Seunghee You

                                                                                                                           





What is love? Is it just a feeling for a lover, family, friends, pet dogs, cherished items, etc.? Is that feeling really everything about love? What is true love like?
Love can be divided into giving and receiving. You are happy when you are loved. Let's imagine be loved. Love is full when someone's warm eyes turn to you. The love you receive fills you up. Most people like it when they are loved. You can say that everyone wants to be loved because it is our instinct. Therefore, when discussing love, talking about "giving love" in which individual emotions are highlighted rather than "being loved" that is universally empathic is a way to get closer to the meaning of true love.
Then how about giving love? it's happy, but also bitter and upset. I think about it, It's not as happy as I was when I received it. The reason is that giving love requires me to give my heart to the other person, which requires sacrifice, patience, consideration, and letting go. I felt the love above in my mother and through Jesus in the Bible. In the Bible, Jesus is the son of God. However, Jesus, the son of God who created heaven and earth, is born in the lowest place in the land, the stable.During his life, he lives to give mercy, teaching, cure, forgiving. Then, at the end of the day, he was tortured and even denied by his disciples, who followed him, and died crucified. However, the Bible says that Jesus was able to handle all these hardships and sacrifices because he loves humans.
 
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” _ Romans 5:8  

Even if you are not a Christian or you do not have faith, you will small in front of the sublime when you see Jesus who died at the expense of everything because he loves you. Isn't Jesus' love contained in this phrase, "I love you without response, without understanding, without any humiliation, without any price." And I think this love is closest to 'giving love'.
However, love without such a response and without a price is far from modern love. This is because in today, where the value of efficiency and utility is dominated, there is a love that as much as you give, there must be something that receive. The meaning of "giving love" is becoming desperate as market-centered, mega-capitalism, commercialization, materialism, consumerism, and self-centeredness are intensifying. When even i love, i hope for a response, understanding, and a price. Can such love really be said to have given love? Maybe there is only a desire to be loved here. Therefore, today, there seems to be more narcissistic love filled with love for me than love for the other person. It seems to give love on the outside, but it only contains the image of struggling to be loved, longing for love for oneself. This love lacks integrity and becomes a distorted love.
Love without coming back is very difficult. However, when a difficult love with sacrifice, patience, and consideration for the other person is implemented, the love will expand beyond the other person to love myself. Furthermore, love based on recognition of the other person progresses to recognition of me. Recognition of myself will improve your understanding of yourself, which will develop into a love that can stably exist for both me and you. As a result, it becomes an altruistic love that allows me and my partner to coexist in love, not a selfish love that only I want to be loved.
Enlightenment has made human became having rational and practical thinking. René Descartes (1596-1650) said, "cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am.)" Jean-Luc Marion (born 1946), on the other hand, said, "i love, therefore, it exists" to start human existence from love. Love is the most important beginning to make humans, themselves, and others exist. So let's not make the other person and me absent with the wrong love.