Love, its Language and Various Prominent Forms
What is Love?
Love is the purest and holiest form of ineffable human emotion and expression with a profound feeling of affection and solicitude towards other human beings, primarily based on kinship or other strong bonding and oneness of relationship, or other living creatures or objects.
What is the language of Love?
Any form of expression or a demonstration of affection requires a language to act as a conveyer. It can be either a spoken language or an unspoken one. Both the spoken and unspoken language of love has various connotations and manifestations but the extent of those are greatly varied and dwells much more in the realm of unknown feelings when expression of love takes the unspoken form.
History of Love and its language
Love is a profound abstract feeling or emotion and hence cannot be measured within the ambit of history and historical events. Love or its language has no origin to be pinpointed. Love has been there always since the beginning of human existence. Only passage of time has mould love and its spoken form of expression into diverse formations and shapes. The Universal unspoken language of love still continues though to be as pristine as it has been since the beginning of time.
Exponents of love
Love is not articulated and manifested by human beings alone. Love in its rugged terrains habit the animal world through innumerable ways and gestures. Several forms of abstract love can be exhibited in many animal species also and even at times in inanimate objects as well. It is only the human beings who have been able to decipher the nuances, connotations, forms, expression and extent of depictions of love in certain parts. That is one aspect of them that makes them unique.
Love cannot be measured
The immense vastness of love is impossible to be fathomed in one human life and poets, writers, painters, musicians and other artistes have made futile attempts for centuries to do so. Many of them have enriched and embellished the expression and embodiment of love through their work, at times even unknowingly! The beauty and innocent purity of love breaths life through such marvel creations, be it poems, novels, music, paintings, art craft or something as honest and as pure as those endeavours. Those have been a quintessential part of humanity over ages.
None can survive without love
No human being in this world can survive without love! This is a very simple statement but has such colossal power that it is etched perpetually in ‘Words of Gold’ in the ‘Continuum of Time and Age’! Even Scientific Researches have vindicated this eternal truth. Those unfortunate souls who have to survive in this world without love eventually die an untimely death from endless longing for it!
Love Poser
How important is love in your life?
Love for God
In the life of a human being love is generally centred on other fellow human beings, mostly their near and dear ones: their parents, siblings, spouses or other love interests, children, relatives, friends or other acquaintances. But a large section of mankind has also deposed their unfailing love in Almighty God. For many of those human beings love for divine is their sole meaning and reason of existence. Without it life has no meaning for them!
Religion has a major role to play in human beings’ love for God, as it acts mostly like a fulcrum around which such love revolves. There are innumerable religions in the world and the image of God visualized and portrayed by each religion and different cultures or traditions worldwide alike is very much contrasting and varied. What is a constant is the love and faith for the divine amid all the differences. So even though it might appear that love for God has diminished due to the existence of countless parallels of God, but in reality it doesn’t make love any less, as love is such a wonderful thing that it only gets augmented by loving, provided it is pure in thought and really heartfelt.
Love for Animals
Animals are fellow living beings to humans and even they cannot survive in this world without love. Many of the animal species give and receive love more freely and in spendthrift manner compared to scores of human beings. It is something that most of them cannot understand, feel or express. Those animals that have somehow developed the unique characteristic of expressing love by means of behavioural patterns and novel gestures has build a special bonding with kind-hearted human beings. Dolphins or dogs could be ideal examples of such rare breed of animals. Their partnership with fellow human friends is a living testimony of the unbounded realm of unspoken language of love and is a real joy of this world!
Mother lovely is the purest form of Love
In case of love among human beings, the love bond between a Mother and her child is probably ‘The Purest Form of Love’ possible. No other human relationship, no matter how firmly bound, can come even close. The sacrifices that a Mother usually makes for her child – beginning from the period of conception and continuing from then onwards – are of the highest degree and order. Taking into consideration the other odds that generally act against her towards her journey through the path of motherhood – particularly the ones posed by society – it makes the sacrifices even greater. And all of these are done with expecting little or nothing but simple love in return. Those two things are hallmarks of real love: ability to make sacrifices and expecting nothing but simple love in return. That’s why if there was ever a form of human love fit to be revered to the status of holiness then it must begin with ‘Motherly Love’.
‘Motherly Love’ can also be manifested even without actually giving birth to a child, as so many adopted mothers have shown over the years, who are either unable to conceive for some medical reason or by choice. Also there are countless other examples of women, members of religious communities having dedicated their life towards service to humanity, like a nun or a sister, who are no less exponents of ‘Motherly Love’. Even though no Scientific Study or research done over the years back this theory, but it generally appears that it is the tender and compassionate innate nature in many women that makes them express ‘Motherly Love’ the way they do. It is hard to generalize – particularly on contentious matters such as this one – at the cost of being let down, but till that time comes this hypothesis is going to hold.
One more thing needs to be added in the end, without which discussion on this aspect of love would be incomplete. Even though both humans and animals are exponents of ‘Motherly Love’, but what separates ‘Motherly Love’ in humans from other animals is that humans carry it throughout their existence from conception, by virtue of their ability to see and perceive things, while animals leave it when the infants grow up to adulthood.
Exhibition of Romantic Love
What comes next in line probably is Romantic Love – the love exhibited among lovers, spouses and other human love interests – particularly as the World is so much obsessed, delirious and hysteric about it. This form of love has lots of flaws, which depicts the seamy side of human nature. Romantic Love is no less from any other form of love mentioned earlier, as if it is exhibited to the desired degree then it has the potential of reaching even celestial heights. It is also another form of love that is very ‘Pure’ by its inherent nature. Only problem is that the exponents of these form of love are not good enough or willing enough to make the sacrifices that are required to take it to the next level and beyond, being stuck in their petty egos and selfishness. Those who have been able to pull them out of such meanness have excelled to Glorified heights – thereby Glorifying Romantic Love in general.
Over centuries Romantic Love has been the Muse of a large part of the sphere of creative art, which includes Poetry, Writing, Painting, Music or other creative art form. To be more precise Romantic Love has been like a means of subsistence for many Poets, Writers or Painters over centuries gone by. Such is the power and aura of Romantic Love and the indelible mark it can leave on Mankind. The legendary play of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by William Shakespeare or the love poems by John Keats would be just a few of such remarkable examples that has given Romantic Love a new life and is still continuing to inspire lovers of this day. Music is no less a source of inspiration, as a matter of fact it is more impacting to many people engaged in a Romantic relationship. That has only made more and more musicians dedicate greater part of their talent and work towards focusing on the aspect of Romantic Love.
There is also one big hurdle that Romantic Lovers had to deal with for ages and continue to do so even to this day. It is the opposition arising out of society, particularly the less-educated or illiterate and backward ones. They are simply tooth and nail against any kind of Romantic relationship for some inane reason or the other that defies all sort of sense or logic. These people are so desperately mad that they go to any extent to throttle ‘Romantic Love’ and kill the foetus in the womb. The ‘Honour Killings’ that happen in countries like India, Pakistan, Middle-East Countries, Sub-Saharan African Countries, parts of U.K. with prominent Asian population, etc. defies all norms and principles of humanity. These depraved heartless murderers have destroyed so many lives and nipped so many blossoming love stories in the bud that a society that breeds such criminals reeks of itself! Pakistan is the champion in harbouring such killers and in India even a gallows threat from Supreme Court is unable to deter such heartless murderers. God only knows when will this mindless bloodbath ultimately stop and where we would end up eventually with such deranged vicious lunatics wreaking havoc in societies comprising of lost and cowardly people!
Platonic Love
Platonic Love is basically such kind of Spiritual Love that transcends the boundaries of bodily needs and desires among humans and treads into the unknown world of spirituality! It is another form of love that is of highest reverence and evokes the purity of the human soul. Noble men and women who are exponents of Platonic love have attained greater heights in spiritual freedom by virtue of their love bonding Platonically. When love as pure and as holy as Platonic love embodies a relationship of love between two human beings then only love in all its purity enlightens itself at the cost of other petty worldly needs and desires. Such an ethereal kind of love is actually one of the real visages of love in all its beauty! Examples of such kind of love can be found among very close friends or family members that have no sexual desire in it but a chaste affection connecting more with the divinity of love. As humans grow with age their love takes more of a Platonic form that connects intangibly with the spiritual aspect of love and depends very little or none on the material needs.
Conclusion
There are countless other forms and examples of Love in this world, some even to the extent of bizarre, but they never make love any less. Love is actually so holy and so pure that it can’t be bound in the ‘Realms of Definition’. Living beings are to define love through the form that is breathed life by their portrayal and expression of love. It’s the heart that relives love while the mind tries to fathom in futile. There is no language, no bounds, no monotony, no narrowness in unending love, yet it has a language of its own that is best depicted in its unspoken form and will continue forever!