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What is love between a man and a woman?

Proverbs 30:18-19.

The use of the term "virgin" is to emphasize her nubility, not her lack of sexual experience, i.e. "the way of a (young) man with young woman."

To me, that seems to be the same question as the title of the thread, just asked about 3,000 years earlier.
 
For me it is an emotion I guess. And it isn't something you do or try to do. It just happens. And if you are very lucky it happens to the other person at the same time. And your brains turn to jello and you become very stupid... together.

Barbie-and-Ken-toy-story-3.webp
 
Never been in love ever and I don't believe in love in first site. If anything it's one way we're you want to love her but she don't care about you.
 
I've had a few loves over the years, though not many relationships. At first, I thought that love was losing myself in another person, but I've learned through the experience of feeling regard for another that loving (as I feel it, at least), is a combination of knowing oneself and accepting it, so one can know another and accept them.

There have been moments where an unrequited love has felt like dying, and others where it has felt painful but almost like waking up out of a dream and seeing the other person clearly for the first time, and yourself as well, because love is an outgrowth of self-knowledge. It's liberating to feel enough caring towards someone that what you really want between you and another are truths of self, even if those truths don't lead to happily ever after. It's still the truth of who you both are, and that in itself is lasting and extremely meaningful.

Granted, I am not in relationship now, nor have I been for some years. It's very taxing for me and the toll it takes feels like too much at present. But one hopes that enough inner swirling will settle that there will be bandwidth for another.

In the meantime, however, there is still oneself to explore and accept.
 
To me, it seems like something everyone in the world experiences in some fashion, except me. That’s really all I know, is that whatever it is, I appear to be incapable of feeling it.
 
One thing I have trouble with is the notion that sex is love. To me, it is not. I've experienced sex. Yet I really don't enjoy it. Intimacy is everything to me. The deep personal connection that another shares with me is the most beautiful thing. The look from my infant son to me when he was only 15 minutes old was the deepest and beautiful thing I've ever known. This is love.
 
yuginot said:
One thing I have trouble with is the notion that sex is love. To me, it is not. I've experienced sex. Yet I really don't enjoy it. Intimacy is everything to me. The deep personal connection that another shares with me is the most beautiful thing. The look from my infant son to me when he was only 15 minutes old was the deepest and beautiful thing I've ever known. This is love.
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Its sappy crap like that which I will never experience that I also hear from my cousins who experienced love. I accepted it years ago that I will never experience love, but I had a little hope until the shutdown March 20th for Covid crap and that ended any hope. But someone got engaged through that so my pity to them which I don't want to hear.
 
Love is caring for another person/creature/activity/thing/abstract concept enough that you allow it into your definition of self. When you lose a love suddenly, it is like having a part of yourself amputated. When you lose your love slowly, you may not even notice until it is all gone.

The Greeks divided love into many subtypes. Eros is love predominated by sexual desire. Philia is friendship, which they considered a kind of love. Agape is love for humanity and love for God, both very abstract concepts. Storge is love based on the degree of relationship. This is familial love but can be abstracted out to larger groupings such as my city, my country, or those who share my ideology. Mania is obsessive or oppressive love. Ludus is a strong affection between two people, absent sexuality. Pragma is realistic love, knowing the other person's flaws and strengths and making compromises, and having patience and tolerance. When the Friar counsels Romeo and Juliette against letting themselves be overwhelmed with passion - eros - he also counsels them to "Love moderately, because long love doth so." That is pragma. Philautia is self-love. The Greeks did not believe that one could really love another unless one loved oneself first.

There are probably other Greek words describing other variations on the theme of love that I don't have here. But I think they have it right in that love is not a single thing but a wide spectrum of feelings.
 
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