“What is love?” This is a question we all ask at some point in our life. Many people live their entire lives with a wrong understanding of what love is. When I conducted marriage preparation sessions with young, engaged couples, one of the first questions I would ask was, “Why do you want to get married?” I never received but one answer, “Because we’re in love.” What a wonderful answer. Couples must be in love when they marry.
Then, I would ask them what their love looked like. They would say things like, “My heart beats faster when he enters the room.” Or “My hands begin to sweat when she holds them.” After several poor attempts to define their love, I would say, “Go outside and run around my house three times, and you’ll feel exactly the same way!”
If love is not how we feel, then what is it? 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 defines fourteen qualities of love.
Love…
1 is patient
2 kind
3 is not jealous or 4 boastful or proud, or 5 rude
6 does not demand its own way
7 is not irritable
8 keeps no record of being wronged
9 does not rejoice about injustice
10 rejoices whenever the truth wins out
11 never gives up
12 never loses faith
13 is always hopeful
14 endures through every circumstance.
Not one of these fourteen qualities in God’s definition of love is a feeling. Love is a verb, an action, an act of the will. No one “falls into or out of love.” A person displays love. This is achieved by doing loving things (the qualities of love). Doing loving things is an act of the will – we decide to display love even in the absence of feeling.
Can someone love more than one person at the same time? Of course, since expressing the qualities of love is an action and not a feeling. We show love to our parents, our best friends, our siblings, our teachers, our work colleagues, etc. All of these “loves” are identical (displaying the qualities of love). The difference in marriage is that each spouse commits to limit certain expressions of love to only that person. Marriage is a lifetime commitment to perfect the demonstrations of love to each other until separated by death.