Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Miscellaneous Love4 Love4 Love has many different meanings to different people. For a four-year-old, love is marrying her daddy when she grows up. For an elementary school kid, love is what he or she feels for his or her best friend, who also serves as a boyfriend or girlfriend. To a fifteen-year-old boy, love is what he should feel for his girlfriend of the moment, only because she says she loves him. But as we get older and “wiser,” love becomes more and more confusing. Along with poets and philosophers, people have been trying to answer that age-old question for centuries: What is love? One definition of love in The Merriam-Webster dictionary is “attraction based on sexual desire” (439). Some people believe that love and sex are one in the same. If two people are in love, they should be having sex. And, on the flipside, if two people are having sex, they must be in love. However, this assumption is obviously not always true. Whether it is right or not to have sex without love is irrelevant; the fact is it happens. Just because a person is sexually attracted to another person and has the desire to have sex with that person does not necessarily suggest that this person is in love. He or she could very well be experiencing a feeling of lust. Yes, love can be very sexual when a person is really in love. The speaker in Denise Levertov’s “Love Poem” explains her love as This passage obviously alludes to sex, but sex is not completely necessary when there is love. The speaker in Sharon Olds’ “Sex without Love” asks, “How do they do it, the ones who make love / without love?” (1-2). Love is deeper and more meaningful than just physical or sexual attraction. Love is a feeling--an emotion. Love is also defined in the dictionary as “strong affection,” “warm attachment,” and “unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for others” (439). All of these definitions are completely correct, but the dictionary does not explain how it feels to love someone. The reason that an explanation for this feeling is not found in the dictionary may be because love is so different for each individual person. In my experience, “strong affection” does not even begin to cover the sensation and emotions a person feels when he or she is in love. Love is compared to “the extraordinary sun / splashing its light / into astonished trees” in Denise Levertov’s “Love Poem” (2-4). Like the sun, love is great and bright and fills a person with extreme joy. Love is greater than anything else a person could ever experience. A lover can even be better than a summer’s day, as the speaker in Shakespeare’s poem suggests. He compares his lover to a summer’s day by saying that she is “more lovely and more temperate” (2) and that her “eternal summer shall not fade” (9). True love is marvelous and eternal. Some say love is indescribable, and to some extent, it is. But the reason it is so hard to describe love is because love is so different for each individual. A person can look up the meaning of love in eighty different dictionaries and never find a definition that explains exactly what he or she is feeling. Love is wonderful, it hurts, it is great, it is happy; love is anything a person perceives it to be. So, these poets and philosophers who have been searching for the answer to the question “What is love?” for centuries are ultimately wasting their time. The answer to the question can only be answered by the people who are asking it. They just need to look into their hearts and find it for themselves. Bibliography: Works Cited Levertov, Denise. “Love Poem.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Shorter Seventh Edition. Ed. by Jerome Beaty and J. Paul Hunter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. 613. The Merriem-Webster Dictionary. Third edition. Ed. by Fredrick C Mish. Springfield: Merriam-Webster, 1997. Olds, Sharon. “Sex Without Love.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Shorter Seventh Edition. Ed. by Jerome Beaty and J. Paul Hunter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. 708. Shakespeare, William. “[Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day]. The Norton Introduction to Literature. Shorter Seventh Edition. Ed. by Jerome Beaty and J. Paul Hunter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. 612. Word Count: 642
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