What is Love?

We've always stumbled upon this particular question, "What is love?" far too many times. I'm sure we'd get a variety of answers ranging from "when I get this tingling feeling in my stomach" to "there is clearly a huge void when she's gone." Well, this question popped up in my Psychology lecture today and it sparked a barrage of questions in my head.

Love is truly a complicated thing. I'd be lying if I said I never experienced it. Honestly, albeit the obvious family bonds, I've never had a relationship with anyone where I could call it love. Those I believe stem from the likes of infatuation, lust, and puppy love. I think the closest I ever came to this is probably an event that took place just recently. However, I will not elaborate on my personal life.

In my IB English class during my senior year of high school, I recall my teacher Mr. McTernan a.k.a Macker-T who wisely said once that "there is passion in love, and the word passion comes from the latin word 'passio' meaning pain and suffering". This I find very true as in order to find love, we get hurt ever so often. Think carefully. When you were pursuing your love interest, how often do you suffer? How often were you feeling down? How often did your emotions depend on the person's actions? Then evaluate the ratio between the times you felt happy and the times you felt sad. It's obvious that the latter figure overwhelms the former.

Among the countless theories of love, there's this theory called "Sternberg's Theory of Love" which basically says that there is 2 kinds of love:

1) Passionate/Romantic Love - The state of intense longing for union with another
2) Companionate/Compassionate Love - Affection/tenderness for those whose lives are interdependent with own

Now there was a survey conducted based on these 2 types of love and the results were as follows. It showed that for passionate/romantic love, the intensity takes a decline over the years while companionate/compassionate love shows a gradual increase in intensity over the years. So good news and bad news. Those couples you see getting all touchy and disgusting will get bored of each other in the coming future. On the other hand, those couples who are less clingy will enjoy greater intensity and will eventually show signs of being touchy and disgusting. I guess I can understand that concept. I take the analogy of a video game. It just came out and I love it so much that I play it day and night. However after a while you get bored of it. The other one can be analogized with a pair of sneakers. You use it every now and then but never chuck it aside. Yes, I admit there are flaws in my analogies, and I already thought of many as I typed them out so just bear with me for trying to simplify things.

As of now, I'm still pushing on in my search for love. Well I'm not searching currently since I believe the time and person will just come one day. And no, I don't believe in destiny or any of those concepts for that matter.