Everyone seems to use the word love: “I love my parents,” “I love my girlfriend,” “I love my friends,” “I love my country,” “I love food,” “I love Playstation 3,” etc., which brings us to question, what is the meaning of the word to love when it can be used for many different things? Several findings in online dictionaries across the internet on the meaning of love could be summed up into: an action based on deep affection. Contradiction arises when we apply this definition of deep affection to things like for example, girlfriend and food. Deep affection seems to reasonably apply to relationships which involve people: parents, girlfriend, and friends.

However, how can deep affection be used to describe feelings towards, for instance, food? People usually, except in a very particular psychological condition where a person may genuinely feel deep affection towards food, does not feel deep affection towards food. People may like a certain food more than other kinds of food, but it is statistically unusual to have deep affection towards food. Therefore, it is a linguistic mismatch to say “I feel deep affection towards food” when the utterance probably means only as “I like that food.”

Up to this point, as we can see, there seems to be confusion in the meaning of the word love. Of course, I am fully aware that the word love can be used recreationally as a metaphor, as in the case of saying “I love that food” to show a kind of exaggerated expression in showing how much you like that particular food. But the point being made is that the word love has been loosely defined. Why it is loosely defined? Because there are problems inherent in the word love that causes the loose definition of the word love.

To understand the problems in the word love, let me use the word fish to illustrate. The word fish refers to the fish as an entity, an aquatic vertebrate with scales and fins that can be found in water, which is a descriptive scientific explanation of fish. But this scientific explanation is just one of other equally valid descriptions of fish, e.g. a creature that breathes in the water, etc. I said equally valid because, in this case, the description does not attempt to explain any causal relationship in relation to the fish (how the fish has evolved to what it is now, etc). It merely describes the apparent characteristics of the fish.

There is a fundamental distinction between our example of the word fish and the word love. Fish exists materially for all of us to see and thus, we are able to derive a reliable description about it. Reliable in the sense that we can agree on the description to a certain degree based on what we see together. Love, on the other hand, is not as reliable as fish, in that love is a feeling, something that an individual feels, something that is immaterial. This fact alone gives rise to the problems in the word love.

The word love is problematic because it is supposedly referring to the universal feeling of love that humans feel throughout the world. Since there is no way of ascertaining whether or not we feel the same ‘love’, we are left at best with assuming that we all feel the same feeling of ‘love’ when we say it. Based on that assumption, we created different ideas of love throughout history. There might be a possibility that our assumption is wrong, or rather, we thought of a different feeling when we thought we say about the same thing. Therefore, all ideas about love are inherently relativistic and therefore unreliable.

One might object my reasoning on the point of the baseless assumption of love, by pointing that we can after all, assume that we talk about the same feeling of love; namely by consulting to smaller fragments of feelings which are describable when someone accounts to be in love. For instance the same feeling of constantly thinking about a particular person, the same feeling of wanting to be near a particular person, or the same feeling of overwhelming affection towards a particular person. This line of reasoning suffers from the problem of private knowledge versus public behavior. Private knowledge is something that an individual may know or feel, but in the process of describing it through language as a public transferring tool, is limited by the limitations of language itself. Although public behavior may show apparent similarities, it is not to be inferred that it is showing the same entity. For instance, many different diseases are exhibiting similar symptoms, but it is a fallacy and may prove fatal for the patients if doctors conclude a disease from merely similar symptoms. The point being made is that the basic assumption we have on love might be wrong and therefore gives rise to the multitude ideas of love that are inherently relativistic, stands valid.

The second problem that follows from the first problem of the unreliability of the concepts of love is that we cannot favor one particular idea to account for the nature of love. Since those ideas are equally problematic in that they are relativistic and thus, unreliable in trying to determine the nature of love. I am in no way suggesting that all the ideas or concepts of love in existence are false in describing the nature of love. There might be one of the concepts that is appropriately describing the nature of love. If I grant that this proposition as true, that there is a concept out of many that actually describes appropriately the nature of love, it is almost impossible to determine which one is the right concept among many other concepts.

These two problems give rise to many different interpretations of love, which are all founded on unsubstantiated ground. Furthermore, throughout history, we have seen many periods in time when one concept was adopted as the appropriate definition of love, and the ideal of how love should be. Such concept of an ideal love became part of a social reality which molds the people, especially their expressive behaviors of love, and to a certain extent, influencing what to feel when in love. For instance, the feeling of jealousy as an attribute that is often associated as part of love does not exist in a polygamous society (assuming such society has not yet been in contact with monogamous society and thus free from monogamous society’s influence). But in a monogamous society, jealousy exists and is propagated and justified. Thus, we can argue that jealousy is more of a cultural product born out of a certain concept of love, it is not an inherent part of love. This example also shows that many feelings that come under the big banner of love may have a cultural origin, and it is difficult to entangle which one is pertaining to the true nature of love, which one is not. Furthermore, throughout our history, many concepts of love have come and go, laying layers and layers on the genuine nature of love, if such a thing exists.

Those are some problems relating to the word love and thus explain why the word has long been defined loosely and as we have seen, we will probably never get to define it properly. It is after all, the ineffable Love!