I think it’s awesome that everyone answered so honestly and detailed about their own memories of love. It’s brave and moving. What my fellow class members have written and some of the statements almost brought me to tears to be honest.

All in all, love is a complex term which is not easy to be put in words and cannot apply to everybody in the same way.

Looking through the class answers on the question “What is love“ one can identify many similarities and differences in the many various definitions all students wrote down.

Many students describe “love“ as a feeling or an emotion, that can vary between being very strong, beautiful, unconditional, intense on the one hand or dangerous and frightening on the other hand. But most of the time it is said to be a positive emotion or feeling.

Others refer love to relationships between two people, who “love“ each other, cannot live without each other, feel sheltered, comfortable and secure with each other.

One can be oneself, fearless, with deep trust and no hiding. There is total honesty and one can withstand bad times because of the lovers support.

Others refer to biological processes that make people feel in a special, extraordinary way that we call “love“. One person even named Christmas as a definition for love. It is a very important and special holiday that we know to be the fest of the family and love.

In general we can say that love appears to be one very important topic for everybody and everybody thinks, that love is important.

While reading the answers from other class members, I gained a clearer and far-reaching  view on love and how one could define it. There was not one definition of love that I didn’t like at all. All of them represented a good view on this special emotional feeling, although being pretty different at times.

I feel like we have to connect our answers to get a more precise definition of love, since there is so much to say about love and one person alone is not really able to think of every detail to it.

The same I noticed while reading the memories. Some of them were very similar to mine referring to the love of their parents. Sometimes they reminded me of moments that I experienced before too, but didn’t think of in that context. I loved the description about Christmas, because for me Christmas is the most wonderful time and closely connected to love as well.

The not love answers talked about very different ideas. My answer saying “not-love” is the sheer corporal and physical attraction was not mentioned as many times as I expected, but still there were a few analogies. What really caught my attention was that one of them referred to a mental disorder of people being obsessed with another person. I think this is an interesting topic, which I decided to also talk about in my presentation, since I think there is a point when too much love maybe turns into something else that is much more an illness than a true feeling for somebody else.

All in all the comparison made me think and rounded off my view on love and its definition.

By reading all the definitions that people gave for the word “Love“ I was surprised, that I could in a way agree with almost each one of them. Even though some of them were quite different as they pointed out different aspects of love or reviewed it from a more personal of scientific point of view. For me defining love as an ambivalent emotion is very important as this is what makes it so hard to describe (fragile – strong, the happiest person – the unhappiest person…). Anyways, I can also understand why people are not able or do not want to define love. Especially by looking at all the kinds of love listed.

While I could understand most people’s definitions of love it was hard for me to agree with some people’s definitions of what is not love to them. As when you think about it many things are strongly connected to love. For example there is a saying that you can only hate someone when you loved him or her before. Furthermore even wars are often fought out of love either of a religion or a country.

Concerning the images I very much liked Johanna’s one as it made me think about the fact that you often realize that you love someone if he or she is missing.  I was amazed how many romantic movies there are and I am still thinking about how the images of love movies give us affect our own opinions about love.

Last but not least, many of the stories in the memory section were really moving and difficult to some up or compare apart from the fact that surprisingly many have to do with Christmas.

1. 1)What is love to the class?
   

Love is an emotion, the strongest emotion a human being is able to feel. This emotion allows you to behave without fear and be truly yourself around the ones you love. It is also a sensation of warmth and shelter. Furthermore, love is honesty, trust, happiness, fullness and beauty. It can be found in everything and at every moment. Nevertheless, sometimes love can be disappointing. It can make you feel vulnerable. So that love can succeed, compromises and sacrifices are necessary. True love is unconditional.

3) List the “kinds” of love:

-  Love for God

- Love for family/ paternal love

- Love for Friends

- Love for your partner

- Love for other people/ charity/compassion

- Love for your country/home

- Physical love/ sexual love

- Platonic love

- Maternal love

- Passion

- Unconditional love

- Platonic love

- Love for animals

- Love for food

- Love for memories

- Love for material things

- Love for nature

4) Memories

I do not think memories can be summarize, for each memory is unique. However, I still found some similarities between them. The majority of the students found love in family experience. They remember the most an unconditional love gesture of their mother or sister, for example. On the other hand, many experienced love when leaving. While being apart from the person you love is when you realize how much him/her really means to you.

5) What is not love?

Love is not egocentrism, narcissism, envy, selfishness, coldness, sexual abuse, anger, lies, evil, obsession (see below) and indifference.

I’ve found many similarities and differences in all answers of questions. To begin with similarities of definition of love, typically, people had the similar feelings when they are in love and it can be seen in the answers. The answers have the similar and typical keywords to explain “Love” such as “emotion”, “strong”, “happiness”, ”passion”, ”trust”, ”special moments”… In some parts, love is described as an adventure and it is declared that sometimes it has a negative meaning and it can cause to do stupid and unusual things. But mostly in positive meaning… Moreover it is stated that love isn’t not only for lovers but also can be felt for our friends and families.

For the memories of love, with a great remarkable point is that people consider if they are being cared from somebody or not without any reminding or notice. And as an addition to their answers to explain what love is according to them, they mostly told some memories that mostly happened with their family members or friends. One memory about his/her grandmother and grandfather is explaining how love keeps us in each other in the life. Sometimes a tennis match can be a shared Memory of Love, sometimes a provement of friendliness can be.

Kinds of Love: Similar answers: Love for family members, love for lovers, love your country, love animals, love for the god, love for delicious meal. It is surprised me to see that most of people mixed “Obsession” and “Love”.

What is not love: Although some ones think material love is not love, some ones state in the first section love can be for non-human or not living things. However many people agree that love is not egoistic or selfish, it rather requires to share.

The most students describe Love as an emotion with adjectives like beautiful, happy, strong, dangerous, warm, fragile, secure....

In nearly every answer you find a kind of bipolarity. It seems that Love is a two sided coin:

happiest person of the world / feeling like the world is ending

unconditional / conditional

beautiful / dangerous

pulls you back to earth / letting you fly

emotional / biological

fragile / strong

emotion / technical process

soul / body

beginning / end

The main consensus seems to be that Love covers all kind of emotions “from fear to euphoria”. Love is not a steady condition. Love is always moving.

Some have the opinion that nobody can define Love exactly. Somebody is saying: “Love is a character” and somebody even says: “ Love is everything”. In my opinion Love is everything but indifference. The statements of our class are saying the same. We connected a lot of different emotions to Love (strong/fragile, beautiful/dangerous) but it is impossible to be indifferent to somebody if you love this person.

Most experiences described by our class are positive. Nearly all experiences are about telling of love. Often love is described as parents or relatives that hold back their emotional needs in order to see their child happy. Feeling that somebody loves you, seems to be a very important experience.

First of all it was really confusing to realize I was not able to recognize my own writing at once. And this is not, because I wouldn’t remember my text but moreover because some answers reflected my own ideas to such an extent that I was quite mixed up after reading everything. 

Still, concerning the definitions of love I was quite surprised about some descriptions that connected love with terms like danger, biological process or adventure. For me these words more likely hint at the moment of falling in love, which according to me is still quite far away from real love. Nevertheless it was very interesting to learn something about differing views on love, or even about different meanings of the word love in other cultures. Some text were very beautiful, even philosophical and I definitely enjoyed reading. 

In terms of the different memories of love I noticed that there were three main types of experiencing love being reported: parental (or family) love, which is mainly referred to in connection with security, sacrifice and forgiveness. It is these moments of unconditional love that are probably chosen most often as an reference to love, which hints at the importance of this kind of love in people’s lives. Then there is the love from/of a friend, which is picked by many people as an significant experience of love as well. However I was quite surprised that actually only a few people chose the love for a partner in a relationship as their most outstanding moments, experiencing love. Maybe this could be because still it is a very very intimate, maybe even too intimate thing to write about.

Correspondingly in the section ‘kinds of love that I know’ parental love or the love of family members in general is significantly often stated first or described as most important and strong emotion, as one never gains it and very hardly looses it. It is just there. Everyone has felt it some day. And it is unconditional. The absence or abuse of this kind of love is probably the most definitive cut in ones soul leaving life long scars.

Accordingly a lot of answers on what is not love refer to terms of sexual relationships like passion and obsession and only very little answers hint on ‘un-love’ in connection with parental love. This is probably because parental love much more unlikely could turn into hate or indifference, no matter what happens. After all it is the sexual love that requires efforts, compromises and real work.

Definitions of Love:

In my opinion, all definitions about Love were pretty similar. Nearly everyone thinks, that Love is the strongest feeling or even the greatest emotion a person can get or feel. Some fellow students said, Love can be the greatest thing, which will make a person the happiest in the world, but in comparison, this person can fall into a big hole, because sometimes Love can be felt as pain. This can happen, if a person gets disappointed or if this someone cant act out the Love he or her feels. Some students just described Love, some students talked about Love in a relationship and some students talked about Love you can feel for your family and friends. This were the most obvious thing, were the class didn’t have one opinion. One student said, the difference between loving the partner or loving the family and the friends would be just the sexuality…

Memories of Love:

There aren’t a lot of similarities, which isn’t surprising, because everyone has made their own experiences. Some are describing situations that are showing how much their parents love them, or experiences with their grandmothers, before they died and some describe situations with their partners or even ex partners.

Kinds of Love:

The kinds of Love are quite similar again. Nearly every student listed Love for Family, Mother-Love, Love for a partner and Love for friends. Many students also chose loving a pet / animal, loving God and loving home to be very important. A few wrote down some adjectives, like unconditional, pure and romantic down.

What is not Love:

Many students said the opposite of Love would be hate. But a few said it wouldn’t be the opposite, hate just would be an indifference of Love. The other states of what is not Love were quite different; stalking, attraction, material, selfish and arranged marriage.

Images of Love:

The most of the pictures are showing two people in a relationship. The people are kissing each other, smiling or hugging and you can see at the first sight that they are in Love. Some images are showing families, like the mother and her baby. On those you can see the other way of Love. But a few pictures are not so obvious, like the puzzle, were one piece is missing or the two birds, but when you look at them for a few seconds, then you can see the other part of Love, the one that isn’t obvious. 

Summary

Love is a very broad and individual topic and therefore every person has his or her very special opinion and experiences regarding this emotion. What becomes very clear in the different definitions and texts, is that every single one has a different cultural and experiential background which leads to the fact, that some answers are more specific and personal and some are rather general defined.

As we all have very different perspectives on the topic “Love” and have also gained different experiences and memories, there are very few similarities except for the rather formal aspects of how detailed or how rational the answers are. Another general difference is the kind of love that each one was thinking of most while formulating his or her answer. Some of us rather think of our partner, some of us of our parents and some of us are more likely to think of siblings when talking about love. Another great influence on how each of us sees the topic love is the current state of relationship we are in, or what good or bad love situations we have been going through lately. Due to the different nationalities represented in our course, there are other cultural views on the topic and therefore also different experiences with love. The best fitting examples to show differences and similarities are the memories of a situation that represented love.

Some of us retell their memory very in-depth, personal and with a lot of love for the detail, whilst others try to keep their love-memory rather short and generalized. The memories are retold with almost every single detail being very unique and therefore what the writer has felt in that special moment is a transfer the love, expressed perfectly to the reader. To sum it all up, it can definitely be determined, that everyone has put a lot of thinking and passion in his or her special love memory and therefore it is unique anyway.

When looking at the answers of the class of love, it becomes obvious that there is not only one way to think of love and that love has many characteristics. Nevertheless, there can be seen several similarities within the answers on the questions about love.

Regarding the definition of love, the majority thinks of love as a strong or even the strongest feeling/emotion. Love deals with caring about another person and about special ties existing between them. Mostly, the understanding of love is linked to something positive but also it is mentioned that love could turn into a bad emotion. One unique definition of love found in the answers is love to be a character rather than an emotion.

Another comparison can be made in the answers about what is not love. A great part thinks that not love is hate, (physical or sexual) attraction and selfishness. In contrast to this, there are two different opinions that the opposite of love is indifference.

With reference to the different kinds of love, it is noticeable that there are many kinds of love existing. The most common kinds of love listed are probably family love, love to a partner, love to friends and love to animals. Also, material love and love to god are mentioned quite a few times. In opposite, kinds of love that are talked about rather seldom are charity, unreturned love and love-hate.

The memories of love, in my eyes, cannot be summarized as each memory is unique.

All in all, love is a complex term which is not easy to be put in words and cannot apply to everybody in the same way.

In our class of Love we were asked to find our personal answers to a few important and, as it occurred to us, quite difficult questions. We described a memory of love, listed what love isn’t in our opinions and even tried to give a definition of love.

The result is a list that speaks of different experiences with love, shows that love is important for everyone and sometimes can have the same effect on different people. To sum it up, our answers mirror the huge topic love with all its variations and special forms.

While looking at the definitions of love it is obvious that there is a huge variety of answers to find. Still, many people put emphasize on the fact that love can be an ambivalent feeling with a negative side and ‘strong’ is the word that is most often linked with it. The combination of unconditional and compromising love was mentioned often which expresses that both kinds of love can exist just not at the same time. Other traits that were mentioned more than once were ‘trust’, ‘bond’, ’safety’, ‘understanding’ and ‘devotion’. Interesting to me is that only two people mentioned everlasting love, which is surprising because it is the typical image of love created by the media. Otherwise many different aspects were listed. One person defined sexuality as the difference in love between lovers and friends whereas another person had troubles finding a difference between liking and loving someone. Sometimes working and making an effort were connected to love but at the same time it was made clear that this doesn’t evoke negative feelings in the context of love. It was even pointed out that love is individual and has nothing to do with the world of advertising. Then there was an interesting point regarding the structure of the answers because a few people didn’t try to form full sentences but instead just gave random associations to the word ‘love’ which nevertheless worked as a definition.

Although the personal definitions were quite different there were many similarities shown in the memories of love. A great number of people wrote about love in the face of departure and constant support without conditions by loved people was the other big topic. In addition memories of love were combined with helping other people, thankfulness and sacrifices made for somebody else’s sake. Some people remembered a secure feeling, the knowledge of what they had to do and experienced that love awoke strengths and possibilities inside of them. On the contrary dying because of love was listed once too and of course Christmas, being the holiday of love, was mentioned twice. It was remarkable that some people chose a memory that has something to do with friendship because in the following section where we were supposed to describe what love is not for us, some people said friendship was not love. This seems to be something were our opinions differ a lot. Another crucial point is that, since most of us listed it as the opposite of love, on the other hand there were only a few people who refused this and pointed out indifference as the opposite. There was a difference made between being in love and falling in love, fear and material-love were listed as well as passion. One time the opposite of love was even described as indescribable. Again there were a lot of arguments found to which most of the people agreed, like dependence, selfishness, war, obsessive-love and abusing-love. The word most used for describing what love isn’t was ‘attraction’ though.

The students had to deal with different questions about love. Almost all of them defined love as a strong wonderful emotion. A lot of them said that love has different states. It can be amazing but it can also hurt. It’s an emotion which connects somebody to a different person or thing.

There was a challenge in defining love because there are so many different ways of love that nobody can exactly say what love is. The important thing about love is that it can be expressed in several ways. The students agreed that love makes somebody feel happy, strong, unbreakable, weightless and a lot more!

All of the students memories are different but they all contain love in many diverse ways. Everyone had to find kinds of love that they already knew and every student wrote down love for their parents and family which is one of the most important kinds. The second most important love is the one for a partner no matter if woman or man.

There is of course the love for material things as well.

The last point was defining what is not love which was really difficult. Hate comes to mind because that’s one of the opposites of love. Also when somebody has to obey to his/her partner then love becomes a dependance and free will is lost, therefore love is dead.

Q1: What is love for you?

In the class answers all definitions of love included at least one of the following key concepts:

totality, reliability, warmth, trust, mutual understanding, honesty, strongest of all emotions, openness, protection, meaning of life.

This intersectional cluster of concepts might be useful to identify traits commonly seen as being a facet of love. Another common feature of the class answers was the reluctance of the participants to express the idea of having found the “final” or even a generalized definition of love. Instead all class members gave highly personalized definitions or even openly refused to label their answer a “definition of love”.
As said in class, there are as many definitions of love as there are individuals. The class answers would suggest this as well.

Unique features of the class answers are the key experiences named by the class members, which made them hold a certain definition of love. Some answers would refer to exemplified love relationships shown by the media, other answers would refer to certain within-family experiences. Although I could identify some common features and similarities of the class answers, I have to say that they are really diverse and interesting.

Q2: Which kinds of love do you know?

When asked to list all the kinds of love they could think of, the class unanimously listed parental love or romantic love. But these commonalities came to an end when “love to your country”, “love for god” and “generalized love” came into play.

The class members have not been asked to provide a ranking of love types, from most to least important for their lives. But I would argue that one has easier access to love concepts which are of personal importance and therefore would put down personally important concepts first.

If it comes to the more “controversial” kinds of love, we see that some class members listed the love “to god” really highly, whereas other class member ditched this kind of love completely from their list. A second observation was, that “love to god” and “love to the country” were very likely to show up in the same answer. They nearly always showed up as a pair.

An especially remarkable answer differentiated types of love which can be expressed by “love between ….” (e.g. other human beings, both “ends” of the love relationship are equally capable of feeling the emotion),  and types of love which can be expressed by the phrase “love for ….” (e.g. love for inanimate objects or abstract concepts like “country” or god). I would argue that all answers included various kinds of “love between”-concepts, but only some used “love for”-concepts as well.

Q3: What memory describes love to you?

A quantitative analysis of the overarching topics of the memory reports reveals the following:

These finding would be somewhat counter intuitive for me and for at least one other class member who wrote:  “First there is the romantic kind of love as mentioned before. This is probably the kind of love most people think of first when trying to define love.”
But when directly asked, the first thing that comes to the people’s minds when thinking of love is: parental love. I think this is really interesting, because it reveals how over-emphasized romantic love is in our perception. My classmate and I would expect others to think of romantic love, although we would not do so. Why? [Hypothesis/speculation]: Because media is busy teaching us the all importance of romantic love, romantic partnership and its sweets and so on and so on.
It would be interesting to find out how common this misconception is among other classmates/people who list parental love as most important

What is love to you?

Some class mates wrote in personal style like “to me love is…” and some used an impersonal form like “one” which in my mind is very interesting. What could that mean? I think it reflects how difficult it is for some of them to talk about love in a personal way.

There are also people from other countries who grew up in different cultures and might have another idea of love. Thus love is something cultural.

Some describe love as an adventure, or state of mind others do not even dare to define love but the majority agrees that love is the strongest emotion one can have for another person.

Words that are often connected with love were: positive and negative, trust, intimacy, being fulfilled, happiness but also pain, fellowship, altruism, beautiful and dangerous.

Memories of love…

…most of the students in love class experienced parental love. It seems to be for most of us the most important experience of love. Closely related with parents also is family and home. Some experienced love in from of friendship and others by having to say good bye or being separated from the person(s) they love. Through altruistic actions like surprises or getting a guardian angel some class mates noticed how much they mean to a certain person. One of us had an experience of love and after that he/she said: love is to do everything so that the person you love can happy.

Kinds of love

Almost everybody mentioned parental love and love for your siblings. Very important are also love between friends and a partner as well as love for animals and God.  People also wrote down different ways to love such as unconditional love others added love for oneself or materialistic and sexual love.

What is not love to you?

The saying from Elie Wiesel (“The opposite of love is not hate it is indifference”) has been mentioned and sums pretty much up what the rest of the class said: love is not obsession, selfishness, pure sexual love, material love, war, jealousy, sexual abuse, betrayal. Some also thought hate would not be love. I really liked the phrase:

“love is not love if you don´t let it happen…”

When I had to write a definition of love I just used some keywords because I think it wasn’t that easy to give a “right” answer to such a huge topic. I think some of my classmates had the same problem but for others it seemed to be quite clear. Some put (like me) already the good and the bad sides of love in. Maybe they had made already some (bad) experiences?

A lot of people think of love in a relationship, so they weren’t thinking that much about love in general but about love as a couple and how it gives you shelter and forces you to make compromises. For some people there is a big difference between like/love (what might be a German problem, we already talked about this in the course) for some not apart from sexuality.

Of course our memories of love differ a lot. Some students thought about a special situation others about a condition. They were thinking about the love of their parents, love of their family members, love they felt when a person died, how they suffered because of love, the safety they felt and love on a special day (Christmas for example).

We all mentioned a lot of kinds of love. Most of us started with the love in the family, in a relationship, between friends and continued with the love to animals and things like nature, your home country, God, art, things someone loves to do. Some mentioned the different kinds of love in a relationship like this can be just physical love, obsessive, platonic or unreturned. I think concerning this question our answers were all quite similar.

Most people wrote about “bad love” in a relationship when they should consider what not love for them means. This shows how strong this word touches us. Maybe because everyone has at least some fears of not being loved or to love someone without being loved in return.

Our opinions about love are different, but there are only a few unique answers. Most aspects in the definitions are mentioned at least by two people. Some described love as the strongest and most important emotion. Without love life would not be worth living.  One quality of love for many of us seems to be warmth and security. That means to “feel at home“ in the presence of somebody. Therefore it is possible to act without fear and to be yourself. Trust and honesty might be preconditions for that.

Next to the happy aspects, effort and sacrifice seem to belong to love as well. If you love someone you are willing to do everything for that person and giving might be crucial in a relationship. Furthermore love to a person is defined as being part of the beloved. A special connectivity is described.

Only one person is of the opinion that love means danger, this can be understood together with vulnerability, because when in love you open yourself and therefore you might get hurt. Unique was the definition of love that love is goodness and fellowship.

In addition only one other student explained that love wants to be expressed constantly.

Most memories of love have something to do with the family. The family seems to be the most important source for love. So three people described a situation where it was clear that the family's love is very strong. The Family or the parents in particular would do everything for you. It is clear that they love you unconditionally. Whatever fault you may do, they will always love you. That gives a feeling of security especially if family members get together. The Christmas-situation as example was mentioned twice. Next to this the relationship to your brothers and sisters can be very strong. It is compared to being in your own world.  Next to this departing and saying “I love you” is described as very emotional.  Other people remembered a situation of love in connection with their partner. Especially missing that person lets you feel love. Two people describe it as painful to be away from the beloved. On the other hand one person emphasized the closeness to the partner as special.  Another memory was about charity work. The person did something for children and they showed him/her how happy they were about it. They gave back love. The opposite is explained as well. One student felt that he/she received love from a stranger. He helped although he did not have to. It was an act of human kindness. Other memories have their origin in friendship. Friends who think of you and support you make you feel beloved.

In conclusion one could say that the class remembers love at first in connection with the family. But there are memories about the partner, friends or even strangers as well.

“I´m sure nobody ever can define love because it is such a broad theme.” 

Hardly any one of us really tries to find a definition for love. The texts are more like a collection of impressions. Everyone has experienced love in his or her life. So everyone has learned about love all life-long. One can find a lot of personal experiences and expectations in our ideas. Some of us might have been hurt lately and some of us seem to be happy in a relationship. I do not think that our answers where too much influenced by the media but maybe our experiences are. Maybe we love the way we do because we also learn what love is by using the media. I think it is interesting that if we look for a definition the first thing we think of seems to be romantic love but most of our Love-Memories stories were about family and friends.

There were quite a few answers that compare the feeling of love with feeling at home. The fast moving pace of our high-technology world seems to make us desire privacy but shared with somebody. There is one answer that says that it makes love very special to spend a moment with someone in silence. I think that is right. It has to be love, to feel happiness that does not need any words to be expressed.

Almost the whole Class of Love seems to agree that love is an emotional feeling. For most of us love has to be connected with happiness. Some of us wrote that the absence of love would have the most terrible consequences. I think most of us would agree that a world without love would not be a nice place to live.

Just a few notes where given that love hurts from time to time. I was wondering if that is because most of the class do think that love that hurts is not to be defined as true love or if we just forgot about that part because we can just think of a lot of nice things when we are thinking of love.

You will find different opinions what love in a relationship is when you read through our answers. Someone wrote:  “I would do nearly everything and I cannot imagine not spending the rest of my life in contact with the person”. I am not sure if there are a lot of relationships unconditional at all time, most likely the love of a mother to her child (like somebody else defined unconditional love). Some of us are looking for total honesty; others talk about respect. One might go with the other but sometimes the truth hurts. Does one really want to know if ones partner finds someone else extremely attractive? Is it some kind of a sacrifice that love comes with to just accept this fact even if it hurts to know?

Summary of the class answers

Reading through the answers was a lot of fun to begin with. I personally found it very helpful to get an impression on how the other students feel about love, how they define it, what their own memories are. The answers to the questions gave me a great picture of the different understandings and interpretations of love however so I found it very interesting and fun, too.

There are some answers that are very unique and personal but some were very similar which surprised me in some cases. Very special and unique are the different definitions of love. While almost everyone agrees on the basic term of love being an emotion the further details differ very much. Some say that love definitely includes affection or even physical attraction others link love with terms like openness, reliability, connection, loyalty, faith and so on. Someone even says that love cannot be defined at all because the word includes so many things and has so much to it that a definition could never represent everything.

The answers given to the question “What is not love?” were very similar in many cases which I find surprising. I would never have thought that words like “obsession” or “material love” appeared that often in the people’s answers. You may think people think of “hate” first which would be the direct opposite term to love but I think that the answers go so much deeper that just finding an opposite to love so I enjoyed reading these answers a lot.

The answers to the questions of memories of love is my favourite part of the survey.

I think it’s awesome that everyone answered so honestly and detailed about their own memories of love. It’s brave and moving. What my fellow class members have written and some of the statements almost brought me to tears to be honest. The memories were very personal and again surprisingly similar at some points. Most of the time people mentioned situations with family members as the greatest memory of love. The love between or received by parents were stated often just like the love to one’s sister, brother or grandparents.

Last but not least the answers to the kinds of love question are interesting to go trough as well because the people’s explanations are much shorter, sometimes only in keywords, but somehow yet very significant, I think.

Here the love to animals or to chocolate is mentioned continuously just to give two examples. I think it’s great that other terms beside the classic romantic love are going through people’s minds when they think about all kinds of love. I’m convinced that so many different kinds of love exist so I find it great to read through all those lists of non-stereotype love.

All in all I think that awesome answers were given to the “questions of love”. Sometimes the answers are similar and yet unique because people may refer to situations that seem alike but in the end the particular connection to love is always different. I enjoyed reading the answers and I think it’s awesome to get all that honesty back since I answered the questions very honestly myself.

Definitions of love

Starting with the definition, which directly refers to an enormous ambivalence made me thoughtful. Love is described as the “strongest” and “most […] dangerous” feeling one could possibly have. I think that referring to danger in connection with love, gives the whole topic a new brisance. It completely outshines all the positive aspects to which all of our projects refer and gives us an impression that one should never “play” with such a feeling.

Another general aspect which captured my attention was the fact that a lot of definitions were referring to love as a feeling connected to a person (c.f.: “longing for another person”, “the affection for somebody”, “wanting to be around someone”). One might argue that these persons didn’t consider the whole “field” of love, but on the other hand, this might be exactly their personal relation with the feeling of “love”. In fact the, most fascinating definitions were based on individualism and simply expressing kind of ‘own’ words which are connected with love (only based on one single person), e.g.: “work, problems, tears, pain”.

Memories of love

Well, an overload of information… I could spent hours reading through these stories again and again, because they immediately give me insights into situations which are so ‘real’ and let me drift away in a daydream each time.

Most of the time I am feeling at “home” whilst reading the excerpts and they show me that each of us has his own little home in love. What does it mean having your own little home in “love”? Well, it is in a sense referring to the point that love might also be a feeling of our inner “home”, a home we carry with us, every time we leave?
For me it is amazing to see that so many of us connected their memories about love to childhood memories or memories connected to their families and especially with their parents. I think love in this section is mostly characterized as a feeling of goodness, but also a feeling which is in somehow something KNOWN, something FAMILIAR which makes us REMEMBER the GOOD parts of our past!

Kinds of love

Well, of course there are many different kinds of love that are mentioned in this chapter, but what is really interesting about it?

I personally think that one could easily see a connection between the memories and the kinds of love which are presented. As mentioned above, a lot of people focused on memories connected to family love, so that there is an important connection between these two points as nearly everyone mentioned “family love”, “love to parents”, “maternal love” or something equivalent.

The kinds of love which really kept my interest were the following: “love to a city”, “love for things that cause emotions in you” and especially “live-love”. This is probably the simplest and most obvious “kind” of love, but it certainly is one of the most important aspects to cope with.

I am personally of the opinion that this kind of love is the one which most of us forget about and which needs to be displayed in a different light in the world of today. Simply loving life isn’t that easy anymore, right? We are always trying to find our “perfect” love partner, the perfect relationship, the perfect proof of love, but what about simply loving our own lives without thinking about something related to it? Isn’t it that we are always complaining, but more and more forget about what ‘this’ is all about? Our life?

Another really important aspect was the following: “love doing something“ – first of all, I thought this is a very pragmatical thought, but then I realized that this is actually what we might call or consider as “passion” for certain things. Especially in the sentence “Maybe it is very exciting or fun, maybe you can express yourself in that way.” – I realized that this is another form of love which is really valuable – valuable in a sense that you can really express your personality with this kind of love.

What is not love?

As I have finished the description on ‘Kinds of love’ with a description of “passion” for certain things, I am very much wondering about the comment that “passion is not love. “ – How could that be? Doesn’t passion mean that you are really into something, something you wouldn’t easily give away?

It is also interesting that there is a lot of controversy on “hate”, a lot of my classmates expressed that the opposite of love can’t be hate, but is rather a kind of “indifference”, meaning that there are no feelings at all.

To put it in a nutshell, I think that talking about love in various circumstances gives us the opportunity to see different opinions, character traits, as well as the full variety of our culture.

“Love is a language spoken by everyone, but understood only by a heart“ is a quote by Shirley Rindani. It shows we know what love is but we can’t really describe it. I got this feeling when I read the answers. Most of the people wrote that love is one of the strongest feelings we know, that we should respect each other in order to be able to experience love, that this emotion is very special, that it means unconditional love and happiness. However I have the impression that no one could give an exact definition what love really is, but they know what it is. For some class members love is a “dangerous feeling”, it’s an “emotion produced by biological processes”, it’s an exciting adventure and that love is a state of mind, not an emotion. One person even stated love isn’t an emotion on its own, its an emotion including many others like happiness. I thought this is a great idea as it could explain why we have such problems to define love.

The answers for the memories were quite similar, the majority thought of a situation with their family. The family always plays a great role in supporting, helping through difficult situations. Other moments in life such as a year abroad also played a significant part in the writers’ lives, as they were missing their families, friends, and therefore they got to know how much love and support they actually get from these persons. Christmas is a further example, for 2-3 people it is a holiday representing love and the family, it’s a time when you realize how tight a family bonding can be, how much love you receive from your friends, family or others.

However one answers astonished me, the idea that the grandfather dies 6 months later than his wife. I am certain that is one of the most powerful memories of love one could possibly have.

When I looked at the answers for the “Kinds of Love”, I didn’t read one unique answers, perhaps I did, but it didn’t seem to me as one. The majority always writes about all sorts of love, such as: unconditional, friends’, parental, animals’, God’s, partner’s, self- and maternal love.

The definitions for what is not love, weren’t very similar at all. There were still some similarities such that love is not attraction, lust, pain, being selfish or hate. However the majority of the answers were completely different. One wrote material love isn’t real love, like eating chocolate, but in the previous question “Kinds of love” others stated the material love, as real love! So what it right? For one person arranged marriage is not love, for another close friendship is not love and a different answer states the colour black as the opposite of love. In my opinion a great, unique answers is love is not love if you don’t let it happen. For a few people hate was the opposite of love, but the quote by Ellie Wiesel says “The opposite if love is not hate, it’s indifference”. I think there is no right or wrong answer concerning love, it’s your personal feeling and this can change like the answers do.