Love can be defined as a strong feeling of personal attachment between friends or family members. It can also be defined as tender and compassionate affection shared between two people.

When you love someone, you respond emotionally to that person’s needs. You help each other so that your lives are better when you are together than when you are apart. Love in this sense grows as your personality develops. It is capable of continually becoming deeper, richer, and stronger throughout your life.

Some people say that to know love, you must experience it. You have experienced some forms of love already in your life. You will experience more as you grow emotionally and socially. The more relationships you have with people, the more meanings the work love will have for you.

Types of Love

Both positive and negative feelings are closely related to the emotion of love. Songs, poems, and books have been written about the good and bad effects of love. They show the power that love can have to either improve or harm a person’s life.

Positive Types of Love

Positive types of love add richness and fullness to life. They help people feel good about themselves, about others, and about life in general.

True love involves total communication and commitment between two people. It means sharing what one has and what one is when with another person. With true love, people strive toward shared thoughts, feelings, attitudes, ambitions, hopes, and interests. While maintaining their individuality, partners tend to think and plan in terms of “we” – what “we” want, how “we” feel, what “we” will do.

True love motivates two people help each other grow and improve. They want each other to have the best life possible. Their love gives them energy to work together to reach their goals.

True love is realistic; it does not expect perfection. With true love, a person accepts the faults and weaknesses of the loved one. The two people are willing to work together to overcome any obstacles and to make the relationship as good as it can be. The realism of true love also allows people to express their true feelings. They can show their joy, anger, or sorrow without fear of losing the love and respect of the other person.

Time is a good test of true love. If a relationship endures varying emotional climates, developing interests, and deepening feelings, it will probably continue to grow as long as the people do.

Tender love is happy and satisfying, 11-11. It is not only beautiful in itself, but it increases the loveliness of the people involved. Tender love makes people feel warm, secure, and cheerful. As people mature, tender love becomes an increasingly familiar and satisfying part of relationships.

Friendly love goes through the years. It is neither passionate and consuming nor hostile and hurting. Friends are kept together with feelings of mutual respect and understanding. They are rarely shocked by the actions of one another. Friendly love is usually the basis for friendships. Sometimes a true love relationship can be built upon a foundation of friendly love.

Negative Types of Love

Just as positive love can strengthen and deepen relationships, negative love can damage them. Love is usually considered “good” but you should be familiar with the “bad” effects love can have on relationships.

Jealous love is a possessive love. The jealous lover holds the other person so tightly that the person is cut off from other people. Jealousy is almost always a mark of immaturity and insecurity. As lovers grow confident of their love and of their loved ones, feelings of jealousy fade. They have faith that their love will last. They realize they do not have to cling desperately to it.

Passionate love is vigorous, insistent, and urgent. It centers on the sexual relationships of men and women. It is driven by nature’s desire for biological fulfillment, and it often operates without reason.

Passion alone can be painful. It can also be selfish, with little concern for the other. By itself, this kind of love is tempestuous and exhausting. Blended with other love forms, it can be exhilarating and fulfilling. Hostile love frequently raises its voice in anger against the loved one. The emotions of love and hate are closely related. When you love someone, you may occasionally have real feelings of hostility toward them. This tendency to hate those you love involves a feeling of ambivalence – being attracted to and repelled by someone at the same time. It can be explained by recognizing that although some characteristics of a person are good, others may be irritating. If you love someone too narrowly to accept the person’s limitations, you become annoyed when that person does anything that displeases you. Then your love may take on a hostile quality as you become critical of the other’s behavior.

Unreturned love is frustrating because it is unfulfilled love. When you realize your love is not being returned, you may react with feelings of pain, sorrow, and hopelessness. Unreturned love can go on indefinitely. The saying, “He still carries a torch for her,” describes a man experiencing unrequited love. In its worst form, unreturned love can become a form of harassment, as the person persists in forcing unwanted expressions of love on another. More often, however, this type of love is forgotten as the person focuses energy on attaining happiness in a more rewarding way.

What is Conjugal Love?

It is obvious from common sense that when man and woman enter marriage, they do so not to have sexual intimacy since this could be had even outside the married state. Rather, inspired and motivated by their love fro each other, they commit themselves to each other in building a common life of sharing. Conjugal love therefore is not the effect of biology, nor “the product of evolution of unconscious natural forces. It is the rational and reciprocal giving of the self in the spirit of love. “By means of the reciprocal personal gift of self, proper and exclusive to them, husband and wife tend towards personal perfection, to collaborate with god in the generation and education of new lives”.

Characteristics of Conjugal Love:

It is human. It is not merely the appetitive of the senses. It is instead “an act of the free will, intended to endure and to grow by means of the joys and sorrows of daily life, in such a way that husband and wife becomes one only heart and one only soul and together attain their human perfection”.

It is total. It is a special from of friendship of generous sharing of everything, without undue reservations or selfish calculations. “Whoever truly loves his marriage partner loves not only for what he receives, but for the partner’s self, rejoicing that he can enrich his partner with the gift of himself”.

It is faithful and exclusive until death. Love, if it must be genuine, must be lasting. This permanence comes from the vows of fidelity to each other. A conditional love, where certain factors foreseen or not are provided as prerequisite to fidelity, is not authentic love. It is timid and selfish love because it puts personal interest above the interest of the union itself. It belongs to the essence of love itself that it be faithful and exclusive, because happiness and security cannot thrive in an atmosphere of uncertainty and fearful anxiety.

It is fecund. It is fertile because it helps husband and wife grow in mutual respect and love and concern for each other. It is fertile because such love is not exhausted by the spouses, but is transferred and continued in the children. Fecundity, in this sense, is not measured by the number of children a couple have, but by the quality of life it offers for the members of the family.

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