A dictionary defines love as follows:
Love (v): to have a great attachment to and affection for or to have passionate desire, longing, and feelings for
(n): an intense emotion of affection, warmth, fondness, and regard towards a person or thing
If you say a word enough, you realize that it sounds funny and eventually, it loses its meaning. It doesn’t matter what word, for example: say the word "Boat". Now say it again… now say it 15x in a row… what does that word even mean? You know that over the course of your life you have associated that SOUND, with the image of a vessel that floats on water… but think about that for a second… you’re associating something you can see, with a series of arbitrary sounds and deciding those sounds, mean that thing… Language really is very arbitrary. The words we choose to assign to everything we perceive in our world are just made up… There are a few exceptions though, as with every rule… Some words have onomatopoeic value and the word is such b/c it literally describes the sound that the word makes. Very catch-22. The word "POP" describes a sound that you can hear, simply by saying the word… Such is the case with some words, you can say them and by saying them, emulate that sound that the action word makes by its simple existence… Some words you can really only understand by experiencing them. These words are slightly abstract. Meaning you know vaguely what they mean but once you experience them first hand, you have a deep understanding that the word alone cannot convey. But other words are far more than abstract. They’re not tied to a sound, or an image of something you can see, these words instead are tied to ideas, thoughts, feelings, etc.
Interestingly enough, to me at least, these feelings, thoughts, and ideas are different for everyone. I mean you can say that you LOVE cookies, and the person that hears that can say, “Yeah I guess cookies are okay”, but do they really understand how you feel about cookies? Chances are they probably don’t because the word that you use to describe your feeling about cookies, is subjective… everyone is going to experience those feelings in different ways. The best we can do is try to draw up verbal descriptions using other made up and arbitrary words and see if you’re meaning matches the next persons… but chances are, it won’t… I mean not really. We all have an abstract idea of what LOVE is… if you ask anyone, they can give a mediocre definition that would prob get the point across… But past that, the word doesn’t really mean anything.
Ok I guess I wouldn’t say that it doesn’t mean ANYTHING, I guess I could more aptly say: It doesn’t have any standard measure… It’s not like an Inch… an inch is the same no matter what… if you say something is an inch, most everyone will know what that means and be able to see, recreate and explain to someone else EXACTLY what you meant… but words that convey feelings are not this way… Which means, the way you love cookies, prob isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) the way you love your children, or the way you love naps… in context the word love has countless different meanings. Each one conjuring up a feeling of what it means to you, and depending on what form of love the person using it means, you apply the thought of love, in that sense, that you have in your head to what the user of the word has said and try to appropriate their feelings…you can’t explain your feelings to someone else and have them use those words as a blueprint and MAKE for love, the exact way you felt it… Feelings are individualized to each person, so to everyone, they all have very different meanings.
I think I’ve successfully illustrated my point… words that convey a feeling, are very hard to quantify… So when I say that I love my wife… You the reader has a vague understanding of that type of love, even if you’ve never personally felt it, you have a sense of what I am trying to say, but you can’t take my feelings and use them as your own and thus you can’t really understand what I mean by using that word, you can only really approximate it… which brings me around to my point: Simply saying that I Love my wife, isn’t enough… The word doesn’t do ANY justice to how I feel about this woman… She has created amazing and perfect life: 5 times! and each time it is a mixture of our love for each other, coming together to create the amazing and perfect little people that we try and find words to quantify our feelings for, but there aren’t any… everyone knows that parents love their children (or that at least they should) but until you have your own child, you simply cannot understand what that version of the word LOVE means… It is a feeling so much more powerful than the cookies that you love…
There is no way to describe the smell of your newborn babies head… and the smell of any old newborns head just isn’t the same. YOUR newborn baby will have a unique smell that you will know instantly and it can’t be explained by ANY word in ANY language… once you feel it, you just know. You smell that baby and nothing else in the entire world matters all that matters is that precious life in your arms, and protecting it with everything you have. The next thing you feel (as a husband) should be a deep and wonderful admiration for the women that just created this perfect little person with that amazing smell… consider for a moment what she just did… her body just created something so amazing that you can’t even find words to explain… she created life… and not just any life, a life that is part of both of you…
That amazing women is now a MOTHER… but again, there is another one of those words that just don’t mean anything… sure everyone knows a mother is the name we give to the female that has a baby, but it is SOO much more than that. it is a job of unending sacrifice that is usually totally unappreciated (at the least greatly underappreciated) by the one you are mothering… it will remain that way until that person either becomes a mother herself, or makes someone a mother, and thus realizes firsthand what being a mother REALLY is…
So all in all I just wanted to say to my wife: "Happy mother’s day, I love you" … but the words didn’t seem like they meant enough.
Interestingly enough, to me at least, these feelings, thoughts, and ideas are different for everyone. I mean you can say that you LOVE cookies, and the person that hears that can say, “Yeah I guess cookies are okay”, but do they really understand how you feel about cookies? Chances are they probably don’t because the word that you use to describe your feeling about cookies, is subjective… everyone is going to experience those feelings in different ways. The best we can do is try to draw up verbal descriptions using other made up and arbitrary words and see if you’re meaning matches the next persons… but chances are, it won’t… I mean not really. We all have an abstract idea of what LOVE is… if you ask anyone, they can give a mediocre definition that would prob get the point across… But past that, the word doesn’t really mean anything.
Ok I guess I wouldn’t say that it doesn’t mean ANYTHING, I guess I could more aptly say: It doesn’t have any standard measure… It’s not like an Inch… an inch is the same no matter what… if you say something is an inch, most everyone will know what that means and be able to see, recreate and explain to someone else EXACTLY what you meant… but words that convey feelings are not this way… Which means, the way you love cookies, prob isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) the way you love your children, or the way you love naps… in context the word love has countless different meanings. Each one conjuring up a feeling of what it means to you, and depending on what form of love the person using it means, you apply the thought of love, in that sense, that you have in your head to what the user of the word has said and try to appropriate their feelings…you can’t explain your feelings to someone else and have them use those words as a blueprint and MAKE for love, the exact way you felt it… Feelings are individualized to each person, so to everyone, they all have very different meanings.
I think I’ve successfully illustrated my point… words that convey a feeling, are very hard to quantify… So when I say that I love my wife… You the reader has a vague understanding of that type of love, even if you’ve never personally felt it, you have a sense of what I am trying to say, but you can’t take my feelings and use them as your own and thus you can’t really understand what I mean by using that word, you can only really approximate it… which brings me around to my point: Simply saying that I Love my wife, isn’t enough… The word doesn’t do ANY justice to how I feel about this woman… She has created amazing and perfect life: 5 times! and each time it is a mixture of our love for each other, coming together to create the amazing and perfect little people that we try and find words to quantify our feelings for, but there aren’t any… everyone knows that parents love their children (or that at least they should) but until you have your own child, you simply cannot understand what that version of the word LOVE means… It is a feeling so much more powerful than the cookies that you love…
There is no way to describe the smell of your newborn babies head… and the smell of any old newborns head just isn’t the same. YOUR newborn baby will have a unique smell that you will know instantly and it can’t be explained by ANY word in ANY language… once you feel it, you just know. You smell that baby and nothing else in the entire world matters all that matters is that precious life in your arms, and protecting it with everything you have. The next thing you feel (as a husband) should be a deep and wonderful admiration for the women that just created this perfect little person with that amazing smell… consider for a moment what she just did… her body just created something so amazing that you can’t even find words to explain… she created life… and not just any life, a life that is part of both of you…
That amazing women is now a MOTHER… but again, there is another one of those words that just don’t mean anything… sure everyone knows a mother is the name we give to the female that has a baby, but it is SOO much more than that. it is a job of unending sacrifice that is usually totally unappreciated (at the least greatly underappreciated) by the one you are mothering… it will remain that way until that person either becomes a mother herself, or makes someone a mother, and thus realizes firsthand what being a mother REALLY is…
So all in all I just wanted to say to my wife: "Happy mother’s day, I love you" … but the words didn’t seem like they meant enough.
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