I keep thinking about the nature of Love in America and how so many people seem to have a really fucked up definition of “love”.  It got me to thinking about our language as compared to other languages and how we only really have the one word to describe a wide variation in emotional states.  Whether we’re talking about our friends, our lovers, our parents, our Higher Power, or anyone or anything we feel great attachment for, we use the word “love”.  It seems to me like that’s begging for a lot of confusion, not to mention abuse.

I am not surprised that the English language has only one commonly used word to describe so many states of emotional connection since it’s historically accurate to say that the English-speaking world has done everything it can to strip the uniqueness out of the cultures it has conquered and absorbed, including their words.  While we may be able to tell all manner of people in our lives, “I love you,” that does not carry the depth of, for example, the Arabic word ya’aburnee, which means “you bury me” as an expression of love so deep for another person they could not bear to be without them.  Related is the Arabic phrase amoot feek, meaning “I die in you”, meant to express the sense of refuge the person feels in the other’s presence.

English requires whole poems to express these things.  There’s nothing wrong with that, as English poetry is some of the most beautiful on Earth and, I feel, an example of an irrepressible impulse within all people to express deeply felt commonalities and connections, regardless of how hard some have worked to suppress and sever those connections.

These ruminations about Love were brought on not only by examining various expressions of so-called “love” in my personal life, as well as by observing how others define love in our highly polarized culture, one in which nearly everyone is familiar with the horrible phenomenon of being hurt in the name of “love”.  I had to think about how to do this truthfully and kindly, which would be difficult since it’s hard to pick apart what’s wrong with our society’s concepts of Love without being seriously critical of Christianity in general.

I decided the only real way to do that was by being critical of the institution while praising the man it was built around, because as strange as it may seem for a witch to say, I think the myth of Jesus is a great one.  It just got horribly perverted.  If Jesus was a real person, which I believe he was, he merely experienced the same Awakening that Buddha and many others have, only viewed through the lens of his Middle Eastern existence rather than a Far Eastern one.  Why the Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Sikhs, and Jains followed a more peaceful path than their cousins to the West is probably an unanswerable question, but it’s one I’m curious about.

Love has had multiple definitions in many other cultures since time immemorial.  Due to the influence of Ancient Greek culture upon our own, we are most familiar with the varying types of love provided by the Ancient Greeks.  The most used ones are as follows.

• philia: friendly or platonic love
• eros: romantic love
• storge: familial love
• philautia: self-love (not that kind 😆)
• xenia: guest love
• agape: divine or unconditional love
• pragma: practical love
• mania: obsessive love

The root word philia can be seen in the name of the city Philadelphia, which translates to its English name, the City of Brotherly Love (adelphos = brother).  Eros is the root of erotic.  Those of a Christian bent may be familiar with agape, as that is the spiritual Love intended in the Scriptures.  Pragma is the root for pragmatic.  Last but not least, most of us are familiar with the concept of mania, whether for a person or other object of obsession.  Collectors fall under this umbrella of obsessive love.

Wikipedia was able to provide yet more types of love:

• unrequited love
• empty love
• companionate love
• consummate love
• infatuated love
• courtly love

One can see how definitions of love change over time and by culture, evolving and expanding to accommodate new ideas regarding Love.  The second list of definitions of Love are much more informed by later Christian spiritual and European cultural notions rather than the earlier Greek definitions, though some concepts exist on both levels, such as mania and infatuation.

I was able to create a list of English synonyms for Love, which greatly expand the vocabulary of Love in our language.

English synonyms for Love

• adoration
• affection
• appreciation
• attachment
• attraction
• charity
• devotion
• fondness
• friendship
• infatuation
• liking
• lust
• passion
• regard
• respect
• tenderness
• yearning

I tried to think of other types of Love beyond these and could only come up with ‘ferocious love’: love expressed with a warrior-like ferocity, a love that will do anything for its object of affection, but not in a manic-like or obsessive manner.  This is “I would kill and die for you” Love.  If there is a word in English or another language for this type of Love, I’m not sure what it is if it isn’t bhakti, the Sanskrit word for ‘devotion’.

Once I got done with my linguistic exploration of Love in English, I turned to other languages to give more breadth and depth to my own notions of Love.  Once again, Wikipedia came to the rescue, with multiple pages on varying concepts and types of what we call Love.  Reading over these differing definitions of love and related terms from other cultures made me see that Love is a multifaceted concept that applies to many situations.

It is also potentially the deepest emotion one can feel, and in that sense it has been a cultural crime for Western civilization to have demoted Love to a confusing, two-dimensional concept that too often causes more problems than it solves, which is not the intent of Love.  Many of the terms below are the cultural result of long periods of collective philosophizing about the nature of love and relationships.  In the West, we are not encouraged to ask questions or philosophize, we’re just supposed to do what we’re told and believe what those in authority tell us to.

I also note with interest that amongst these dozens of definitions and types of Love from around the world, not a single one speaks of violence, oppression, enslavement, narcissistic domination, or assault of any type.  Those things are antithetical to Love, and anyone engaging in these behaviors while using the word “love” or any of its synonyms should be assiduously avoided.

My personal exploration of the notion of Love was important on a personal level.  Due to the extraordinarily dysfunctional nature of my home life, I grew up with some extremely distorted perceptions of Love and what it was supposed to mean.  As a result, throughout my adult life, I was unable to properly experience Love, on any level.  I had affection for people, but real Love eluded me until my Awakening, and that merely signified the beginning of a longer Journey of discovering what Love really is.  I’m happy to say that I now have a much better idea of what healthy Love is supposed to feel like, and my heart does not feel so empty anymore.

Other cultures

• aware (Japanese) – the feeling of bittersweet joy that comes from a moment you know won’t last
• arbejdsglæde (Danish) – the feeling of satisfaction and joy that comes from loving your job
• bhakti (Sanskrit: Hinduism): “attachment, participation, fondness for, homage, faith, love, devotion, worship, purity”; “participation, devotion and love for any endeavor, while in the Bhagavad Gita, it connotes one of the possible paths of spirituality and towards moksha”; emotional devotionalism to a personal god or spiritual ideals
• cafuné (Portuguese) – gently and lovingly stroking someone’s hair; physical intimacy, not necessarily sexual; physical touch that conveys emotions that words cannot
• cavoli riscaldati (Italian) – an attempt to bring back a romance of the past, literally translated as “reheated cabbage”
• chesed (Hebrew): “‘kindness or love between people’, specifically of the devotional piety of people towards God as well as of love or mercy of God towards humanity“; love or charity between people in Jewish ethics; contributes to tikkun olam, “the healing of the world”; one of the ten Sephirot of the Kabbalah associated with love and kindness (Jupiter), first of the emotive attributes of the Sephirot
• commuovere (Italian) – a story that is so moving you find yourself crying
• cwtch (Welsh) – embracing someone to make that person feel safe
• dor (Romanian) – sadly longing or pining for someone or something
• drachenfutter (German) – an apology gift to your lover
• duende (Spanish) – the emotional power of great art
• fahrvergnügen (German) – the love of driving for its own sake
• fargin (Yiddish) – to find true joy in the success of other people
• fernweh (German) – the feeling of missing a place you haven’t actually been before
• filotimo (Greek) – a friend who is very honorable and deserves respect
• forelsket (Norwegian) – the rush experienced when you first begin to fall in love
• friluftsliv (Norwegian) – the joy of being outside in nature
• gattara (Italian) – a woman who loves cats to the point of devotion
• gigil (Filipino) – the desire to squeeze something because it is cute
• goya (Urdu) – the complete suspension of disbelief that happens when you hear a great story
• házisárkány (Hungarian) – a nagging and unhappy spouse, literally translated as “indoor dragon”
• hiraeth (Welsh) – longing for the past or for a lost homeland
• hygge (Danish) – the relaxing moment of sharing food and drink with friends
• iktsuarpok (Inuit) – the feeling that leads you to look out the window to see if a visitor is coming
• ishq (Arabic): love or passion; “the irresistible desire to obtain possession of the beloved (ma‘shuq), expressing a deficiency that the lover (‘āshiq) must remedy in order to reach perfection (kamāl)”; “its underlying reality is the aspiration to the beauty (al-husn) which God manifested in the world when he created Adam in his own image. The Islamic conception of love acquired further dimensions from the Greek-influenced view that the notions of Beauty, Good, and Truth (al-haqq) “go back to one indissoluble Unity (wahda)”; “used extensively in Sufi poetry and literature to describe a “selfless and burning love” for Allah”; “core concept in the doctrine of Islamic mysticism as is key to the connection between man and God”.
• kama (Sanskrit: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism): pleasure, enjoyment, and desire derived from the senses or emotions; see the Kama Sutra, i.e. “The Pleasure Scripture”
• karuna (Sanskrit): mercy or compassion, self-compassion, spiritual longing; the desire to remove suffering from others (as opposed to metta, the desire to bring about well-being and happiness in others); “far enemy” is cruelty, “near enemy” is pity
• kilig (Tagalog) – the feeling of blushing and getting butterflies in your stomach when you see someone
• koi no yokan (Japanese) – the sense that you could fall in love with a person you only just met
• la douleur exquise (French) – the intense pain that comes from wanting a person who can never be yours
• l’esprit de l’escalier (French) – the feeling of realizing the perfect thing to say too late for the situation
• litost (Czech) – the suffering you feel when you see something that reminds you of how miserable you are
• mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan, Tierra del Fuego) – a look two people exchange when they want to start something but know they should not; “a look that without words is shared by two people who want to initiate something, but that neither will start” or “looking at each other hoping that the other will offer to do something which both parties desire but are unwilling to do”; “an expressive and meaningful silence”
• merak (Serbian) – a feeling of pure bliss in simple, daily pleasures
• metta (Pali, Tibet; also maitri, Sanskrit): loving-kindness, benevolence, friendliness, amity, good will, interest in others; “In Buddhist belief, this is a Brahma-vihara (divine abode) or an immeasurable that leads to a meditative state by being a counter to ill-will. It removes clinging to negative state of mind, by cultivating kindness unto all beings.”, “The “far enemy” of Metta is hate or ill-will, a mind-state in obvious opposition. The “near enemy” (quality which superficially resembles Metta but is in fact more subtly in opposition to it), is (attachment) greed: here too one likes experiencing a virtue, but for the wrong reason.”
• mokita (Kivila) – something that everyone knows is true but no one talks about
• naz (Urdu) – the pride of being unconditionally loved
• noroke (Japanese) – to brag about a person you love
• nunchi (Korean) – the ability to listen carefully to another person and discern his or her mood
• odnoliub (Russian) – someone who is capable of only loving one person or one thing at a time
• oodal (Tamil) – an exaggerated and put-on anger that goes with a lover’s spat
• paasa (Tagalog) – someone who leads another person on, allowing the other person to think they are romantically interested when they are not
• pena ajena (Spanish) – the sense of empathy you have for the embarrassment of someone else
• razbliuto (Russian) – the feeling you get when you think about a person you used to love but don’t love anymore
• ren (Chinese, Confucianism): “cohumanity” or “humaneness”, “the Confucian virtue of the good quality of a virtuous human when reaching for higher ideals or when being altruistic. Ren is exemplified by the functional parental instinctual feelings and intentions of encouragement and protection for their offspring or children”.
• rire dans sa barbe (French) – to laugh quietly to yourself about a funny thing that happened in the past
• saudade (Portuguese) – the feeling of nostalgic longing for a far-away person or place;“happy melancholy”, love for that which is no longer present
• schadenfreude (German) – pleasure at the discomfort or misfortune of others
• torschlusspanik (German) – the fear that you are running out of time to do something important in your life
• toska (Russian) – an overwhelming feeling of misery and boredom
• voorpret (Dutch) – the feeling of great anticipation about an upcoming pleasant experience
• wabi-sabi (Japanese) – the sense that there is beauty in imperfection
• waldeinsamkeit (German) – the feeling of being alone in the woods and connected with nature
• won (Korean) – reluctance to let go of a belief that isn’t real
• ya’aburnee (Arabic) – a statement that you wish to die before someone you love so you don’t have to endure life without that person
• yuanfen (Chinese) – a relationship that was fated or pre-determined; “fateful coincidence”; destiny or luck as conditioned by one’s past; “by assigning causality of negative events to yuanfen beyond personal control, people tend to maintain good relationships, avoid conflict, and promote social harmony; likewise, when positive events are seen as result of yuanfen, personal credit is not directly assigned, which reduces pride on one side of the relationship and envy and resentment on the other.”
• yūgen (Japanese) – the sense that there is much sad beauty and mystery in the universe, especially as it relates to the suffering of people