What is love? (baby don't hurt me)

Given the popularity of the word, you'd think love would be the sort of word everyone knew the meaning of. People talk about being "in love." About what products and services and restaurants they love. Approximately way too freaking much of the entertainment industry is designed around no other objective than to cash in on some poor soul's idea of love. Even within relationships where it goes without saying that love is the driving force of the whole arrangement, there are interminable back-and-forths about who loves who "more." But what is it?

Definitions are important, and if we don't know what love is, how do we even know we want it - in general or from a specific person? Ask a dozen people on the street, and I'm confident you'll get a dozen different answers as to what love is. In fact, some people even argue that love is not the same thing from one person to another but that its very nature changes based on who is giving and receiving it. In any case, almost every popular answer and even some dictionary definitions seem to reduce love to category of feelings. Feelings of happiness, security, vulnerability, etc are high on the list. The way the word is often weaponized today, one could believe that sex was the chief expression of love and that to oppose any variety of sexual encounter is to make war against love itself. This, of course, falls apart the moment we realize it makes all of love little more than a pathway to sex, and even most people who use the word in that way would - at least I hope they would - be offended at the idea that sex was the height of what love produced.

But that's enough time spent on what love is not. I suggest that there is a real, universal, unchanging definition to the word. That love is a measurable, definite thing. Specifically, I suggest that love is exactly the measure of what one soul is willing to sacrifice for the good of another. Preemptively, I reject altogether any notion that "the good of another" has primarily to do with what makes the beloved feel happy or safe in the moment or to do with the beloved's preferences. Those things can be as easily prioritized by one who is afraid of conflict as by one who is willing to make real sacrifices for the sake of those he loves. There is real good. It is godliness in this life and hope in the next one. If anyone gives you every happiness in this life by silencing your conscience about eternity, that person does not love you. That is not to say that happiness and safety in this world are not good at all. Certainly a man who loves his wife must try to provide for her security and comfort if he can. But if he must choose between her security and comfort in this life or her eternal joy in the next, then whether he loves her or not can be easily seen by which he pursues for her.

Anyway, it is easy to see on this definition how "I love you" and "I love you more" and "I love you more than x" are not things that can just be said honestly. If I love you, I am willing to make sacrifices for your good. If I love you more than you love me, I am willing to sacrifice more for your good than you are for my good, and this is not always a bad thing. A husband should love his wife more than she loves him. Parents should love their children more than their children love them. And, importantly, a wife whose husband loves her that way should be aware of it. If marriage is a reflection of Christ's relationship with the Church - which the Bible gives us to believe it is - then it would be dreadfully inappropriate for the representative of Christ in the symbol to love the representative of the Church less than she loves him. Leaving all appropriate room for nuance, certainly there are times when a newly converted husband whose wife has been a Christian for several years may not yet love her more than she loves him, but that is a matter for grace in the meantime, not an exception to the rule.

Backtracking just a little, it is strange to me that "I love you more" is considered a nice thing for couples to say if they reduce love to feelings. In the best case, that makes it "the chemical phenomena in my body yield more pleasant results in me than I think the chemical phenomena in your body yield in you when we are in close proximity to each other." At worst it's "I enjoy you more than you enjoy me, and I think that is a good thing."

So how do we come to that definition of love? Why can't love be just about feelings or sex or a general positive disposition toward someone? Well, unsurprisingly, the easiest and best way to get there is through Scripture. There are plenty of supporting passages for this definition of love, but rather than pad for words, I'll cut right to the one which wraps the entire conversation neatly. In John 15:13, Christ tells his disciples that no man has greater love than one who lays down his life for his friends. There we see love Himself - because God is love, though the modern inversion that "love is God" does not therefore hold - identifying both the means of expressing love (sacrifice, in this case of one's own life) and the fact that there is a mathematically highest expression of love.

To lay down one's own life for another is to say with one's actions "my love for you is such that I now put aside every possibility of future happiness in this world as well as all the goals I have not yet accomplished. Instead, I now pour all that I am - all that would have gone into the pursuit of my own happiness and goals - into this one attempt to secure for you whatever good in this world or the next which can come of my sacrifice."

I wonder how differently we would approach both each other and the Lord if we gave real thought to the commands of Scripture regarding love under this definition. Ephesians 5:22-33 is referenced by many as oppressive to women because wives are commanded to obey their husbands but husbands are "only commanded to love their wives," but what - by this definition of love - could be a harder command than that husbands must love their wives as Christ loved the Church?