Love and friendship

By Rahul Kumar

• Love is crying and smiling simultaneously.
• Sometimes love is like a delicate fragile boat on which you ride through the turbulent seas: afraid and unsure if it will survive the storm. But knowing that you are protected in the midst of the storm, is what we often forget or neglect to see. Without love, this journey would be impossible, so turbulent and tumultous, without the shelter of this vessel, however fragile, that to survive would be impossible.
• Love is getting up in the morning and thanking your stars for the person beside you. Through the turmoil of the night when the fears unincumbered by the laws of nature shower their wrath on the sleeping you, this person puts a hand across you and through that touch, you feel the comfort and get the security that all is going to be well.
• Love is about feeling. Love is too honest to feel good all the time. Love is about bravery to feel what 'is' ... regardless. Although feeling good about yourself all the time is a nice fantacy I'm not sure it's honest. Love seems to be more about feeling who you are, even the parts that you may not wish to accept... then it's possible to make friends with yourself and feel good in some way about yourself but you have to do this for yourself ..... yes ! that definatelly is LOVE-ing yourself, but no one but you can do that for you. Someone you love and who loves you can simply assist in revealing yourself to you and supporting you while you create a friendship with your 'soul' (if that's an acceptable word for it)
• Love is a itch in the heart that you cannot scratch
• Love is a splinter in your brain that drives you crazy that you cannot reach and it can either drive you mand or tickle you to new heights.
• Love in English language is a very broad term, it includes all sorts of loves. There is no distinction in the word itself. The variety of love is determined by the context in which it is used. But then the ambiguity of expressing and perception can cause misunderstandings and hence it could be received and viewed with suspision. Perhaps it is this reason that lovers are (either implicitly, and sometimes explicitly) cautioned not to use the word love, even though there might be genuine love brewing.
  This is resolved in other cultures/languages by using different words to express differnt kinds of love. For instance, Tibeteans have 14 words for love, distinguishing from Altruistic love and Selfish love (both being on the love scale but diametrically opposite) and all the forms in between and on other scales. While the abstraction in the English language allows to represent what really happens... an admixture of these various forms of love to some extend, it becomes hard for us to understand the concept of love and what one means when he/she says, "I love you!". It is for this reason, in my estimation, that love becomes such a subjective issue. That is my interpretation of the statement can be very different from yours and so on. My understanding of the word, my past experience, my general disposition, my partialities and my present attitude will dictate how I interpret the assertion.
  The fact remains though that no matter what kind of love is expressed and intended, it often times strikes a chord deep within us that other emotions fail to tickle.
  So ladies and gentlemen, love someone altruistically and you will (as I am sure most of you already have) appreciate the pleasure of giving yourself selflessly. And I wish upon you that you be loved too.
• Love is caring for another person, love is compassion, love is protectiveness, love is self-sacrificing
• Is love a compromise?
• If love is so chaste and devine and noble as it is made out in the literature, how come there is an inherent anxiety associated in declaring one's love to someone? Is it because love is understood so varidly and subjectively (look previous points) that the supposed misunderstanding that it can lead to, makes a lover apprehensive of declaring one's love? Or is it the vulnerability that causes anxiety? By vulnerability, I mean one of two things or possibly both of the following. First, by exposing a deep emotional sentiment to someone who may or maynot understand the genuinity and severity of the expressed feeling is liable to react callously. Or second, even if the feelings are intellectually understood, they are not felt and hence not reciprocated can cause unsettlement on part of the party that declares one's love.

So my question is, do these sentiments represent selfishness? Wouldn't a nobler approach entail courage to display the emotions despite these uncertainities and continue loving despite unreciprocated feelings/sentiments? But then what is one to say of intensity? At what point unrequiited love turn into stalking? Or is that a fair comparison?