In the academic world, there is a group of words that are a nightmare to deal with. They are a nightmare, not because their bad or anything like that, they are a nightmare because we know exactly what they mean but have no way of defining them well enough to match the meaning in our head. There are quite a few of these words, but the most popular ones are “justice” and “love”. 

At first it may feel really easy to define them (that’s the meaning you have in your head speaking), but when you try and write it down, chances are you’re going to have either a biased description or a description that is describing something else. By “biased” I mean, your culture, beliefs, or experiences are determining the meaning of the word; and so outside of you, the meaning isn’t always applicable. People who ascribe to a religion tend to meet this problem more.
By “describing something else” I mean that you’re probably associating the word with a concept that runs really close to it. So for “justice” for example, people tend to confuse it with the word and concept of “fairness” but the two are very different. Or in the case of “Love” sometimes I tend to confuse it with the idea of “generosity” especially generosity in food.

Ironically Purple Lipstick’s motto is “Love Always”, a really intense application of the word.
As a part of the Purple Lipstick team I couldn’t walk around with this really powerful statement and not at least try and define what I meant when I said it. I feel as though my research turned up really successful, and though I haven’t had time to run them by my professors and peers (mostly because I’m scared I’m wrong, because I really like this definition) I think you might like it too.

What is Love? Love is not a feeling, it isn’t an emotion, it is not a chemically controlled reaction; it creates and expresses itself through these, but it is not them. If it were, it would be flimsy and inconstant, like anger or jealousy. Love is far more complex...

Love is a decision to expand your identity.

Before things get confusing let me first give you a decent philosophical definition and then we’ll break it down and you can decide what you think ;] :
“Love is the decision to include the other into the identity of the self, it is the expansion of what the self sees as “I” ”
key words here are “the self”, “expand”, “the other”, and “identity”. By “the self”, I mean “the thinking thing”, the voice reading this in your head; the thing, that the body feeds, defends, and holds as a priority for its existence. By “the other” I mean the things outside of the “thinking thing”. By “expand” I mean the action of including something else into the boundaries of the “thinking thing”, and by “identity” I mean the name you give your existence.

I know that was a lot of “things” and quite a lot to process, read it twice and slowly, and I guarantee it’ll sound less busy. What I define Love as, and what I mean when I say the word Love, is: I am expanding my identity, expanding the severity of relevance of something/someone to me. The way my limbs rush to my defense in reflex to danger, the way my immune system sacrifices and commits to threats to my survival, the way my heart pounds with the joy of my little successes, the way I take care of this body that makes up the “I” that it holds as the beginning and end of its identity. When I love something, I extend this behavior to them. Their life becomes as relevant as my own, and I rush to their defense, their goals, safety, and happiness are worth my sacrifice, their joy, sadness, experiences are as if they were my own, because “I” no longer only means me, but it means “them” too.

I really like this definition, but I’d really appreciate it if you have a different definition in mind, or if you had something you wanted to add. Go ahead and tell us what it is on one of your social platforms.

Love Always,

Albert