What Love Is

Young couples anticipating marriage today are frequently confused in trying to determine whether or not they are in love because there are so many definitions available. This is particularly critical in the U.S. because the majority of Americans will not marry, and will not stay married, until they both love and feel loved by their mate.

Love, therefore, becomes a prerequisite for and a necessity in marriage. I have found that those who try and divine love fall into three general categories: the cynics, the humorists, and the philosophers.

First the cynics, Plato described love as “a grave mental disease,” and it was Thomas Carlyle who noted that “Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common there with.” Helen Rowland simply described love as “woman’s eternal spring and man’s eternal fall.”

And according to John Barrymore, love is “the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.”

Next we have the humorists. “Love,” said Samuel Johnson, “is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.” George Bernard Shaw defined love as “the gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.”

“Love is like the measles,” said Josh Billings. “We can have it but once, and the later in life we have it, the tougher it goes with us.” H. L. Mencken thought love to be “the delusion that one woman differs from another.”

Still another author, unknown, defined love as “one hormone system calling to another.” Other anonymous definitions of love are “an intoxication of the nervous system,” “triumph of imagination over intelligence,” and “a process that turns a young woman’s frog into a prince.”

Then we have the philosophers. Alphonse Karr wrote of love, “It is the most terrible, and also the most generous of passions: it is the only one which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.” The poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, “Love withers under constraint; its very essence is liberty; it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear.”

On a similar philosophical note Henry Ward Beecher said of it, “Love is the river of life in this world. Think not that ye know it who stand at the little tinkling rill, the first small fountain. Not until you have gone through the rocky gorges, and not lost the stream; not until you have gone through the meadow, and the stream has widened and deepened until the fleets could ride upon its bosom; not until beyond the meadow you have come to the unfathomable ocean and poured your treasures into its depths – not until then can you know what love is.”

It really does not matter how many definitions of love there are. What matters is the meaning two people in love assign to the words. For some “I love you” means I want to be with you, or I am attracted to you. It may mean I want to control you, or I trust you. In some instances “I love you” means I want to be intimate with you, or I want to share your money with you, or finally, it may mean I am deeply committed to you.

It is this last meaning that has significance for me . . . I am committed. Too frequently we think of love only as an emotion which, if it were, our attraction or attachment to our spouse would be dependent on the variation of whatever is felt. A couple cannot live in a a marriage on one continual, euphoric, emotional high.

If love is perceived as a commitment, it will survive ulcers, the absence of make-up, wrinkles, gray hair or even baldness. Love will then withstand the variation in weight loss or gain and will not be measured by inches around the girth or numerically as one weighs on the scales each day.

Defining love as a commitment will allow it to endure the emotional highs and lows in marriage. Perhaps that is what most wedding vows imply when we marry “in sickness and in health . . . for better or for worse.” When the “sickness” and the “worse” parts of marriage come, the relationship will survive because we are still committed to each other. That, indeed, is true love.