The Nature of Love

If there is one thing everyone wants above all else--it's love. When you've got it, anything is bearable--sickness, poverty, failure. But when you don't have it, even money and power seem empty and unimportant. See, as human beings, we need love. We need someone to share our experience--that's what makes life meaningful.

But what is the nature of love?

Cambridge Dictionary defines love as "strong feelings of attraction towards, and affection for, another adult, or great affection for a friend or family member." Merriam-Webster Online describes it this way: "strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties." These are fairly adequate definitions, but they don't really suggest the magical aspects of love, the whirlwind, the metaphysical mysteries. Wikipedia does a little better, beginning its "love" entry like this: "Love is a constellation of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection or profound oneness."

Still, it leaves something to be desired. Fortunately, almost every writer, statesman, or comedian of note (ever) has chimed in with his or her own thoughts on the nature of love.

Aristotle said "Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies."

According to Ambrose Bierce, love is "a temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder."

Muda Saint Michael described love as "a mustard seed; planted by God and watered by men."

Geoffrey Chaucer said simply, "Love is blind."

R. Buckminster Fuller called love "metaphysical gravity."

Robert Frost said, "Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."

John Ciardi dismissed love as "the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old."

And Sebastian R.N. Chamfort bemoaned that "Love, such as it is in society, is only the exchange of two fantasies, and the contact of two bodies."

Sophocles disagreed, writing, "Love, unconquerable/Waster of rich men, keeper/Of warm lights and all-night vigil/In the soft face of a girl/Sea-wanderer, forest-visitor/Even the pure immortals cannot escape you/And mortal man, in his one day's dusk/Trembles before your glory."

Dorothy Fields praised love, calling it "the reason you were born."

But William Shakespeare declared "there is no evil angel but Love."

Pablo Neruda mused that "love is a voyage with water and a star/in drowning air and squalls of precipitate bran/love is a war of lights in the lightning flashes/two bodies blasted in a single burst of honey."

Ovid cautioned that "Love is a kind of warfare."

And Iris Murdoch suggested "love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."

Emma Goldman called love "the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny."

Ann Wuehler despaired "Once you love someone it's like cancer. It spreads and spreads until it eats you up."

And Matt Groening described love as "a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."

John Barrymore joked that "Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock."

D.H. Lawrence warned that "Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration."

But perhaps the deepest, most profound observation on love comes from American dramatist David Mamet who writes in Goldberg Street: "Love. My golly, it sells diapers, don't it!"

You've got us there, Dave. You've got us there.

Baudelaire Jones is the author of Dialogues of the Dead. For further reading on this subject, he suggests love quotations and love stories.