How do you define love?

[MrEco]

All my life, I've always thought of love as something reserved for family, pets, and romantic partners. The typical range of what love can be attributed to. But recently some thing's have happened in my life that have made me rethink that (In retrospect) very limited definition.

Firstly, I think love could accurately be used to describe how we feel about our friends. A slightly different type of love from familial and quite different from romantic love, but a form of love nonetheless. Imagine for a second that your mother (Or father, sister, brother) were to die. You would feel incredibly distraught and most likely cry. Now instead for a moment imagine it was your best friend who were to die. Wouldn't you have the same reaction, albeit perhaps a slightly less intense one? I don't understand why, but modern society seems to never even consider love as being able to be held by two people who are just friends. But I honestly think there's very little difference from how I (Or anyone else, generally speaking) might feel about my brother or my brother-from-another-mother.

Secondly (And I know this may turn some heads, but please bear in mind that this is just one mans philosophical opinion), I disagree with the commonly held idea that incestuous relationships are a bad thing that are only driven by some kind of perverse lust. I don't get why your relationship to someone should dictate how you're allowed to love that person any more than that persons gender, race, or age. As long as both people are consenting in the relationship, and as long as both people are mentally capable of consenting, then I see no reason why two people who genuinely love each other and wish to move on to a more intimate way of expressing that love should be treated as criminals or moral deviants. It just doesn't make any logical sense to me.

That's all for now. I would love to hear your feedback and your own opinions on this subject. Thank you.

[BoringSupreez]

Love is a commitment, not a feeling. When you love someone, you do what is best for that person and put them ahead of yourself. You can love something without even liking it. That's why a parent can love his kid even when the kid is being royally rotten. That's what I believe.

Incest? No. Just no.

[Luke]

All I know is that I love Noiseredux.

In all honesty I've been telling my friends I love 'em since high school. Not a drunk, "Ya know chwat? I rilly love youse guyzz", but more of a "Alright, talk ya later man. Ya know I love ya". I know that's odd, but I also hug almost everyone too. It's an emotion, it's a feeling, it's putting others ahead of yourself. Love is saying, "Nah man, you go ahead and the window seat", and "Sure, you can have the last donut", and "It's fine. We'll watch What Not To Wear even though a hockey game is on".

[Gamerforlife]

I think love is a psychological concept. Different people define it in different ways and experience it in different ways. It's one of those things you can't define because it arguably doesn't even exist. It's just an idea. I'm sort of partial to the idea that real love is self love, because if you don't love yourself then you are not truly capable of loving anyone else.

As for the incest thing, most people are afraid to discuss such a topic. I think it's interesting to note however that different cultures and different time periods have different ideas about what is or isn't incest or whether or not it's even wrong. Like most things we deem wrong in life, it's only wrong if you believe it is. Everyone has different moral values and the truth is, most of our beliefs are programmed into us from society and culture and are thus, not truly our own beliefs

One of the things I find interesting about the HBO series Game of Thrones is that one of the characters regularly engages in incestuous acts and the makers of the show don't seem at all uncomfortable about showing that. It's rather fascinating given the amount of attention the show gets from mainstream media

[Czernobog]

Gamerforlife put into words what I would have a great deal of difficulty trying to say in his first paragraph. Essentially that love is an idea or concept that can be different from person to person.

I define love as a sort of psychological need to give others my compassion and trust. This can be relatives, or friends. However, there needs to be some sort of exchange of emotion for me to define love. I don't believe in attributing an emotion as strong as love to inanimate objects but others surely might.

[vlame]

it is a feeling of security and imperviousness.

[neilencio]

it's when the sun in your eyes make some of the lies worth believing.