Love is…?

Yesterday I gave you a preview of one of the lessons that I’m presenting in a local high school. The students did their homework on a number of questions about love. They were as follows:

1.    What is love?
2.    What is “in love?”
3.    What is romance?
4.    What is intimacy?
5.    What is attraction?
6.    What are boundaries?
7.    What is commitment?
8.    What is trust, fidelity, and loyalty?

Explain the significance and importance of these questions.

We picked out two of the most interesting answers to question 1 from the 10th grade class. One student said “A mutual attraction between two people that is one step above ‘like.’ There’s a different intensity when love is involved.” Another student said, “Love is trust, understanding, respect, and fondness.” He also noted that “love is an abstract concept.”

In response to question of the overall significance of the questions, here are two responses that, although very different in attitude and approach, are both thought-provoking.

One student wrote: “To be honest, these questions seem stupid. Maybe for others they are helpful, but to me, they seem like a waste of time. Why? Because you can’t learn these things from a textbook or other people, these are things the individual experiences, and if anybody wants to trust a dictionary or textbook definitions for this, it certainly isn’t me.”

Another responded: “The importance of these questions is that it covers so many diffent aspects of relationships. If a person does not know the answer to these questions, I think it would be very hard for them to be in a relationship.”