what is love is it a stupid rip off for people to get in your pants? a overwhelming feeling? the need to be with somone the rest of your life? or jsut somthing people say to each other?

to me its a definat rip off. how about you?

I sympathise with you. One day I'm sure you'll find it.
As to what love is, I can't say. I love my girlfriend deeply, but I couldn't put into words what exactly it is I feel. A combination of a lot of things really. I put her welfare and happiness above my own, I love talking with her and being with her, I want to make her happy... I don't know. As Freud said, love is the province of the poets.

Love can be depressing at times but once you find love it's sure to be the best feeling in the world---untill something ruins it

It's indescribable, it's everything, the happiness, sadness, the want, the need and everything you feel when you're with that one person. You just know what it is when you find it and even then you wouldn't be able to put what you're feeling into words.

yea--- but it still bites.

I'm sorry, but I've really got to disagree with you there. I've found someone who I love and who loves me and I've never been happier. I feel complete and don't think I could comprehend life without him.

i have a boyfriend and i'm really happy too but still sometimes it bites.

love is fleeting, fragile, and takes you by surprise. i'm not sure whether i believe in romantic love or not, but if it exists, i know i'm scared of it.

i dotn really belive in love i belive in infatuation and desire but other then that i think its just a sham

Nope... love isn't a sham. It's kinda hard to describe really... it's that feelin that ya want to be with someone... that ya don't wanna be apart from them... knowin that someone is there an cares, an that ya care about them too... that the person ya love is the most important person in the world an matters more than anythin else... knowin ya can spend time wi that person an have that companionable silence... comin home from work an feelin a thousand times better fer seein their face, an givin them a hug...

I could go on an on an on... but trust me, it DOES exist, an when ya find it, it's great!

I know love exists. I know I've been in love. I know that there are different types of love. I just don't know how to explain love. It's just one of those things that is different for everyone, and may be different for every person that a single person loves.

Love: the basic reciprocation of emotions, thaught, and learning processes between individuals, taken to a potential brink beyond which other candidates disappear ...

Notes:
1 it easier to fall in than out ...
2 its nice
3 I recommend it

I definitely believe in love.... but I wouldn't know how to describe it....

I agree with a lot of what was already said though (such as caring about that person more than anything else in the world, putting that person's welfare first, always wanting to be with that person, etc....). I think the word love is used to describe a collection of thoughts and feelings that all come together.

It's more than just a feeling. The Greeks had two forms of love: eros (romantic love) and agape (friendship-type love). All love stars out as agape. With certain people (where there is a 'reward', if you will) there can be eros intertwined with agape. The feelings only go so far, though. There comes a point where it becomes a choice. Love is as much of an action as a feeling. Case in point: My friend Harmonie and I were engaged. She broke the engagement (the eros) off. I was hurt, but I had to choose to love (the agape) her anyway. True love, I believe, is the ultimate fusion of eros and agape and I believe that, though it is rare, it exists.

i always though that love was a trick your body plays on you to keep reproducing. we gotta keep making more people, yknow? but i guess if a man can fall in love with a man and a woman can fall in love with a woman, maybe its a little more than reproduction.

Love, i have experienced it in different degrees growing up. Theres love for family, love on your crush and love for the person you know you are going to spend the rest of your life with...the last one I have

Love can have darksides, but they come natural as a process to learn from one's mistakes whether your own or someon else's.

love was great for me...then it turned around and stabbed me in the back...ive never had good luck with it since...well if ya dun count kevin
i have to say that for me so far love has sucked...
but yanno...you dont meet your soulmate in a rundown public school in the middle of nowhere....

meh....love is a messed up thing

There is no such thing as love. Just people reaching out into the beyond...grabbing onto the one thing that won't turn their backs on them. Love is a game and love is dumb. We're alone in the world and the universe and we refuse to believe it so as soon as something ANYTHING shows interest, we grab hold of it so we don't die alone. That's all it is. Love is a fairy tale and does not truly exist. It's impossible for love to exist in our world.

Love has recently plowed me over with a steam roller, as some of my closer pals on the forums have heard.

Hey kids, it burns. But I knew that when I was getting into it, so my dramatic smashing and beating that love gave me was plainly accepted. Hey, he ended up ditching everyone else, I knew I was somewhere on that list as well. What is it? In my experience, complete and utter devotion and affection for another person. There's a difference between loving and being IN love with someone. Though they don't go with their respective names, I use I love you for very, very close friends, and being IN love with someone for.. that person, you know? Call me odd, but I'm not horribly bitter towards love from this. Half of me thinks he'll come back, because I was so sure about there being a future after these four years we've had, and the other half is weeding out the next candidate. So is life, I suppose.

Cheers, Venus. You're a funny cow.

For me it's not because someone else burned me. I've been burned many many many times. But that's not it for me. Love does not truly exist. Love is just another brilliant idea we've come up with to justify this evolution that we live. People think love is wonderful when they are IN love and with someone else. But I've been IN love and even then I realize it's pathetic and stupid. There is no real god either, and I only say that because its another form of love. The only god and the only love there really is...is the stuff within you.

That's what love IS. It's just an emotion. That would be like saying sadness, happiness, anger, feelings like that didn't exist. Though actual love is far more rare, it's quite the same as any one of those, and very real simply because a collective of people have experienced this feeling. As for it being stupid, I'll now apply the phrase - whatever floats your boat. I myself like to keep myself a relatively happy human being, and having love for someone else manages to do that for me. Nothing pathetic or stupid with being fully content.

All emotion is nothing more then a figment of our imagination. We do things and we are certain things and we blame it on emotion. Emotion is our Jesus Christ and we are the masses of Isreal. Who I am is Longinus. There should be no emotions. Love is killing us. Depression is killing us. Happiness is killing us because thats all we want and we cannot achieve it. Society surely likes to put words to things and thats all emotions are.

Emotion is a figment of a creature's imagination, very true. However, there's nothing we can really do about our bodies and our minds having been conditioned this way. Animals feel emotion as well, maybe not love, but they have shown sadness and things of that nature. Since there's nothing to do about HAVING emotions, we're given two options. Block it out completely and become emotionally baron, or accept it and live like the rest of the world. I myself see nothing wrong with accepting different emotions, they're something to work through, and they do make life a bit more entertaining with its flavourful ups and downs from the day's events.

If those are my options I'd rather cut myself off from them at all. It's a lot better that way, believe me.

Hey, to each his own. Whatever makes life easier for you is best. Of course, I've gone with the latter.. I'd be very much gray if I were to lack all emotion in every form. Not quite sure if it's possible.

I personally REALLY respect and even downright ENVY that. I've tried so hard to accept "normal" emotions and live those but it's impossible for me. With what I've said it's only how *I* feel. I personally don't wish that on anyone else.

In that case, I really hope some day that you're able to handle them on a day-to-day basis. I myself like to use my ADD to kill off any emotion I find particularly unpleasnt.

That type of thing does not happen for a person like me, Syuu. I personally wish the best on every single person here, but with me...it's different. Emotion should be killed, stripped, and taken away. It's the best way.

I'll leave it at that, then. I can't help but wish the best on you as well. That truly must be an awful feeling, or lack thereof.

That's a very sad thing to say, prince...

I personally think the emotional rollercoaster can get a bit much too, but if ya never experience the low, ya can never truly appreciate the high. I suffer emotionally an physically in a crappy job, purely cos I need the money... but I know that I appreciate the time with me wife a whole lot more, plus I know I'll enjoy me next job even more knowin I won't be sufferin there any more...

I know I'm apt to fall in love a bit too easily (I'm a fool fer it!) an I've been burned lotsa times... but I stuck it out, an now I truly believe I found it. I reckon everyone can find it, but from my experience I'd say jus don't look fer it - let it find you! If I'd been lookin, I'd definitely have missed her...

Leo I know exactly what you're saying. I was the same way. But for me, it's not because I've been burned. I've stopped being burned because I cut off all those emotions. And things don't hurt anymore. That's the only point I was really trying to make......in a round a bout way I guess. I'm really bad at making points ^^;

It's funny.. I can tell you exactly what love isn't. I can tell you all the little things that make up love, but I can't tell you exactly what love is. Being in love and loving someone, and having those feelings returned, is probably the best feeling in the world. It's hard to find.. it's harder to keep.. but I guess I just have to believe that eventually it will happen..

i've been reading this for awhile and trying to think of something to say to aries....quite unsuccessfully, i might add.

i just find it so...sad...that someone so young has given up on feeling anything. myself, i can't control my emotions that way.....i can't even keep from crying if someone hurts my feelings at 21 years old, lol.

but to say love isn't real....i dunno that just.....baffles me, quite honestly. i just can't understand that. and to say that you don't fall in love anymore....it's just been my experience that the heart decides what it wants, and won't be governed. you can fall in love w/ someone, even though you know they are completely unattainable and you'll never be able to be with them. you don't want to fall in love with this person, but it happens anyway, and then there you are in an impossible situation.

but, maybe i'm just an overly-emotional person. if cutting everything off works for you, then that's good, aries. i just can't imagine a life without feeling anything. what's the point, then?

Because it's better then anything else I personally have ever known, Candice. As much as I may sometimes "think" I want love or that I understand it...it's not true. With the experiences I've had and just the way I view the world, it just makes a lot more sense to cut everything off because there is ZERO point in my trying to love.

Then don't try... an when it happens, jus go with it!

I think a lot o people try too hard to love, or confuse it with other stuff. Love shouldn't require lots of effort, it should just be.

Now the entire relationship, that needs work... but with love there it's worth it.

I used to try but once I stopped and moved based it, everything I've said here is the result.

it's evil!

but it's nice when it happens and is true. but it rarely works out for me...

I still think Love sucks sometimes-- well i'm obviously the depressed one here.. so while you think of happy things i'll just go in a corner and cry...

personally i have never been in love -the partner type- but i have been infatuated with people. that is why i have came to the conclusion that i am one of those people who are supposed to stay single. "love" is just another thing that was'nt included in my genetic make-up. sometimes i think that i am missing out on something, but at others i think that i'm lucky because i can do what i want without having to consult with anyone.

I've been reading this with interest, and the one thing that no one's really said about love is fear. Not the fear of sexual abuse, but the fear that's linked to wanting or needing one person more than you need anyone else. Many people have said how great it is to walk home from work and see the person they love, how they know that person knows them more intimately than anyone else, how they can't imagine life without them, but surely there must be fear in there somewhere - the fear of that person leaving them, the fear that one day they'll come home from work and look at that person and not feel anything, the fear that one person knows you more than perhaps you even know yourself. To be honest that scares the crap out of me.

I think I'm with Aries on this one - I don't believe in love. For me. Yes I've been infatuated by people, but not in love. I love my friends and my family, but I rarely use the word. To me, love smacks of being tied down, of having boundaries and limitations enforced on you, of losing your individuality. It probably says more about me than it does about anyone else to say that those things are the things I fear the most, and so I don't want to be in love. I don't want the quiet complacency of routine, of settling down in front of the tv, of comfortable silences. I don't want to be in love because it scares me.

I think that love can work for some people - for faeries and leo it obviously does, but I don't think that it would work for me. It's bad enough for me being in a relationship with someone because I want to jump out before it gets too serious, before I get hurt. Imagine me being in love then - the whole thing would be made up of me alternating between wanting to be with that person every day and not wanting to be with them at all. For me, I think the idea of getting hurt is enough to make me want to avoid the whole thing, regardless of whether the months or years of happiness would be worth the hurt at the end. A weak and stupid outlook? Quite possibly, and I'll happily admit that, but I think by nature I'm happier being single...I should really tell my boyfriend this at some point!

Some people like bein part of a couple, the cosy niceness of it all... such rapturous contentment an yet I find it so conformist an joyless. I've never been one for contentment, I think it's a compromise. What ya describe there is what I see in relationships, an one time I woulda agreed wholeheartedly!

But... that said, my relationship with me wife isn't about boundaries, or contentment, or limitations. We both recognise we are free spirits, with our own needs an desires (selfish as they may be) an we give each other the space an time to be ourselves. The difference bein that we choose to be together. I dunno... but it works fer us. In fact, a lot o people really envy us cos we're happy as a couple.

Something I know too well. Hell I love Kiefer right? lol (1st sentence true, 2nd a joke)

i know i'm terrified of that happening. i got hurt once because i fell even harder for my ex after he broke up with me, and he never knew. my current boyfriend was telling me how much he cared about me, and although he never used the word love, i just got this nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach and wanted to run. i know exactly what you mean about being torn between wanting to be with someone all the time and wanting to hide from it.

Love......


Butterflys and tears

The greatest feelings in the world

and the worst feelings in the world.

love sucks... stay away at all costs....
sorry just a bit bitter today.

You and me both ravein. *hands you the bottle of vodka*

*swipes the bottle of vodka*

me join in please? ned to get seriously pissed.

Absolutely, Wolf. Let's go.

woot!!

*gulps down some vodka and hands the bottle back to aries*

I've put some thought into love and what it is in the past, mainly because i've experienced it, in all its splendour, then had my soul ripped away... but ya dun want to hear about that, so on to the topic in hand.

Love, is not an emotion, it's a catalyst. Emotions are singular, they very rarely cause other emotions with such a consistency and ferocity as love does, fear, jealousy, happiness, sadness, depression, euphoria, love cause all of these and more, many simultaneously. A feeling of familiarity, and companionship so strong that one would be willing to spend ones life with the subject of said affection, a sense of utter relaxation of self that one is truly able to let go and be themselves without fear of rejection, those and more inspire love, love inspires emotion, and the emotion gives those who feel it a truly incredible sense of peace.

On the same subject, fear of loss is understandable, but no-one fears losing the person, they fear losing the emotion the person inspires, if their was a way to be truly in love without their partner, many people would embrace it.

Love can save lives, love can destroy them, love can change people for better and for worse, no singular emotion can do this, hence why love is a catalyst for emotion, and not an emotion in its own right.