What is Love?

Hmm. Yes. Love is very interesting thing. So many different ideas about what it is.
I find "The end of love and hate" by Amaro as very interesting. He mentions sticky, possessive, restrictive, attachment, fixed views, type of love.

I see love as a commitment to doing the next right thing. Being willing to go to any lengths (p76,79, AA Big Book) to do so. Whether my feelings support that aspiration or not.
But I like the aspiration of abandoning all craving. All clinging. "let go absolutely' (p58, AA Big Book) ..as they say
Being able to hold the moment. (not feverishly cling to it) Understand that it is beautiful, but not cling to it or hang on to it longer than it will last. Ask more of the moment than it can deliver.
All beautiful moments pass away and are replaced by other moments. The craving mind is the enemy (for want of a better word) that destroys the peace. Not the inevitable passing of all conditioned reality. The coming and going of all people places and things. 'This too shall pass' as they say. well yes. It does.

Like an aa member in my home group said ? ages ago. Pain is not caused by change. It is caused by RESISTANCE to change.

But I see resistance as nothing more than the CRAVING mind. Trying to hold on to an 'old idea'. (p58, AA Big Book)
It is the craving, the clinging that is the cause of the suffering. Not the conditions.
Anyway, I think you would find Amaros explanation of love and hate as very interesting.

At 16.56 minutes in the talk called "We Are More Than Our Feelings" Munindo talks about fully surrendering to the delight of the moment without getting 'lost' in it. A quiet knowing of the relativity of experience. The impermanence. Its a fabulous talk. Well I think so.

I like Tom's description of love, in his myspace post called "Run from the heard"

"What I find most odd is the extreme confusion over such a simple concept as Love. As a society, we've grown so self-obsessed that most confuse love with lust, and have totally lost the notion of Love as a perfect ideal that's unchanging, true, and an object to die for. It's quite a simple concept when you think about it. However, it's easy for selfish desires to "drug" within us any notion of objective idealism, creating deep rooted subjective confusion. So we can now actually believe such erroneous statements as "we are no longer in love," or "we grew apart," etc. to explain failed relationships.

C.S. Lewis said that "we don't fall into and out of Love like bathwater." Precisely. If we are in Love, we shall forever be in Love. If we presume to have fallen out of Love, then we were never in love in the first place.

The disheartening fact that most relationships break-up or end in divorce suggests that most, sadly, never find true love. But how can they, when they've lost the notion of a perfect ideal to some ever-changing, relativistic lustful feeling construed as Love? I read recently that 10 out of the last 11 relationships on The Bachelor have failed. Well is it any surprise when there's no aspiration to common values, morals, or spiritual beliefs – the necessary elements of Love? Isn't it all rather self-centered chaos ending in recycled failure? When shall we break this tiresome cycle of recycled errors?

I'm not jaded; I'm just not drugged. Whatever I do in this life, I shall not be a herd statistic, and conform to a pervasive and undermining motive of self-centeredness. I'd rather die trying to discover a perfect ideal implanted in my heart by a higher Source, a perfect notion of Love, everlasting beyond Time immemorial, a Love that is the "same yesterday, today and forever," not dependent on fleeting feeling or emotion, though the cause of romantic emotion, beyond happiness and sadness, and underpinned by godly morals and values."

He's linked on my blog in my list of 'people I like' as opposed to an alcoholic blogger. An interesting guy. He's very !! much IN the world, but not OF it. Nice bloke.