L is for Love (again)

L is for Love (again)

I am specifically not going to look at last year’s post on Love because I want to see later if my thoughts have changed.

I vaguely remember putting about different kinds of love, such as love for family, friends, pets, humanity/life in general and romantic as all being different, and I still adhere to that.

What I’m not as sure about anymore is that these kinds of love are actually as umbrella like as I first thought.

I regarded love as going like this:

                                                                                                Love
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|                                 |                                         |                                       |                                        | 
Friends                 Family                             Life                                    Romantic                          Pets

Type thing, when really now I have two possible models.

The first being a spectrum type love with Hatred at one end and then romantic love at the other, then loving humanity, friends, family etc all come on different points on the spectrum, and this could explain messed up versions of these feelings such as paedophilia, Bestiality and Incest.

I also thought of the possibility of love being a pyramid rather than a scale. So here we would have love for all life forms at the bottom, then just above that love for specific life forms such as pets, then love for friends, then love for family and finally romantic love.

This model also allowed for the sick twisting of love and for a kind of inverted model for hate.

This model also makes it slightly easier to see how each one builds up, as in my experience you have to love already on the previous step before you can really love on the next tier.

The problem with all of this of course is how do you define love, can you actually set such rigid parameters on love. A second objection would probably be on my inclusion of taboo areas, are they love?

I suppose again that depends on the definition. If love is simply a chemical reaction in your brain that leads to a sensation or the ‘emotion’ then I suppose they would count, but thankfully society has declared these kinds of love as wrong and perverted.

I do think that love is probably more than just one single emotion though, it is probably a whole host of different emotions working in unison (or possibly more likely, in conflict).

I find it hard to pin point this particular feeling down to descriptive words, they never seem adequate enough, does that suggest there is still more to it?

DFTBA