A sample of how the thought of "love" is often linked to that of "protection"

quote:

Originally posted by Sand Leaper What the hell is true love anyway?

First of all, since this emotion is defined by a word, we need to understand its concept:

love verb (t) to have strong feelings of affection for another adult and be romantically and sexually attracted to them, or to feel great affection for a friend or person in your family.

This, exclusively, is what the word is about, and it all starts here. Like Renegade said in another thread, love can be divided into different types depending on how a certain culture sees it. And why does English (and many other European languages) use such wide umbrella term?

Because it can be summarised as the feeling of keeping the status quo of whatever we find pleasant. Your parents take care of you. Therefore chances are you might love them for your existence relies (or relied) on theirs. Your offspring carry on your genes and might help you when you're old. Friends do favours. Lovers look after you. This is all triggered by a biological process as a survival mechanism.

Naturally, it's bound to be unfortunately mixed with other feelings (such as jealousy and insecurity), as hardly (if ever) you can find something pure outside theory (that would be true for emotions, chemical substances and most other examples). So, in this case, pure love would be a theorical state of feeling compassion for whatever may be benefical in my existence.

Sex, on the other hand, is an interpersonal corporal stimulation. The reason why it's culturally linked to traditions and/or emotions is because of all its consequences (from STD's to pregnancies). Even though we're receptacles of exterior stimulation sex, unlike love, doesn't require as much contact with our emotions, other than the biological need of reproducing.

Choosing sex exclusively would probably show a lack of capacity of either dealing with emotions or the lack of trust in such mechanism, whereas the pursuit of an exclusively true love (Judeo-Christianly separated from sex) would become the product of an idealism, hiding oneself from the outer world and bound of not being true love nonetheless, since we're limited.

If I were to choose one of these extremes though, I'd rather choose true love, for it would decrease the chances of harming others and or create superfluous problems.