According to the Oxford American Dictionary “…Love is any of a number of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection”. This is the “officially accepted” definition of love. Nevertheless, it is necessary to mention that love is notion that has caused many arguments concerning its meaning throughout the ages. Many people have tried their best to define this phenomenon but each person puts individual interpretation in it and therefore a priori there cannot be any objective definition of the term “love”. Love in psychological terms does not contain only positive aspects as it is usually stated.
Love is a unique feeling of respect, adoration, desire for a given individual or “object” which eventually makes the person to become one whole entity and at the same time reveals the dependence on the object of love as a carrier of a unique combination of the proportion of certain qualities or peculiarities. In terms of psychological aspects, love has a dual character as it shapes the personality of the person from two positions: the first one brings happiness, harmony and adoration not only for a given “object” but to the world around; the second brings a misbalance and dependence on the presence of a given person in the life and in the world around. In other words love is strength and love is weakness of the consciousness of any individual.
The first half of the definition states that love is the person’s psychological strength. By this statement it is assumed that it makes the person stronger through the harmonization of the personality or in other words through obtaining a constant source of positive emotions. Such side of love deals with the person’s self-acquisition. This is especially important due to the fact that a person on his own is a closed system and love as an attachment to another person or object opens this system and makes it complete. For instance, a person who starts experiencing the unique feeling of affection, attachment, respect, adoration and desire for a given person or objects become generally psychologically stable. This stability occurs as the result of the person being concentrated on this given “object” and receiving a vast amount of positive emotions communicating with this object. This is always a good stimulus for any kind of activity. As the person tends to prolong the emotional harmony he becomes psychologically mature enough to take certain responsible steps required to be with the loved “object”.
In other words, love implies the mobilization of the psychological resources of the person. This is the reason when people do love, sometimes they do things they wouldn’t ordinary do. The loved object provides the person with the psychological protection from all obstacles.
On the other side, in the second half of the definition states that love is a weakness. In terms of the psychological health of the person love brings misbalance and dependence on the loved object. The person cannot imagine the life without the loved object and the mood depends on the ability to interact with “it”. The person starts experiencing fear of loosing the meaningful other, sometimes the desire to makes everything perfect results in unnecessary actions, thoughts, quarrels. The weakness of love is the impossibility to live a “happy” life, the impossibility to be a harmonic personality without the loved person. For instance, if a person starts numerous attempts to please the meaningful other, if the amount of compromises increases form day to day, if even the though that something might happen to that person tears the heart this is the point where the weakness of love comes into play. The weakness is that the person can agree to do something that normally would consider being a humiliation or a step away from the principles.
Love truly is strength but it is also a weakness with all its compromises the person does. Love is not just a fairy tale with no negative manifestations. It has two sides: the white and the black, where the end of one is the beginning of the other. The truth is that love is tremendously difficult to define and is one of those terms that will be always argued and analyzed. Loves gives a lot to the person and also takes a lot from him as the price for the good. Maybe it is how the balance of the universe is achieved. Or maybe love is the strength of the weak and the weakness of the strong?