What is this thing called Love?

I'm not asking a rhetorical question. It seems love means different things to different people. It often seems love is indescribable. For some, it's a feeling of floating on air. Others say being in love gives a person a certain glow that others readily notice.

Check out these quotations on love:

• Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it...It really is worth fighting for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more." - Erica Jong
• "Sometimes love is stronger than a man's convictions." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
• "Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness." - Oliver Wendell Holmes
• "Love stretches your heart and makes you big inside." - Margaret Walker
• "Love has no awareness of merit or demerit; it has no scale... Love loves; this is its nature." - Howard Thurman
• "Love is like war: Easy to begin but hard to end." - Anonymous
• "Where love is, no room is too small." - Talmud
• "Loves makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place." - Zora Neale Hurston
• "Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired." - Mark Twain
• "Love is more than three words mumbled before bedtime. Love is sustained by action, a pattern of devotion in the things we do for each other every day." - Nicholas Sparks
• "To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven." - Karen Sunde
• "A love song is just a caress set to music." - Sigmund Romberg
• "Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit." - Peter Ustinov
• "Love is like a violin. The music may stop now and then, but the strings remain forever." - unknown
• "Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence." - Erich Fromm
• "Love doesn't make the world go round, love is what makes the ride worthwhile." - Elizabeth Browning

Many people are afraid of love and therefore don't seek it or even run from what looks like it might grow into love.

Even others say there really is no such thing as true love. No such thing as a true soulmate.

Still others say that "love hurts." That, perhaps, is the saddest comment of all to me. It causes me to ask, "if it hurts, is it really love?"

In the movie, The Firm, Tom Cruise's wife tells him: I loved you before I knew you. Even before I knew you, there was the hope of you. Call me a hopeless or hopeful romantic, but I absolutely love this concept. I like the idea that we know what love means to us and that the challenge is to find the person who fulfills that promise, that hope.

I'm learning that perhaps we enter new relationships asking ourselves "Is this the one?" Instead, I suspect (because I certainly don't have all or necessarily any of the answers) we should learn to let relationships happen, follow a natural course, instead of trying to force the relationship, or the person, into who we want it or them to be. I'm talking about a kind of live in the moment mentality. I strongly believe that what will be, will be.

I love the quote from Elizabeth Browning:

Love doesn't make the world go round, love is what makes the ride worthwhile.-



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