I recently completed a philosophy class at a local college. During my time attending the class our professor talked about love and gave us a definition that I really liked.
First of all, my professor talked about how our society has come to see love as a feeling or emotion, but he said that this is wrong. A reason he gave for this is that God commands us to love, but how could he command us to have a feeling or emotion? Also, if we think of love as a feeling it inevitably becomes very selfish.
Another thing he said is that love is an action. And his definition was: "Love is a commitment to treat people with dignity, kindness, and respect."
The last thing I want to share with you is how he talked about romantic love. He said that to love someone romantically you FIRST have to treat them with dignity, kindness, and respect. In addition, loving someone romantically is to unite with them spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, and eventually physically. It is a commitment to share yourself with the other in a way that you do with no one else to an extent that you do with no one else.
As I typed this up I was thinking about how different this definition is from the way our culture treats romantic relationships. Many people my age "date" very flippantly and I'm sure a lot of them have no concept of the commitment I talked about in the previous paragraph. I think that a lot of relationships are very selfish. So we need to be careful of this. In all of our relationships, whether romantic or between friends and family, we need to seek to serve the other person and treat them with dignity, kindness, and respect, always putting them before ourselves.
