditional surrender that.

Sexual love: romantic love and includes love in question. Sexual desire is considered a manifestation of love that is born of self-esteem.
Platonic love. With the property, is a philosophical concept that involves increased expression of an idea to the contemplation of it, the appearance of the beauty of pure knowledge and selfless essence. For Plato, true love is born of wisdom, namely, knowledge. Sex is commonly known as a form of love. There is a sexual element that occurs in a mental, imaginative or idealistic and not physical.

Love in animals: It's an instictive love to protect against danger.

Love toward inanimate object, or physical attraction, an idea, country (patriotism), place of birth, honor, independence (integrity).

Love toward God or deity (devotion): Seing God as the source of all love.

Representative Love

Universal Love: where all people can think that the environment and the great mystical experience as nirvana, ecstasy or enlightenment. According to Christianity and Buddism, love is the in sublime manifestation of human being and their existence on earth.