Essay About Different Definitions Of Love And Different Forms Of Love

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Love (l v) n. deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a
person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense
of underlying oneness. A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with
whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance. (Websters
Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc). There are many
different definitions of love. To each person it is different, but most agree it is one of
the most important emotions to the each creature on this earth. There are also many
different forms of love. For instance, love for your family versus love for a mate. It
is still a mystery to most people why people do crazy things for love, or why people
feel love “conquers all”.
Definitions of love go as far as Greek mythology. For example, the story of Cupid
and His mortal Bride Psyche. There are many explanations on how love exactly came to
mean what it does. According to John Lee there are 6 different types of love. 1. Erotic
love: romantic, sexual irrational, and largely based on physical attraction. 2. Manic
love: intense, all consuming, possessive, and fluctuating between joy and despair.
3. Ludic love: egoistic, self-serving, competitive, and based on an unequal relationship
between one partner who is highly committed and another who is emotionally
uninvolved. 4. Pragmatic love: a rational, practical, fair exchange between two carefully
matched partners. 5. Storgic love: the companionate, stable love that emerges from a
relationship between friends. 6. Agapic love: the altruistic devotion of one partner for
the other. Many people have theories, but overall love is whatever the actual individual
perceives it to be.
Through the ages, thinkers and writers have attempted to solve the
mystery of love. Myths, poetry and novels have the longest history of recording the idea
of love. For example, the Sumerian and Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh goes back to 2000
BC, Egyptian love poetry was written on papyri and vases between 1300 and 1100 BC,
and Chinese folk love songs were first documented between 1000 BC and 700 BC.
Countless philosophers, from Plato to Martin Luther, from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to
Santayana and Sartre have also devoted their writings to conceptualizing love. Freud
looks at love from the perspective of the sexual drive. According to him, love as well as
sexuality is rooted in infancy (Freud, 1905). A persons first love object is the mother.
The mothers breast provides the infant not only with nourishment but also a source of
sexual pleasure which he will later on seek from his adult lover. (For girls, the object of
love somehow later becomes the father. Freud views adult love and sexuality as an
extension (or rediscovery) of their infantile forms. Believing that