What is Love? (Please Ask yourself)

Yes I am completely with you on that, we need to ask ourselves what is love in order to love each other properly.
Well, I'm going to take a shot at defining love as best as I can, here we go:

Love is something you do for another person, or a feeling you have for them, where you want to love them and be loved. To love someone is to try to help them be happy, and to be happy is to know Jesus. So when we love someone, we put their needs before ours, and promote their happiness and well-being.

However I am just talking about Platonic love, what about the love between a man and a woman that makes you want to marry and have children?
That kind of love is a whole other category, but it also starts with the love that you get from friendship, like the love I outlined above me.
I think when it comes to romance and sex, that should be only reserved and expressed with the person that you have committed to spend the rest of your life with, which is signified with the sacred tradition of marriage. It says in the bible for there to be one man and one woman, so obviously God wants us to be monogamous and not sexually promiscuous.

With that being said, PMO is clearly nothing to do with love, and everything to do with our sinful desires. Basically pornography is stripping the purely sexual part of a relationship, and handing it to you in the form of a video that you can watch. There is no "love," there is only you using someone else's body for your own desires. You are also lusting after another woman that is not your wife, which is adultery if you are married. And even if you aren't married you are still cheating on your future wife by lusting after another woman that you shouldn't be.

I'm not sure if you are married or single, but if you want to find love, a good way to do that is to practice the virtue of Chasity. Chasity is definitely a huge part of love, It shows that you have the ability to love someone so much, that you will resist your desires and put her/his needs first. It shows that you have so much love to give, and that you also know to save it for that one special person.

Chasity is also a device to test other people's love for you.

I heard of a story of this girl who went on a date with this guy, they got in the car together and he started making sexual jokes and sexual innuendos about what he was going to do with her tonight. At one point in the date, he turns over to the girl and asks her what he's gonna "get" tonight, (sexual stuff) and she tells him that she practices chastity and she won't do sexual stuff with him. So he dumps her in the middle of the road and leaves her there. When she got home she was crying and sad, but later she realized that she had stood up that guy who would have just used her for sex, and in that way she tested to see if he actually loved her or not by being chaste.

So I guess that's what I think love is, but of course I have a lot to learn still. The real essence of love I think is to know Jesus's love first, and then you can go on and love other people like Jesus would.

 

I think that love is not theoretically possible between people. Howard Jones wrote about it in his hit song "What is Love?" Two people or more never "love" each other. What they pursue is the satisfaction of their own desires through other people. In the event that this is threatened, they abandon the "love" thing.

Why go after it? Loving a woman, during the beginning, middle and ending is cloaked in misery. He wants her, so he suffers in the pursuit. She allows him in, he suffers as she puts him through the paces. Life changes, and she moves on, he suffers her loss.

 

Obligatory:

What is love... baby don't hurt me... no more.

 

All my post does is reinforce the poignancy of Christ and The Sacrifice. He was the only one who could love. He knew our composition, evil as it was and is, yet He made a way. Sin is an inevitable condition of life. Piety is only a puppet show, a trick of the light.

We can't earn favor, we can't love ourselves, we can't love each other, and we don't even truly love God. This is because humans love only if there is a possibility of gain. Thus the separation between the divine and material.

Our miniscule faith, which we cannot even generate independently, is the only route to salvation.

 

Very insightful indeed, but I think that God smiles upon marriage and family, sex/romance is also a gift from him for us to enjoy and express deep love and intimacy with our partner.
You are right about how we can never "truly" love, we are not perfect, and we need to recognize that so we can love better. That is why I think romance without commitment is inherently selfish and just using someone else for your own desires.
And you are totally right about Jesus's love, so we should take that to look up to Jesus and love like he does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_theory_of_love

Have a look at this theory, it is very interesting and possibly true in some ways.