Nearly always misrepresented. Poets use it and teenagers whisper it to their bedroom posters. Lovers embrace it magazines print it and somewhere right now someone is telling their pet that they love them.
How can it mean so many different things to so many different people? It is of course just an emotion that we try and describe and there are many variables. You don’t love your family in exactly the same way as you love your partner. You don’t love your pet in the same way that you love your job. Its all the same word but with a hundred different meanings.
As a writer and dare I say a poet then I give a lot of thought to this as I always want to portray the right meaning to anything I create, but its difficult as am I only pushing my own feelings across instead of the fictional character I write about? Is it true that I appear in all my work?
It is true that some people use the word far more than others and I do think that this dilutes the meaning to them. These tend to be people that only see the good in people and of course that is misguided as the universe and everything in it is a perfect balance of negative and positive. Awareness is everything. If you create a mound or a hill from a flat piece of ground then you must also create a hole at the same time. Negative and positive feeds off the other and are always balanced.
My probem with love is well my own problem I guess, as I will always remember my ex partner telling me that she loved me but was not in love with me so that kind of set a measuring point in my head from there on in. Also I am very aware of those people that seem to love everyone they meet. These people are the ones that tend to either be a bit naive or at least are misguided and I think it is more likely to be younger people although it happens with more mature people too. They form what they believe to be deep relationships very quickly and often long before they get to know the real person. Be wary of this as that love is normally unfounded and they tend to get hurt more than most because they often jump into a physical relationship very quickly too, which leads to pain when one of them realises it was not for them as their true personality and needs get revealed . These types of people often repeat this behaviour many times.
I think love to me is when my every waking moment is centred around that person, when I know I would put my life on the line to protect them. When my heart beats faster in their presence and when just being beside them is enough. This love can only come when you have got to know the real person and has to go way beyond attraction or sex.
Love can conquer distance and time and it can be at a more powerful level than most of us can understand. Energy can call to energy although it has to be balanced but I think I would describe true love as when two energies grow together over time and merge. Both people keep their identies but feel incomplete without the other in their lives.
Andy