Love, what is it?

[slipstrike0159]

First off, this is not a chit chat place to talk about your own relationships. Its entirely conceptual and is based off of CRITICAL THINKING. Kindly go away or post more wisely.

Anyway to answer the original question you have to look at all the defining characteristics. When you try to define it you will likely run into many different levels of such an emotion. I will assume you have already come to the conclusion that love is an emotion of several levels of severity since you call for a definition of "pure love". Like reach said, its a culmination of aspects. However if you were to ask me of a simple personal opinion i would say that you would define pure love as sacrificial devotion with the most correct intentions behind it (i say intentions loosely because i know many people will argue the semantics of 'intentions'). We as humans recognize that the highest form of bonding with someone is complete devotion, whether that is seen as only loving one individual or simply having an (un)spoken trust with someone else, etc. Of course devotion in of itself has varying levels, this is why i bring up sacrifice. You can see all around in our media or even daily life how the idea of sacrificing yourself for someone else is seen as the ultimate act of kindness, as in sacrificing your time and service to help someone less fortunate or even just simply doing something that inconveniences you with the only hope of reimbursement being that you helped someone else. So when you throw those two together i believe you can come up with a definition that attempts to scratch the surface.

However, i will say this. Love is a different thing to different people. Our own personal definitions vary based on a vast amount of things. That being said, i think it is impossible to define love, or rather "pure love", as pertaining to everyone because it is an emotion that is inherently different for every person. Although, if you want to try anyway, you can gather up some common traits or feelings someone comes upon in their own situation and use that culmination of broadly accepted feelings to describe it. Just understand that it IS different, as well as different on varying levels, for every person and therefore is mostly opinionated and situational definitions.

The funniest thing about love in my personal opinion is how often times it is thought of as a spectrum with respect to hate, whereas love being on one side and hate the opposite. At the same time however, it is thought of as having a thin line between love and hate seeing as how one can jump from one to the other very easily. So just for some food for thought questions; is it a spectrum or a line to cross? In the case of the line, does that suggest that even 'pure love' can get easily pushed across the line under the right circumstances? Or in the case of the spectrum does that suggest sometimes as you approach the end of one side you see traits exhibited on the opposite end?
I for one think of it as two sides of the same coin. Although they are very distinctly recognized as opposites, with enough force you can change the side of the coin that is facing up. And in that respect, sometimes your chances at either is decided by that 50-50 attempt at a flip of a coin.