The Haddaway

To be or not to be? That is not the question. What is love? Now that is the question.

[WARNING: This post does not contain any information about video games and to some the idea may be mushy, stupid, or lame. For those people, just don't read on. For others, feel free, and I encourage you to post comments, questions, answers, anything to help me with this question. You've now been given fair warning.]

Lately, thanks to joining [OkCupid.com] and answering over 100 questions in order to improve my matches with people, that answer has definitely kicked around my head. Speaking as a scientist, love (according to science) is the result of chemicals being released in your brain which is done via certain stimuli, generally another person. It has nothing to do with your heart (except that it makes it beat a little faster). Speaking as a philosopher, well I don't really know what to tell you there because I'm not a philosopher. I honestly don't know how to describe the concept of love, and unfortunately neither does Haddaway.



I've been trying to define what this feeling is meant to be for me personally. I may have narrowed it down to one thing: having your faith in another person completely rewarded. That's probably not nearly as romantic as things we may see in movies like You've Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, or Love Actually. I'd like to consider myself to be a relatively trusting person, which is probably why that is the driving force behind this definition, but as of late my faith in humanity has been on edge. My friends are amazing, and 99.8% of the time, my faith in them is rewarded which is awesome, hence I love them.

So maybe this definition needs to be tweaked in order to get it right for the whole "happily ever after" scenario people think of when the word love is uttered. Maybe it should be: having your faith completely rewarded and feeling fulfilled emotionally. That doesn't really seem perfect either, but I think I'm getting closer. My first definition was more like philia, the Greek word for brotherly love (Philadelphia), and this one kind of tacks on eros a bit. Not so much lust in the dangerous biblical sense, but passion for someone else, a longing fulfilled. Okay I may be getting way to into this so I'm going to leave this as it is. What do you think? What is love?

Musicians have been trying to capture this for centuries and I haven't been able to really hear anything that encompasses it all. Movies have the same problem. You'll encounter love stories that just aren't close enough to anything your real life, or it is, but the circumstances still make it too different to really equate the two. Now, movie soundtracks definitely can sometimes wrap up as much emotion that may actually be involved in the concept of love, for example: 500 Days of Summer. While this movie is not strictly a love story, both the film and the music really bring all those feelings to the surface and it brings something else into the picture that I haven't considered yet, hope. I'm not going to spoil the movie for anyone if you haven't seen, but I highly recommend it. Anyway, love does have some component that requires hope, which brings me back to faith. Maybe its that once you truly find love, you don't really need hope anymore because your faith is being rewarded and returned, where as if there is doubt, then hope comes in. You hope that this is the right person, when if it is true love (if there is such a thing, and I'm not saying there is) then you shouldn't have to hope, you'll know.

Well, I guess I'm a bit of a hopeless romantic underneath this technologically-guarded geek exterior. I don't really deny that at all, but its definitely not directly on the surface. And I know that not everyone is going to agree with me here, in fact maybe no one will, but I think that's perfectly fine. Everyone has their own definition of love, or rather what they are looking for which maybe at some point down the road they may consider calling it that. The key is Ven and his diagram. As long as you and whoever you want to spend the rest of your life with fall within that shaded region on your Ven diagrams then I think you'll be fine.

Dream on.

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