Valentine’s Day is coming up this week, and as an excellent representative of the American commercial holiday it has a logo, metric tons of merchandising, and a simple theme: love. But is it so simple? “Love” is one of the most discussed and written-about notions around, and if you count popular music in the last century or so, when it began focusing on teenagers, maybe it’s the top of the top. But come on, what is it? It’s one of those questions that everybody can answer right away. And their answers will all differ. So does that mean that nobody really knows what love is?
Explaining emotions — and here I’m making the unjustified assumption that “love” is an emotion — is often best left to people who spend their lives in the arts. So here are some terse explanations from various folks from that group over the years. By the end of the list, I’m sure it will be much clearer, right?
The list starts off with straightforward proclamations:
Love is a serious mental disease. (Plato)
Love is space and time measured by the heart. (Proust)
Love is the only gold. (Tennyson)
Love is a virus. (Maya Angelou)
Some authors took a different approach; they don’t define love precisely, but talk about a characteristic they find interesting:
Love isn’t something you find. Love is something that finds you. (Loretta Young)
Love is (like a) faucet, it turns on and off. (Billie Holiday)
Some explanations seem to be in discussion (or argument) with each other:
Love is the answer. (John Lennon)
If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question? (Lily Tomlin)
Love is blind. (Chaucer)
Love is not blind. (Julius Gordon)
Maybe love is something very serious:
Love is never wrong. (Melissa Etheridge)
Love is a fire. (Joan Crawford)
On the other hand, maybe it’s just an amusement:
Love is the greatest refreshment in life. (Picasso)
Love is a game. (Zsa Zsa Gabor)
Or maybe it’s both, as well as everything else:
Love is all you need. (Paul McCartney)
Unfortunately it seems we’ve come to the end of the list (although please feel free to continue with your own research; there are thousands of these epigrams, and that’s not even counting all the dodgy doggerel you can find in commercial greeting cards. So I’ve failed in my objective, and while that usually entails an apology, you’re not going to get one from me. Because after all:
Love means never having to say you’re sorry. (Erich Fromm)
