Is it possible to explain love? Is refusing to explain love superstitious or practical?

Love is like what you said, unexplicable, cannot always be understood and somehow special. We might not know what we love in others as it may be alot of stuff, but when people are << why do you love me? >> they usually want some reassurance that the other is not just fooling around. For example, I have previously asked this question, when a guy once told me he loved me, and he had no reason wat so ever other than: you are pretty and hot! That way, i discovered he does not know who i am, how can he love me? therefore, he is just another desperate person or a player fooling around. Love might not be fully explicable, but some parts of it are.

cynically I could say…survival instinct
it is magic… magic of survival
survival is life
life is magical

love is not a feeling, is an ability if you feel butterflies in your stomach, that is something you ate

Love isn’t magic. It’s not a super-mystical state of being, imo. It’s about action- not feelings. Love isn’t a feeling at all. Love is being safe, calm and loving. The feelings people say love are, aren’t love. Correlation not causation.

I’m inclined to say that love can be explained in terms of how one defines one’s selfhood. Love is at least a partial breakdown of the self-other barrier, a blurring of the distinction between the lovers. Since that distinction is our own creation, we can negate it as well, and allow our own self concept to bleed into another and entangle with it. What is self and what is other is no longer so clear. Self-interest extends to this new, larger entity. This appears mysterious because we understand the nature of the self so poorly. We tend to think of it as something fixed, and substantial, so we’re puzzled when it exhibits its provisional nature.

Surely true love runs deeper than any words can explain and any response to the question Why do you love me is going to be either incredibly shallow or you’ll be there for a very long time, listening to a ream of answers that barely scathe the surface.

I’m not sure it’s possible to explain love, but I feel like we must keep trying. In addition to the personal quest of explaining our personal feelings for someone we care about, the quest to explain love is one of the greatest forces in art, music, and literature.
Without the goal of explaining love and its expressions, we wouldn’t have most of the Beatles canon, Sidney Carton’s poignant lines of sacrifice (for love), or countless other things. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wouldn’t have had to count, and the Carpenters wouldn’t have noticed the avian arrival. As a society, we must try to explain love, even if we never can.

Love is an attraction based on sexual desire, one that facilitates procreation. Physiologically, it bears a striking similarity to disease, being a series of biochemical responses that trigger an emotional cascade, impairing normal functioning.

Love is explainable.
The corporations want you to believe it’s not.
Otherwise you won’t spend that much money for Valentine’s Day.

Love is the on ramp to the rest of your life.

I think that attraction is what just happens and can’t be avoided..you just feel it, not just in a romantic way, but you also feel attracted to other people because they share the same toughts or ideas as you do and that’s how friendship starts.. so I think that romantic attraction is what “happens” and you cant explain it.. but love per se.. is more like a decission.. and a very conscious one. At some point the original atraction changes.. and you start to think about the other person, the posibilities, the future with each other.. and those are decisions.

oh, and I do think that trying to avoid explaining it is supersticious…at least for me, I pretty much question everything around me.. me included, So for us, people who are constantly trying to rationalize things it’s just natural at one point to think.. is this love? or is this not? what is love?.. it sucks but, it’s the way it is.

I think examining it too closely for a lot of people is somewhat superstitious. I hold the opinion that the more you examine it, the more powerful it becomes – not the other way around. It re-enforces a bond and connection that is already there. And, I also feel that… How can it ever be a bad thing to explain why you love someone? It makes your partner feel good, it makes you feel good, etc. Isn’t love about feeling good?

I don’t care how much crap rains down on me for saying this, but love without reasons isn’t love at all, in my opinion.

Some things don’t really need to be explained. Love is a legitimate emotion that we feel. Just because we don’t constrain and define it doesn’t make it any less real.

Outside of the fact that I feel very comfortable with my loved ones, and when they’re happy, I’m happy, I don’t have the foggiest why, so trying to explain it would simply be a waste of time.

Might as well as why I shiver when I’m cold, and I get tired when I walk too much. How does my brain make my foot go up and down, and where does the Universe start? I have no idea.

Of course there are neurobiological explanations. But under normal circumstance they take away all the wonderful magic related to love.

After reading this, I am clear that there are two different points of view about this, and it seems like there is significant distance between them.

Now I’m wondering how to explain this difference. Is it religious? Is it education level? Is it something about upbringing? To tell you the truth, I’m at a loss to explain this. It seems like there are too many factors involved and too much variation in them for there to be any correlation.

I’m also wondering what happens when a person who values explanations falls in love with a person who thinks explanations are anathema? It seems like there would be a lot of misunderstanding there. The magic person would think the explanation person was needy, and the explanation person would think the magic person isn’t very insightful. Would that be enough to keep such relationships from happening? Seems like it could.

@daloon From personal experience… It sucks. It hurts pretty badly, actually.

@DrasticDreamer I’m sorry. I hope that what you learned has made you a bit more successful since then.

I think love goes beyond just a feeling. Love is a verb. You act out on it. That’s not only just cuddling, or even having sex, but what I mean by love being a verb is you would take your life just so that person could live. You couldn’t see them go through any pain. Your love for them runs so deep, you practically share a heart.