For the benefit of this column, Lovelines, readers who have been sending text and email to ask for the meaning of love, it is important to know that love goes with trust.

Going through the English dictionary, the word love is defined as strong affection, feeling of love, making love, wooing, and a variety of related but distinct meanings in different contexts and expressions.

But one of the American psychologists, Zick Rubin, if I may borrow from him tries and defines love by the psychometrics. He says three factors constitute love they are "attachment, caring and intimacy."

If we are to go by these three words, I will say the essence of love is a topic that needs frequent debate because different parts of the word can be clarified through identifying what is not 'love.' Looking at it critically, love is commonly differentiated or compared with apathy (hate). As a less sexual and more emotional and intimate form of romantic attachment, love is commonly compared with lust; and as an inter-personal relationship with romantic overtones, it is also compared with friendship.

Love usually refers to interpersonal love; that emotion you feel as a person for another person. So also, love involves caring for or being identified with a person or thing that involves yourself.

Bertrand Rusell describes love as a condition of "absolute value," while Thomas Jay Oord, a theologian described love as "act intentionally, in sympathetic response to others, to promote overall well-being."

Going further, Thomas A Kempis said "love is swift; sincere; pious; pleasant; generous; strong; patient; faithful; prudent; long-suffering; manly; and never seeking her own; for wheresoever a man seeks his own; there he falleth from love." The above is very commonly used in this column.

Okay, many young ladies and gentlemen often say "I love him or I love her, but he/she doesn't love me"; "I love him or her too much but our parents are the obstacles"; "what can I do to make him/her love me or know that I love him/her." As often said, love is something that develops and grows in your mind when you are attracted to someone or someone is attracted to you. It is a feeling from the heart because love doesn't hate, fight, irritate, and so on.

"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness." That is what Woody Allen said. This supports Kempis words that love is ".patient; faithful; prudent; long-suffering;."

(To be contd)