Do you really know what love is? Most human beings do not. Love has many different meanings to different people. For an elementary school kid, love is what he or she feels for his or her best friend, who also serves as a boyfriend or girlfriend. To a fifteen-year-old boy, love is what he should feel for his girlfriend of the moment; one definition of love in The Merriam-Webster dictionary is “attraction based on sexual desire” (439). Some people believe that love and sex on the flipside, if two people are having sex, they must be in love. However, this assumption is obviously not always true. Love is something so powerful, that it is strong enough to take on any obstacles, including someone's life. If someone truly loves someone, they are willing to sacrifice their life for someone they love. That is true love when you are willing to give up your life so that your loved one can live on.
Our love doesn’t involve only people. There are many dozens of loves and objects of love. We can love God, memories, ideas, beauty, literature, music, things… Love isn’t restricted to the love of people.We can postulate that the most important object of love is people. That people are the central part of love, and that all other forms of love are just extensions and sometimes perversions (such as the love of money).
May be the central part of love is in fact the love of people. Many of our loves are perversions, involving secondary things and secondary or foolish paths. We often forget the most important in life, and grasp the secondary and false loves.
Nevertheless, human life and human love is made of much more than just love of people. We can’t limit the object of our loves to people – be they our relatives, our neighbours and friends, or even mankind. Life supposes a broader relationship of love.
Everyone wants to be happy, and yet there are only a few people who are able to experience this feeling. Happiness seems to be the pursuit of mankind, and yet it persistently eludes human beings. Some people concentrate their energies and spend most of their time earning money and piling up a fortune. They believe that it will give them happiness. But after they have acquired a fortune, by several years of toiling or through devious means, they realize how they were mistaken. The heap of wealth does not give them happiness, though it may give comforts. Actually wealth adds to their worries, make their lives tense which in turn affect their health.
There are some others who pursue power to achieve happiness. Different means can be adopted to attain power. One may decide to enter the field of politics. Having contested elections one may raise to the level of a Minister, Prime Minister, or even President of a country. One may turn into a dictator, ride roughshod over one's own countrymen and subjugate other countries as Hitler did. But as his biographers have revealed, Hitler died an unhappy man. One may turn into a bully and harass those around in order to establish one's superiority over them. But it is certain that such a person will be anything but happy.
Many members of the modern generation are striving for happiness in sex, fashion, drinks and drugs. They wish to escape from the problem-ridden world into a world of intoxicated dreams in order to be happy at least for a few hours. But only a few know the secret of true happiness. It is love; love in all its ramifications; love between lover and beloved, children and parents, brother and sister, between neighbors, friends, between the teacher and the student, master and servant, man and God. Love is the repository of happiness, if only it is practiced without any ulterior motive. Shelley says, "All love is sweet given or returned." The Bible says the same thing in different words, that is, he who loves is twice blessed. It means he who makes the other person happy by loving, also feels happy for having loved.
