Should it be the center of all that we are, or all that we try to be?
Love is a fundamental element of life that defines our very being. This is a very complicated concept to define, so cheers to you for extrapolating the question out as you have.
ASSUMPTION:
Each person's definition of love is unique according to thier life experiences and genetic programming.
In short, all people are somewhere on the continuum of:
"Not a Loving Person<------->Extremely Loving Person"
They types of love all of us can experience are more generalized (e.g. romantic, platonic, familial, etc.); the real variation comes in each person's (a) definition of each type of love they have, and (b) their implementation of love overall.
I have adapted my whole ideology about love. It used to be my mantra, so to speak, but now I think of it in an entirely new light.........
This I'd like to hear some day...
How do you think of love, in terms of where it comes from,
I believe as humans, we have love that is:
(A) spontaneously borne as a result of positive experiences (babies love their puppy dog because they are soft and nice and sweet, etc.) that occur throughout our lives, and also
(B) That love that is taught to us via being the recipient of another person's implementation of love (In other words, when someone treats us lovingly, and it affects us, and we appreciate it, and understand their motivation for doing so, we are thus empowered to wield that type of love later in our lives if we choose to).
The purpose of love is to serve as a vehicle for us to express our feelings for another entity, whether a person, place, or thing.
unconditional versus conditional love.
To me, unconditional love is implicit in (healthy) parent/child relationships, and relations among siblings.
Unconditional love in romantic/platonic relationships is a bit more difficult to conceptualize, because when a friend/partner does something hurtful, we are able to forgive them at some point, but we remember the pain, and the net effect of the experience (hurt, forgiveness, reconciliation, etc.) is a change in our overall perceptions of the person. Yes, we love them no matter what, but does that mean we will blindly allow negative behaviors to transpire on an on-going basis? No, hardly. At some point everyone wises up, and in some cases, it is necessary to love someone "unconditionally" but to never be in their proximity again. So, maybe unconditional love is not the right term for what I am trying to define here...hmmm....
Don't forget both sides of love when you respond.
Could you please elaborate on what you mean by "both sides of love?"
Do you mean giving/receiving it, or something else?
I can better reply to this section once I better know the context of what you are looking for...
Please don't launch into definitions of romantic love, like, "Love feels like being overtaken in all your senses." Other threads have already been devoted to that.
I promise I didn't try to do any of that.
CONCLUSION:
I am a very loving person, but I do not traverse the landscape of my life blindly loving everything. As one matures, it is necessary to learn disgression in how we implement our concept of love. What is appropriate, what is not, when things should be able to feel a certain way, why we should feel certain ways, when there is a need to have a sense of caution in giving/receiving love, etc.
We get better at loving, and at being loved through experience. That is why I feel badly for being that did not have an amount of love/nurture in their formative years that resulted in them having a healthy definition of love, and some good examples of how to potentially implement it later on. If a person doesn't have this base of knowledge, I feel it truly impacts how one will go about pursuing interpersonal relationships. Once someone is closed off and avoidant, it is that much harder for them to experience positive, loving experiences.
Finally, I think one very important concept that everyone should understand about love is this:
"It is impossible to love someone who does not love themselves.
If a person does not love themselves, then they are by definition unlovable.
They do not have the capacity to experience an emotion that they feel they are unworthy of receiving."
Once I understood the above, it made a whole lot more sense to me that
"you can't change people, people will only change when they are ready to, and at a time of their choosing."
REFLECTIONS:
Love is a precious resource. Unlike money, when you successfully express love your supply of it does not diminish, it actually grows, and the total amount of love in the world grows too. However, time is an extremely valuable resource too, and choosing to use one's time and other resources in the pursuit of expressing love to people that don't appreciate it, is a waste of one's overall life energy.
The point of love is to support positive, healthy, and happy experiences in life, so when people tell me how much they are hurting because of a lot of crazy dysfunctional shit going on in their lives, my first piece of advice is for them to make sure their definitions and concepts of love are appropriately and adequately defined. For if they are not, then it is very easy for a person to needlessly go through many cycles of various kinds of abuse, because unfortunately, to them, what they are experiencing is "love."
