Love has many different meanings to different people. For a four-year-old, love is marrying her daddy when she grows up. For an elementary school kid, love is what he or she feels for his or her best friend, who also serves as a boyfriend or girlfriend. To a fifteen-year-old boy, love is what he should feel for his girlfriend of the moment; only because she says she loves him. But as we get older and “wiser,” love becomes more and more confusing. Along with poets and philosophers, people have been trying to answer that age-old question for centuries: What is love? One definition of love in The Merriam-Webster dictionary is “attraction based on sexual desire” (439). Some people believe that love and sex are one in the same. If two people are in love, they should be having sex. And, on the flipside, if two people are having sex, they must be in love. However, this assumption is obviously not always true. Whether it is right or not to have
sex without love is irrelevant; the fact is it happens. Just because a person is sexually attracted to another person and has the desire to have sex with that person does not necessarily suggest that this person is in love. He or she could very well be experiencing a feeling of lust. Yes, love can be very sexual when a person is really in love. The speaker in Denise Levertov’s “Love Poem” explains her love as the flash of golden daylight in the body’s midnight, warmth of the fall noonday between the sheets in the dark. This passage obviously alludes to sex, but sex is not completely necessary when there is love. The speaker in Sharon Olds’ “Sex without Love” asks, “How do they do it, the ones who make love / without love?” (1-2). Love is deeper and more meaningful than just physical or sexual attraction. Love is a feeling--an emotion. Love is also defined in the dictionary as “strong affection,” “warm attachment”and
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