It’s 3 a.m. and the phone rings. It could only be one person because everyone else knows not to call her this late. “Hello,” she answers. “I’m coming over, I can’t stop thinking about you,” the boy on the other end replies. “I went to bed six hours ago. Don’t be ridiculous, there’s no way I’m letting you in.” He cuts her off, “But I love you baby!” She angrily replies, “If you loved me, you wouldn’t only call me at three in the morning. You do not love me and I do not love you. What we had is over, stop calling me.” This is an example of what love is not. This is an example of what love is oftentimes confused as, lust. So, what is love? To Old Blue Eyes, “Love is a many-splendor thing.” To my best friend Sami, “Love is desperately needing someone, forgetting their flaws, being willing to give up things for them, craving them, trusting them with your life, being completely satisfied.” To Megan Robinson, another friend of mine, “Love means having someone you can always count on, someone that you couldn’t imagine life without.” To her, “Love is a way to define how you feel about a person.” But to me, what we call “love” comes in multiple forms: the love of a friendship, the love of family and true love, which can be the most deceiving and hardest to define of them all.
Sometimes it is easier to define what something isn’t, rather than trying to define what it is. Of course, there is always the “Websters’ defines this as that,” definition, but that’s boring and no matter what Websters’ says, each individual is going to have his or her own definition of certain words; love is one of those words. When thinking of what love is not, the interesting story of Henry VII and his six wives is always the first thing that comes to mind. Catherine of Aragon was the first of Henry’s six wives. He divorced her to marry Anne Boleyn in 1533, the woman who he had obvious desire for during his marriage to Catherine. Unfortunately for Anne, after not producing a male heir, Henry decided that he’d had enough of her and had her beheaded on false adultery charges. After Anne Boleyn, Henry married Jane Seymour who gave him his long-awaited male heir, but sadly, died doing so. After Jane was another Anne, Anne of Cleves, whose marriage to Henry for political reasons only lasted a few months. Henry’s fifth marriage to Katherine Howard was short too. It only lasted eighteen months before she was found guilty of High Treason and executed with two of her lovers. Henry’s sixth and final wife was Ms. Katherine Parr who was Queen of England from 1543 to Henry’s death in 1547. A man who goes through six marriages to six very different women clearly does not know what love is. No man would have the woman he “loved” charged with adultery and beheaded just because she could not produce a male heir. It’s very sad that she had to die for that reason, especially since it is the male that determines the sex of the child. Love is not getting married six times, love is not executing one’s wife, and love is not marrying for political reasons. Another example of what love is not is the couple that is in an “open relationship” because the two parties love each other but don’t want anything too serious at the present time. This is just an excuse for one person or the other to have their cake and eat it too, which is selfish and definitely not love. This is an example of what love is repeatedly confused as, lust.
Two feelings that are oftentimes confused are love and lust. Love is “a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.” Lust is “intense sexual desire or appetite.” Nowhere in the definition of love is anything sexual mentioned. A prime example of lust is in the movie Match Point. In the movie, Jonathan Rhys Meyer’s character, Chris Wilton, is married to Emily Mortimer’s character, Chloe Hewett Wilton. Not long into his marriage, Chris runs into his brother’s ex-fiancé, Nola Rice, who he’d always been attracted to and even fooled around with during her engagement to his brother. After learning that she’s moved back to London, Chris starts talking to and sleeping with Nola behind his wife’s back. Throughout the affair, Chris tells Nola that he loves her and that he is going to leave his wife, but it never happens. Instead, Chris ends up murdering Nola, getting away with it by staging the murder as a robbery, and going back to his wife. Another example of lust is sex. “Sex is not love! Our culture teaches us that sex and love are one in the same. This is a lie.” Sex is not in the definition of love, but it is in the definition of lust, so when talking about feelings that are based solely on sexual desire, one should not label them as love, but as lust instead.
There are three forms of love: love of friendship, love of family, and true love. When thinking about the multiple forms of love, the first one that comes to mind is the love of friendship. The love of a friendship is always having each others’ back, being okay with opposing opinions, being there for each other no matter what. Love of friendship is exemplified in Jason Roll’s short story titled “Love is Watching Someone Die.” The second form of love is the love of family. As my mother said, “Love of family is complete, unconditional love. You love them regardless of faults and you would sacrifice anything to protect them.” A great example of sacrificing anything to protect family would be in the book The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult when Daniel Stone tries to take the fall for Trixie, his daughter, who is arrested as a suspect in the murder of her ex-boyfriend, Jason. The third and final form of love is the hardest of them all to define because it is so rare, true love. Ann Chrisman, a friend of mine, defined true love perfectly. She said, “You know when you’re in love when you never want to sleep because your reality is finally better than your dreams. Love is being there for someone at any given time, no matter what is going on, and making sacrifices for them. To me, love is not judgmental or superior. Love is that spark when you kiss that person and it is the feeling when you can’t stop smiling or thinking about that person. It is also that unbearable feeling that overwhelms you when you think its all going to disappear.” An example of true love would be the song “So Much” by The Spill Canvas. Wanting to die in the arms of one’s significant other is the definition of true love.
It’s 3 a.m. and she’s been asleep for hours but he’s just getting ready to go to bed. He curls up beside her, wraps his arms around her, kisses her on the cheek and tells her he loves her. She rolls over and says that she loves him too. He then asks, “Can I keep you forever?” and she sleepily replies, “There’s nothing I’d like more.” This is an example of true love, but there are many things that love is not, lust being one of them. Love comes in three forms: love of friendship, love of family, and true love.
