Ardor, amour, head over heels, affection, adulation, ardency, attachment, cherishing, crush, devotion, emotion, enchantment, fervor, fidelity, flame, fondness, hankering, idolatry, inclination, infatuation, involvement, lust, mad for, passion, piety, rapture, relish, soft spot, taste, tenderness, worship, yearning, zeal, and pathos are the others. This is how mankind defines love.
Some claim that loves makes you more creative as we seem to think differently when we are in love, which triggers global processing, which in turn promotes creative thinking and interferes with analytic thinking.
Others say that dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin (you know, the romantic passion cocktail) lead to feelings of euphoria, sleeplessness, loss of appetite and obsessive thinking. If this is the case, who needs love?
I don't know what love is but I do know what love is not: not unconditional and especially not everlasting. It could be a temporary tradeoff. And has to be fair, otherwise you feel outwitted, fooled, cheated as only functional tradeoffs determine species coexistence.
Ancient Greeks used to have different names for love: philia, eros, agape, storge, or xenia, according to the context.
Even nowadays, love comes in degrees: infatuation, intimacy, affinity, passion, commitment, settlement, and my all time favorite “we stay together for the children” type of love. Best case scenario is a mixture of all.
For Greeks, philia was a virtuous love, not influenced by emotional involvement, but not Platonic in today’s sense (the term was coined by Aristotle anyway), which implies no physical contact. But can we speak of love and not of pathos or emotion? Even the love of god requires passion. Especially the love of god. Cause one cannot unconditionally love a supernatural concept without blind passion.
Philosophia was the love of wisdom. But there was nothing passionless about philosophy and we all know about the intercrural (diamerizein) or irrumatio contact during the rite of initiation of young disciples. Yes, it involved corporeal love; it was a body and mind love of wisdom.
Storge was passionate and sensual love, something that Romeo and Juliette or Paris and Helen of Troy, or Young Wherter have experienced.
Nowadays, storge seems to be an old fashioned concept or at least a transitory and trivial one, and science says that what keeps a couple together is the age difference between a man and a woman and not mad passion (men should be 15 older to maximize their chances of having the most offspring that survive). If the age difference between spouses is the key to a successful marriage, that transforms all women in little girls looking for their fathers in their husbands. We are so Freudian after all.
Agape is a word that modern Greeks still use for love, and in the New Testament was used with the sense of charitable, altruistic, and unconditional. Like parental love. Now that is an interesting topic. We know what makes us fall in love with the opposite gender, the surge of hormones to the brain, the release of cuddle hormone, the appetite for sexual desire and the devilishly pleasant and irresistible tingle in our groins. The basic need to copulate and multiply. The insane desire to become immortal and conquer death by giving birth to our children. Or the mixture of intimacy, passion and commitment.
Why as parents love our children, it’s pretty much a no brainer. If we were god, we loved our children roughly, exigently, demandingly, pushing them beyond their human limits, asking them to overcome them, thus initiating their perfection. But we are not as there is no god. And the love for our children is passionate, irrational but moreover unconditional. We love our children possessively, simplistically, maternally, desperately, energetically, gloriously and sometimes to the point of alienation. At times we define ourselves through them.
Why do we love our parents? Should the shared DNA oblige us into experiencing parental love? Are our mothers infallible just because they gave us birth? Or because they fulfilled their emotional void through us? Do the blood-ties blind us?
Biologically and evolutionary speaking, once we exit their tutelage, and we seek no further support from them, our affection based on needs should cease. Yet, we keep on loving them. Or maybe it is not love. Like everything else in life, love and respect, even parental must be earned through permanent hard work and diligence.
Parenthood doesn’t come with the territory and a parent must earn his/her respect and love like everybody else. Anyone can breed but not everyone is fit to be a parent, let alone a good one. Parental respect is not self-understood and you should never take your children’s for granted.
As adults do we still love our parents? Or maybe what we feel for them is compassion, gratitude, duty and moral filial obligation, and sometimes respect as a remembrance as they led a righteous life. No one abandons the weak, especially someone from the same tribe.
For a while, we feel guilty for not being capable of loving them as much as you feel they love you, and you might wonder if there is anything wrong with your “love skill”. I haven’t seen an adult madly loving his/her parents, unless they are pathologic or Freudianly stuck at the age of 4. You are looking for possible excuses within yourself and them. Childhood sexual abuse? Nope. Domestic violence? Nope. Lack of affection? Nope. What is wrong then? Why can’t we love our parents back the same way they love us? Is it biology? Is it maybe because like rats, we push the elderly, the sick and the useless towards the edge of the cliff so we can make room for the young, voracious and vivacious? Is this what we are eventually? A pack of rats? A gathering of apes? Yes.
Shall we feel guilty and apologize? Apologize for what? For our faulty genes which determine us to shift our focus from our elderly towards our offspring? Both are equally helpless. Ironically, psychologists claim that insincere apologies are better than no apology. Well, if this is the case, we are sorry for being who we are. After all, biology is our destiny.
A proverb says that you can define a society by the way it treats its dogs and elderly.
Shall we then trust a society that mistreats the stray dogs or shows no compassion towards senior citizens but claims to have family values? Oh well, shall we?
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