Do I Know What Love Is?

Do I Know What Love is?

Every year when Valentine’s Day comes around, I think there is nothing more that can be written.  Surely the four lettered word that is supposed to make the world go round has been flogged to death?

Then I asked myself ‘do I really know what love is?’  I’m no statistician, but if I were a betting man I’d say well over half the poems ever written have love somewhere in them. Yet I find myself reviewing the well-worn topic of love and realise I am still discovering it. Emma Thompson’s character in Love Actually says “…and true love lasts a lifetime!”  and I suppose it does. Yet I am continually discovering new angles from which to view love.

I sometimes can’t remember what I did yesterday, yet a memory from a lesson in school back in 1968 is a clear as crystal even now.  I even remember the classroom I was in and who was teaching at the time.  Our Headmaster Mr Ellis-Williams was doing an emergency cover lesson.  He chose to speak about ‘love’.  Upon the blackboard (yes teachers still used chalk back then) he wrote out four Greek words all defining love.  One that stuck in my mind was Agape and although I didn’t retain the definition, I remembered the word.  So yesterday I finally got round to researching the meanings behind the four I uncovered.  There are differing numbers, but I stuck with the four the teacher had focused upon.

I realised when I look back at my life that the definitions had been woven and intermingled into one and sometimes stood alone.  When I say to my wife ‘I love you’ I realise how inadequate the single word is for me.  Words can have a habit of being insufficient to describe many things and I for one have often misused language to explain how I might feel at any given moment.  Paradoxically silence can often convey so much more and given that speaking is a very small percentage of communication, it is hardly surprising that that well used word ‘love’ can completely fail the moment.

I realise that in the forty-odd years I have been married that I have gone through all of the Greek definitions and recycle them still. Yet still, do I know what love is?  Well, I will just have to keep on discovering moment by moment.