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What is love?
Posted : 8 Jul, 2011 02:43 PM
What is love? What happens when we love? How do we feel when we love? How often do we want to say �I love you�? Have you ever said �I love you�? Is it easy to say �I love you�? Do you open your eyes and see love around you? Films, novels, stories, plays, songs, poems - everything describes love. How important love is. How precious love is. How strong love is. Therefore, no one in real life talks about love. It is as if love is talked about so much in books, that when people mention the topic, the response, ironically, is, �Love is just in books and movies.�
Since my childhood no one around me has talked to me about love. Neither my family nor anyone in my community discussed or taught loving life, nature, animals, environment or other people. The only exception was that I was repeatedly taught that I should love my country.
Perhaps I am in love! I�d like to tell her, �I love you,� but how can I? I cannot bring myself to utter these words. Here in Sheki, using the word �love� is shameful and embarrassing. In Sheki, love itself is shameful. Any girl would be considered stupid or not başıaşağı (head to the ground) if she openly announces she is in love. The criticism would follow her, �Oh, she loves somebody. How could she raise her head and look at boys? Isn�t she thinking about her brother and father?�
Perhaps the girl sees the boy, and talks on the phone with him. But if this love fails no one will marry her, ever. Any brother or father would be ashamed of his sister or daughter upon hearing rumours� that she is in love. On the other hand, a mother would be proud of her son if he is receiving secret phone calls, flirting, and playing with the feelings of a girl. She would never allow her son to really be in love and make his own choice of partner. Any boy or man who falls in love and fights for his love will be criticized as weak.
In general, to make a choice influenced by feelings and personal fulfilment, to love somebody and marry that person is considered unlikely. When a boy comes of age, his family will search for his potential future wife. The boy is shown many girls, and after a boy observes a girl only then does she learn if he likes her. So, girls must wait until someone sees them and proposes marriage.
No one thinks it abnormal or unhealthy if a woman reaches the age of fifty without ever being in a relationship. If no one wanted to marry her or if she refused to marry the boys who proposed, she just must resign herself to her fate of spinsterhood. It is healthy for human beings to love, express emotion, socialize, form relationships. It is not hard to imagine the psychological condition of women who have never been loved or who have never loved someone.
Let us consider a typical married couple in Sheki. Are they able to show their emotions? Certainly, many couples have arranged marriages, and even after marriage their lives continue to be controlled by their parents. None of these husbands would dare tell his wife that he loves her in front of his parents. Some couples don�t even pretend they love one another. There is no need; they are already married.
Once I was speaking with a male co-worker, and I implied that he is a romantic man. He frequently speaks of love and romance, and he takes special care to decorate his surroundings, calling them �romantic�. Observing his attention to detail and his talk of romance, I commented that he must enjoy caring for his wife, performing kind, romantic gestures of affection for her. He replied, �Of course I don�t. My mother lives with us! I must behave seriously next to my mother.� Women long deprived of love from their husbands seem to attach to their sons. Their sons� attention and appreciation must suffice as an adequate substitute for romantic love. Thus, when a mother�s precious son marries, she will not accept less attention and tender love that she received before her daughter-in-law arrived.
While pondering this topic of love in Sheki, I remembered one story from my childhood. My friends and I were helping wash carpets in a neighbour�s yard. I recall overhearing two women gossiping, making fun of a man who openly expressed affection for his wife. The women thought this man to be weak because he told his wife that he loved her in front of everyone, including his relatives. At an early age I watched as women openly made fun of this word, �love�.
Recently, I was talking with my close friend, a westerner. We were discussing life as usual when I offered some advice taken from an Azeri love story. She replied that she would never listen to an Azeri tale about love because romantic love does not exist in Azeri society. People marry without love. Here people don�t even use the word �love�. So what could I say? She was right. People often talk about the humanity, hospitability, respect, and sincerity of Azeris, but no one mentions �love�. Men severe, meaning �I love�, is not used.
I first read the novel Ali and Nino as a child. After reading an American author�s commentary about the life of Kurban Said, I decided to reread this famous Azeri love story. The novel captured my attention as if I were reading it for the first time. There are so many descriptions of historical events and famous people that I overlooked when I read the story as a child. What caught my attention was the description of the emotions of the people after Ali kills Khachaturian. Ali and Nino flee to Dagestan, and there Ali observes Nino, the woman he loves, bringing water from the public well. When Ali spots Nino, she treats him as a stranger. At first surprised, Ali soon remembered the cause of Nino�s behaviour. Nino was just mimicking the actions of locals; mountain people don�t express emotions.
Sheki, too, is a mountain town. Just like people from Dagestan descried in Ali and Nino, Shekians never show affection, tender feelings, much less love. Therefore, no one here talks about loving each other, loving people, life, nature, or just having an open heart and loving everything around you. The best description of this intense emotion or anything resembling it is expressed with �I like you�. If a girl receives a marriage proposal, people say, �Oh their son saw their daughter, liked her, and wants to marry her.�
My distaste for a lack of emotional expression in my community has led me to employ the word �love� anytime other Shekians would most likely choose the word �like�. A few years ago one of my male friends, an active Sheki NGO leader, listened as I casually used the word �love�. I noticed he was embarrassed, and he suggested that I shouldn�t use �love� so frequently. He said it made him feel uncomfortable as he listened to me speaking, �You know I love this. I love that. I love, love, love�LOVE!�
I firmly believe that what will save society from its evils � crime, depression, greed, grief � is love. We have to love everything around us and teach others to love. Love is a gift, but also a skill.
There is need to clarify what love and sex means or stands for in marriage. Many people attach the same meaning to the two, which is a serious error. The keywords in the title are love, sex and marriage. It is imperative to explain what each word stands for.
Marriage is an agreement between a man and a woman to live as husband and wife. It is an institution created by God primarily for the purpose of companionship. It is a bond and an everlasting covenant that is meant to exist for as long as the couples live. It was created to terminate only by death of any of the partners.
Love is the foundation of every marriage. Love is not in words but in action. Love is better demonstrated than said by words. Love is not a feeling, because there is much more to love than jumping into bed with the opposite sex.
Love is sacrifice and service by one to the other. To love is to give what is the best for the benefit of the other, and to accept him as he is and not on the basis of what is to be gained from him. Even casual sex has an emotional bond attached to it.
To love is to make a self-sacrificing concern for the benefit and welfare of another and to love the other without condition in spite of the other's actions or in-actions. Love is a strong emotional attachment to another person. It is a deep affection for another person, to be fond of the person and wanting to be with him/her all the time. Love is a heart-to-heart connection between husband and wife. To love is to accept the imperfections of the other and to accommodate them.
Love is fueled by personal intimacy which must be developed by the couple for their love to grow. Without personal intimacy, love wanes or fades and gradually dies. This is how many marriages have failed because the partners took their affection for granted and did not develop it.
Many people are in marriage but very few are in love.
Sex is sexual intercourse or a sexual union between husband and wife. It was created by God to be expressed within marriage as an instrument for husband and wife to express their love for each other. However, sex is not love because it is possible to have sex with a person you have no feelings or love for. Further, there are other ways to express love for each other apart from sex. Sex is not the exclusive means to show love to another.
Sex alone, without strong personal intimacy, can not sustain a marriage. Sex without personal intimacy is driven by passion and passion is a weak and unstable foundation to build a marriage on. Moreover, passion can easily take the place of real friendship.
Many marriages are mere sexual relationships because the partners rushed into for romantic connection without developing the intimacy connection. Intimacy is friendship which takes time to develop, to nurture and mature. In a marriage built on sex driven by passion, there is no real love for each other and each member exists to derive mere physical and sexual pleasure from the other which quickly becomes boring.
Full expression of love can be said to occur in marriage when personal intimacy is developed and maintained and is combined with sexual intimacy. Then will love be complete.
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