Love Defined

A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.

A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance.

Sexual passion

Sexual intercourse

A love affair

An intense emotional attachment, as for an appreciated pet or treasured object.

Perhaps, the most important of Divine Laws is the 'law of love.' Put simply, "Love is Law, Law is Love." This amounts to the same thing as "the gift of giving" without the hope of reward or pay, or serving others. When you do the right thing for others you receive gifts in unexpected ways. Paradoxically, those who help you may not be those you help. The help you receive may come from surprisingly distant connections.

How We Communicate Love

Why is it that so few couples seem to have found the secret to keeping love alive after the wedding? The problem is that what has been overlooked is one fundamental truth: People speak different love languages.

Your emotional love language and the language of your partner may be as different as Chinese from English. Being sincere is not enough.

Seldom do partners have the same primary love language. We must be willing to learn our partner’s primary love language if we are to be effective communicators of love.

There are basically five emotional love languages. Here are the five ways that people speak and understand emotional love:

Words of Affirmation: Verbal compliments, or words of appreciation, are powerful communicators of love. They are best expressed in simple, straightforward statements of affirmation.

Quality Time: Looking at each other and talking, giving your undivided attention. That twenty or more minutes of time will never be had again: we are giving our lives to each other. It is a powerful communicator of love.

Receiving Gifts: A gift is something you can hold in your hand and say “Look, he was thinking of me,” or “She remembered me”. The gift is a symbol of thought and the thought remains not only in the mind but is expressed in actually securing the gift and giving it as an expression of love.

Acts of Service: Doing things you know your spouse would like you to do. You seek to please her by serving her, to express your love for her by doing things for her. These acts require thought, planning, time, effort, and energy.

Physical Touch: For some individuals, physical touch is their primary love language. Without it, they feel unloved. With it, their emotional tank is filled, and they feel secure in the love of their spouse. The touch of love may take many forms. Don’t make the mistake that the touch that brings pleasure to you will also bring instant pleasure to her.

When we choose active expressions of love in the primary love language of our spouse, we create an emotional climate where we can deal with our conflicts and failures.

What if the love language of your loved one is something that doesn’t come naturally to you? When an action doesn’t come naturally, it is a greater expression of love.

Source: The Five Languages of Love by Gary Chapman

We Express Love Through the Power of Attraction

To attract is to cause to draw near or adhere. Here is how the power of attraction works within each of us:

Because human beings remember with neurons (the cells of nerve tissue), we are disposed to see more of what we have already seen, hear anew what we have heard most often, think just what we have always thought.

Within the brain, every mental activity consists of neutrons (electrically neutral subatomic particles) firing in a certain sequence. An "Attractor" is an association of ingrained links that can overwhelm weaker information patterns. If incoming sensory data provoke a quorum of the Attractor's units, they will trigger their teammates, who flare to brilliant life.

An Attractor can overpower other units so thoroughly that the network registers chiefly the incandescence of the Attractor, even though the fading, firefly traces of another pattern initially glimmered there. A network then registers strikingly new sensory information as if it conformed to past experience. In much the same way, our sun's blinding glare washes countless dimmer stars from the midday sky.

The limbic brain (i.e. the emotional brain) contains its emotional Attractors, encoded early in life. Primal bias then forms an integral part of the neural systems that view the emotional world and conduct relationships. If the early experience of a limbic network exemplifies healthy emotional interaction, its Attractors will serve as reliable guides to the world of workable relationships.

No individual can think his way around his own Attractors, since they are embedded in the structure of thought. And in human beings, an Attractor's influence is not confined to its mind of origin. The limbic brain sends an Attractor's sphere of influence exploding outward with the exuberance of a nova's gassy shell. Because limbic resonance and regulation join human minds together in a continuous exchange of influential signals, every brain is part of a local network that shares information--including Attractors.

Limbic Attractors thus exert a distorting force not only within the brain that produces them, but also on the limbic networks of others--calling forth compatible memories, emotional states and styles of relatedness in them. Through the limbic transmission of an Attractor's influence, one person can lure others into his emotional virtuality. All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another's emotional mind with ours. Each relationship is a binary star, a burning flux of exchanged force fields, the deep and ancient influences emanating and felt, felt and emanating.

The limbic transmission of Attractors renders personal identity partially malleable---the specific people to whom we are attached provoke a portion of our everyday neural activity. Ongoing exposure to one person's Attractors does not merely activate neural patterns in another--it also strengthens them. Long-standing togetherness writes permanent changes into a brain's open book.

In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain's inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them.

Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.