What Is Love to You?

Ra'ees Wingard

2/6/12

Love is ....

What is love to you? Everyone's understanding of love is unique. This is owed to most people having different experiences with love. Depending on one's experience with love, there are different perceptions of it. Love can be a beautiful or breath-taking thing. Love can as well be a sad and dreadful thing depending on the way you look at it. Love is a bouquet of flowers. One can say this because love can be a gorgeous thing. Love can feel delightful, just how a girl feels when she receives a bouquet of flowers. Love can also hurt; it can be a miserable thing if you look at it from a negative stand point. Love is a broken bone. One can say this because a broken bone aches, like your heart if it was broken, or like the feelings that you have buried inside you.

The metaphor, love is a bouquet of flowers tries to explain the target domain, love. Also it highlights and hides different aspects of love at the same time. A bouquet of flowers can be considered something gorgeous, cheery and thoughtful; this highlights what love can be. Love can be something stunning and the feeling of love can also be considered stunning too. The way you feel when you're loved can be considered exquisiteness like the presentation of a bouquet of flowers. If someone goes out of their way to give a person they care about a bouquet of flowers, they're thinking about them. When you love someone you think about them a lot because you care about them so considerably. Likewise when flowers are given they can cheer someone up, make them smile; it can be considered a type of healer. Love can also be considered a healer of the soul because that person you love might make you so happy and put you in a good mood by being around them. So being with them might make you think nothing can go wrong as long as you're with them.

This metaphor hides certain aspects of love as it highlights the target domain at the same time. There's a whole other side of love which is hid due to this metaphor because love is not only beauty. Love can be pain, sorrow, suffering, agony, misery etc. Everything to do with love isn't always good. For instance, consider hate crimes. Gay couples are not always accepted in certain communities. We always hear about bullying's and exploitation in schools due to someone's sexual orientation. So, love can too be considered sorrowful and miserable depending on the perspective from which you look at it.

There are many stand points one can take when ask the question "what is love?" Love is a broken bone. This metaphor's target domain is love, then "broken bone" highlights different characteristics of love from and it correspondingly hides different features of love as well. A broken bone can be considered something dreadful, painful, heartbreaking, miserable and depressing. One can say this because a broken bone is very painful and depending on what you break and it can be miserable. For instance, some pro athletes suffer career ending injuries that destroy lifelong dreams. This can be considered heartbreaking.