What is Love, do you really know?
The next part of my Loving Myself series is looking at that word LOVE. The main problem in talking about the concept of love is that the word love has too many uses. People love their sweeties, their phones, the pizza that’s delivered to the house and, yeah on some occasions, will even admit to loving their parents and siblings. So, is any of that love? Valentine’s Day isn’t any help either. Love is equated with the gushy sentiment, or having hot sex, or those pledges of eternity.
How might we talk about love in a way that makes it easier to understand and helps people figure out whether they’re feeling love or not?
One way I’ve started to consider this is looking at three aspects of what might be called love:
Romance
Romance maximizes the emotional aspects of an act or a relationship. It seeks to create feelings of desire, affection, caring, and being in love. You know that bubbly feeling that softens our heart and allows our own gentleness and tenderness to flow in the starting steps of a relationship is NRE.
Intimacy
Intimacy maximizes the connective aspects of an act or relationship. It seeks honesty, openness, closeness, deeper understanding, and connection with a partner.
And Sex
Sex maximizes the physical aspects of an act or relationship. It seeks bodily sensation and pleasure both from and for the partner and, by the way, this can be accomplished by a lot more than intercourse.
Romance joins our hearts; intimacy joins our brains, and sex joins our bodies. So taking these three into consideration, romance, intimacy, and sex yields eye-opening results.
Let’s think about kissing,
So you can really break down our way of thinking and look at our actions think about texting, online interactions, intercourse, and oral sex through those three. How do they look? Does everything fit into every category? What is it like to be romantic or intimate – and does being sexual really fit in everywhere? How might these behaviors work at a party? What’s a romantic word? An intimate word? A sexual word? What gifts, movies, or songs might fall into each category?
Love is really a result of a combination of all of these factors. That combination will be different in each relationship, but remove romance, intimacy, or sex from the equation and what’s left probably isn’t love. Friends with benefits tend to have intimacy and sex but not romance. A hook up may have sex but lack romance and/or intimacy. Perhaps the elusive word “love” now seems a bit more concrete and accessible?
