baby❤bujji...

                      As we struggle to define love, the ancient Greeks seemed to have no problem at all defining multiple kinds of love.

I think we all go through each stage at one point, but if you want a better definition of the kind of love you give or the kind of love you seek, here are the seven kinds of love according to the ancient Greeks.

1. Eros: Love of the body 
Eros was the Greek God of love and sexual desire. He was shooting golden arrows into the hearts of both mortals and immortals without warning. The Greeks feared that kind of love the most because it was dangerous and could get them into the most trouble. Eros is defined as divine beauty or lust. Eros is mainly based on sexual attraction and it is where the term “erotica” came from.

2. Philia: Love of the mind 
Also know as brotherly love, Philia represents the sincere and platonic love. The kind of love you have for your brother or a really good friend. It was more valuable and more cherished than Eros. Philia exists when people share the same values and dispositions with someone and the feelings are reciprocated.

3. Ludus: Playful love
Ludus is the flirtatious and teasing kind of love, the love mostly accompanied by dancing or laughter. It’s the child-like and fun kind of love. If you think about it; this generation loves Ludus more than anything else.

4. Pragma: Longstanding love
The everlasting love between a married couple which develops over a long period of time. Pragma was the highest form of love; the true commitment that comes from understanding, compromise and tolerance. It is pragmatic this is why it is referred to as “standing in love” rather than “falling in love” because it grows over time and requires profound understanding between lovers who have been together for many years.

5. Agape: Love of the soul
It is the selfless kind of love, the love for humanity. It is the closest to unconditional love. The love you give without expecting anything in return reflected in all charitable acts. It is the compassionate love that makes us sympathize with, help and connect to people we don’t know. The world needs more Agape.

6. Philautia: Love of the self
The ancient Greeks divided Philautia into two kinds: There is one that is pure selfish and seeks pleasure, fame, and wealth often leading to narcissism and there is another  healthy kind of love we give ourselves. Philautia is essential for any relationship, we can only love others if we truly love ourselves and we can only care for others if we truly care for ourselves.

7. Storge: Love of the child
This is the love parents naturally feel for their children. It’s based on natural feelings and effortless love. Storge is the love that knows forgiveness, acceptance and sacrifice. It is the one that makes you feel secure, comfortable and safe.

Defining love can help us discover which kind we need to give more of and which kind we want to receive. If we incorporate Eros, Ludus & Pragma into our relationships and Agape, Philia and Storge into our lives, we will reach Philautia and live a happier life.

Romance is the expressive and pleasurable feeling from an emotional attraction towards another person. This feeling is associated with, but does not necessitate, sexual attraction. For most people it is eros rather than agape, philia, or storge.

In the context of romantic love relationships, romance usually implies an expression of one's strong romantic love, or one's deep and strong emotional desires to connect with another person intimately or romantically. Historically, the term "romance" originates with the medieval ideal of chivalry as set out in its chivalric romance literature.

Humans have a natural inclination to form bonds with one another through social interactions, be it through verbal communication or nonverbal gestures.

General definitions:
The debate over an exact definition of romantic love may be found in literature as well as in the works of psychologists, philosophers, biochemists and other professionals and specialists. Romantic love is a relative term, but generally accepted as a definition that distinguishes moments and situations within intimate relationships to an individual as contributing to a significant relationship connection.

The addition of drama to relationships of close, deep and strong love.
Anthropologist Charles Lindholm defined love to be "...an intense attraction that involves the idealization of the other, within an erotic context, with expectation of enduring sometime into the future."

Historical definition:
Historians believe that the actual English word "romance" developed from a vernacular dialect within the French language meaning "verse narrative"—referring to the style of speech, writing, and artistic talents within elite classes. The word was originally an adverb of the Latin origin "Romanicus," meaning "of the Roman style." The connecting notion is that European medieval vernacular tales were usually about chivalric adventure, not combining the idea of love until late into the seventeenth century.
The conception of romantic love was popularized in Western culture by the concept of courtly love. Chevaliers, or knights in the Middle Ages, engaged in what were usually non-physical and non-marital relationships with women of nobility whom they served. These relations were highly elaborate and ritualized in a complexity that was steeped in a framework of tradition, which stemmed from theories of etiquette derived out of chivalry as a moral code of conduct.


Courtly love and the notion of domnei were often the subjects of troubadours, and could be typically found in artistic endeavors such as lyrical narratives and poetic prose of the time. Since marriage was commonly nothing more than a formal arrangement,[6] courtly love sometimes permitted expressions of emotional closeness that may have been lacking from the union between husband and wife.[7] In terms of courtly love, "lovers" did not necessarily refer to those engaging in sexual acts, but rather, to the act of caring and to emotional intimacy.

#1.“We have to allow ourselves to be loved by the people who really love us, the people who really matter. Too much of the time, we are blinded by our own pursuits of people to love us, people that don't even matter, while all that time we waste and the people who do love us have to stand on the sidewalk and watch us beg in the streets! It's time to put an end to this. It's time for us to let ourselves be loved.”
                                                             ― C. JoyBell C.

#2.“Never let hard lessons harden your heart; the hard lessons of life are meant to make you better, not bitter.”
                                                         ― Roy T. Bennett.

#3.“At the end of the day, I just want to sit with someone I love and chat about what matters and even what doesn’t.”
                                                             ― Crystal Woods.

#3.“There's a mess inside you:
You clean the outside.”
                                                                 ― Anonymous.

#4.“Real women fight for something, other than their own emotions.”
                                                                          ― Shannon L. Alder

#5.“Time flies, whether you’re wasting it or not.”
                                                                     ― Crystal Woods.

#6.“As one old gentleman put it, " Son, I don't care if you're stark nekkid and wear a bone in your nose. If you kin fiddle, you're all right with me. It's the music we make that counts.”
                                                                 ― Robert Fulghum

#7.“Create. Not for the money. Not for the fame. Not for the recognition. But for the pure joy of creating something and sharing it.”
                                                                     ― Ernest Barbaric

#8.“But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart?”
                                                                              ― Stephen King

#9.“There are no lessons to be learned from the past. This is the first thing I learned from it. There is nothing back then that there isn't here now. There is nothing here now - nothing that matters - that wasn't back then. What matters. Are you a good person? Do you have any love in your heart? What would you do in a given circumstance? It all comes down to something like that.”
                                                                       ― Tom Lichtenberg

#10.“Same first name as a president and an obscure comic book character. Half-Jewish. Excellent grammar. Easily nauseated. Likes Reese's and Oreos (i.e. not an idiot). Divorced parents. Big brother to a fetus. Dad lives in Savannah. Dad's an English teacher. Mom's an epidemiologist.
The problem is, I'm beginning to realize I hardly know anything about anyone. I mean I generally know who's a virgin. But I don't have a clue whether most people's parents are divorced, or what their parents do for a living. I mean, Nick's parents are doctors. But I don't know what Leah's mom does, and I don't even know what the deal is with her dad, because Leah never talks about him. I have no idea why Abby's dad and brother still live in DC. And these are my best friends. I've always thought of myself as nosy, but I guess I'm just nosy about stupid stuff.
It's actually really terrible, now that I think about it.”
                                                             ― Becky Albertalli, Simon.

#11.“If your best friends do not read books, they reads you.”
                                             ― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#12.“For at the end of the day, what matters is never the wine, it's always the moment; it's always the people.”
                                                             ― Olivier Magny.

#13.“No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,—that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality... The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”
                                                         ― Henry David Thoreau.

#14“I live to enjoy life by the littlest things, feeling the grass between my toes, breathing fresh air, watching the wind sway the trees, enjoying the company of loved ones, a deep conversation, getting lost in a good book, going for a walk in nature, watching my kids grow up. Just the feeling itself of being alive, the absolute amazing fact that we are here right now, breathing, thinking, doing.”
                                                        ― Marigold Wellington.

#15.“There comes a moment when you realize what matters the most in your life. Let that moment be now and that matter be your love and kindness.”
                                                           ― Debasish Mridha

Conventional wisdom says that sexuality is a natural instinct. It's a very common and innocent human activity, it's what happens between a man and a woman, it's what people do and all we need to do is relax and enjoy it, right?

It seems so simple. But if it were so simple, why do we need to be reminded over and over again that it's natural, it's innocent, it's pleasurable, it's what we do, it's what happens, relax and enjoy it? In fact, the media has bombarded us with that message for so long and in so many different ways with such ingenuity that you have to wonder why the message hasn't been accepted. Why are we still so uncomfortable, so unsure, so mystified by our own sexuality?

In the world that the Almighty created, there are three conditions. First, there is the secular, weekday, mundane condition—ordinary, common things that we possess. Second, there is the holy, Divine condition—so heavenly that we don't have these things at all. These two parts, so far, are pretty easily accepted and understood. The difficult part is the third condition, the sacred. Although sacred means set aside and unavailable, the sacred is not totally unavailable. The sacred is that which is holier than the ordinary, but not so holy that we can't approach it at all. It's something in between what we have and what we cannot have.

Confused? Let's use a simple example. The Almighty grants us the blessing of children. So, we have children. Your children. My children. But when we say "my children," is that a possessive "my"? Do I own my children? The answer, of course, is no. They're not really mine. They don't belong to me. When I say "my wife," is that a possessive thing? Does "my husband" means that which belongs to me? Of course not. And yet, we can use a term so familiar as "my" in referring to these things in life. That's the sanctity in life, and if we're not careful, in our arrogance, we can lay claim to things that will never belong to us and lose their sanctity.

So, where does sexuality fit in? By its very nature—not by divine decree, not by religious belief or dictate—sexuality belongs to the arena of the sacred. We experience it, but we cannot own it. We can go there, but we don't belong there. We can be sexual, but we cannot possess our own sexuality. The reason for it is very natural and very basic. To be intimate means to go into a place that is private, that is sacred, that is set aside. Sexuality means one person entering into the private, sacred part of another human being's existence.

You cannot own another person's intimacy. It's not available. Even if the person wants to give ownership. Can't do it. It's not sharable. It's one of those things in life that the Almighty gives us that we can never possess. I cannot possess my children. I cannot possess my spouse. I cannot possess my Creator. I can't even possess my life. I, certainly, cannot possess the other person's intrinsic, sacred and unsharable part.

Well, if it's that unavailable, if I can't possess it, then what connection, what relationship do I have with it?
This is the sanctity we can experience, but cannot own. And that is why the pleasure in intimate relations is more intense than any other pleasure. You can enjoy a good meal. You can enjoy good food, and it's great pleasure, but it's not the pleasure of sexuality because you possess the food. It's yours. You planted the vegetables, you grew them, you plucked them and you ate them.

They're yours. With the sacred, you cannot afford to become familiar There's no awe involved. The pleasure of sexuality is that it's a combination
of having and not having. It's a combination of ordinary and other worldly at the same time. It's something that you are granted, but you cannot own and possess. And when you feel that combination, the pleasure of being in another person's intimate space while at the same time remembering that you don't belong there—it's not your place and can never be your place—that's what makes sexuality different.

The key word is familiarity. With the sacred, you cannot afford to become familiar. With the truly divine, there's no danger. It's out of your reach—forget about it. With the secular and mundane, well, you should become familiar. So where does familiarity breed contempt? Where is familiarity really destructive and unwelcome? In sanctity. If you become familiar, too familiar, with the intimacy of another person's life, whether physical, emotional or mental, then you've compromised the sanctity.

In our tell-all world, visualizing the destructiveness of familiarity might be difficult. But you don't call your parents by their first name... because that's too familiar. We don't use the Almighty's name in vain... because it's too familiar. And for our grandparents and our great-grandparents, intimate relations was a sacred thing not to be talked about... because that would be too familiar. The relationship between a husband and wife was restricted to behind closed doors. It was a sacred thing, something you don't squander, share, or even speak about. That's why our grandparents could not talk about their relationship. They weren't keeping secrets—they were keeping something sacred.

Today, human sexuality is something you're supposed to become familiar with. We claim to already be familiar with our sexuality and we are ashamed to admit that we are not. We've removed the sanctity, all because we thought our uptight parents were keeping a secret from us. The media continues to bombard us with these brilliant, subtle messages of the "naturalness" and "openness" of human sexuality, and it's not convincing us. Try as we might, we cannot ignore what our bubbes and zaides knew: the marriage bed is a sacred thing and the only way it works is when you treat it with sanctity.

Still need proof? Look at those same bubbes and zaides a little closer. Those two people, who have been married fifty, sixty, seventy years, are still a little bashful with each other. They still blush with each other. They still excite each other. That is human sexuality. That is sanctity. And that is the last word on intimacy.

Love is an Action

Now we can address the second part of the “What is love” quandary—how to know if we love someone else?

The answer is straightforward. When we behave lovingly towards someone, it means we love that person.

When we ask a question like “What is love?” we assume that we’re trying to define an abstract concept similar to “What is freedom?” or “What is good fortune?” But truthfully, love is not a concept. It’s an action.

To ask, “What is love?” is like asking, “What is running?” or “What is swimming?” If you’ve ever seen someone run or swim, you know exactly what running and swimming entail.

The Hebrew word for love, ahavah, reveals this true definition of love, for the word ahavah is built upon the root consonants h‑v, which means “to give.” In order for love to be real love, it has to be expressed as an action. If you love your beloved, then you must show it. By the same token, if you are loved, that will show, too. You will recognize it by the way you are treated.

Feeling commands us, “And you shall love the L‑rd your Feelings.” This precept leads us to voice the age-old question, “How can we be commanded to feel a feeling?” Either you feel it or you don’t, right?

An answer offered by our tradition explains that we are not being ordered to feel a feeling in the abstract sense. Rather, the command is for us to behave lovingly. In this light, “And you shall love,” actually means, “You shall perform acts of love.”

This is the true test: action, deeds, performance.

Feelings can be deceptive. Sometimes, what we perceive as love may in fact be another emotion. But actions cannot be mistaken. So, rather than ask, “What is love?” we must ask, “Do I perform acts of love for my beloved?” and “Does my beloved perform acts of love for me?”

Contents:

• Why Do We Ask, “What Is Love?”
• “Am I Loved?” Vs. “Do I Love?”

Whenever we ask, “What is love?” it’s usually because a) we’re unsure if a certain special someone really loves us, or b) because a certain special someone just accused us of not really loving them.

When we are truly engaged in giving and receiving love, we don’t ponder such philosophical questions. It’s only when something is lacking that we begin to analyze and contemplate what that thing actually is. For example, nobody sits down to a full meal and asks, “What is a pastrami sandwich?”

So, if we’re even asking the question, “What is love?” it probably means that we don’t feel completely loved, or that someone doesn’t feel completely loved by us.

But since we’re asking, let’s try to answer the question.

   “Am I Loved?” Vs. “Do I Love?”

The two scenarios that usually cause us to contemplate “What is love?” give meaning to the question. Either we wonder, “Am I loved?” or we ask, “Do I love?”

It is easier to first address the “What is love?” question in terms of the love we feel coming toward us. If we understand how to recognize when we are being loved, we can also learn to recognize our love for another.

When we are loved, we tend to feel it intuitively in our guts. But how does it work? Is there an extrasensory perception in the heart that is able to read the feelings in another person’s heart?

In fact, it’s really not that ethereal or supernatural. On the contrary, it’s pretty practical and down-to-earth. Our hearts take cues from our senses. Everything we see, hear, taste, touch or smell teaches us about our universe. We don’t need to contemplate or ask questions. Our sensory organs report to our brains, and our brains interpret the data and send the report to our hearts. So, if we see a loving smile, hear loving words, or feel a loving touch, the brain processes this information and concludes, “Hey, we are being loved right now!”


In short, when we are loved, there is tangible proof. It’s not an abstract thought or feeling, it’s concrete and evidenced. As King Solomon wrote in his book of Proverbs (27:19), “As water reflects a man’s face back to him, so is the heart of one man to another.” This means, when you are treated with love, your heart feels that love.