What is love? It's certainly not what the media tells you.

Eric and Kathryn on numerous trips.  Josh and Leanne are our children.

As a young man who was about to be married, I really wanted to understand what love was.  How is it possible to be in love, to love somebody, or to fall out of love?  Is the opposite of love hate?  I had been a Christian for about four years and was also trying to understand God's love for me, for all of mankind.  John 15:3 says, "There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends." (NLT)  Then there is showing love, making love, loving food or a thing, and feeling love.

What is love?

I have been married now for 37 years come July 16th of 2025.  I would like to think that I have it sorted out by now, well, enough from the perspective of a 64 year old man with 2 adult children and 2 grandchildren.  My thoughts are based on the years I have been on this earth and the challenges I have faced.

The first problem in understanding love is that we use one word to convey a sentiment with so many different meanings.  Look it up in an unabridged dictionary and you will find something like 22 different ways to use the term.  That's rather ambiguous.  Does "I love you" mean nothing, as in a tennis score, refer to something sensual, or maybe express great fondness for something like ice cream?

Another issue stems from the desire to interpret feelings in a meaningful way.  This is especially hard when there is no reference point; young people often face this dilemma.  The way one person feels about another may change throughout adolescence.  Love is hard enough to understand when you are my age, let alone when hormones get involved for the first time.

We use words to think, to problem solve, and to communicate.  The simple fact is that the word love is a messy term that attempts to corral the great, broad range of feelings and thoughts into something concrete and tangible.  How do you explain the colour blue to someone who has never had sight?  It's a simple concept if you can see, but that changes significantly once the sense of sight is removed.  Then there is the scientific explanation of colour where you can talk about the wavelengths of light and the frequency of a photon.  Expressing love in such a way would certainly rip the romance out of the notion.  Shakespeare always relied on his audience having a certain amount of experience with the subject; there was no need to define it.

The metaphor, "Love is a rose", is a good place to start to understand its nature.  Love changes over time, and although we see the mature bloom as the pinnacle of love, it is really about the end result, the seeds encased in the pod.  The pod protects the seeds from harm and cares for them until they can be released.  This oversimplifies what is going on, but it gives a broader understanding of how time is involved in what love is.

Love changes over time.  It is more than just one thing, sentiment, or emotion.  There are many components to it and evolves throughout the relationship.  The love of friendship.  The love of family.  The act of physical love, both platonic and sensual.  The love of being together and making each other stronger.  Pleasure, protection, passion, procreation.  If each could be measured at a moment in time, we would discover that they are not static variables.  What love looks like when you are 6, 16, and 60 is not the same.  It changes, and that's OK.  

True love (insert sound track from The Princess Bride here) requires sacrifice.  It protects, shows kindness, puts others first, and supports.  Although some may argue that hate is the antithesis of love, I believe it to be selfishness.  Mothers protect their children and most would willingly give up their lives to protect them.  That is love.  John from the bible had it right after all.  You have to lay down your life to truly love someone.  Really.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com