love

We always talk about the importance of love, the prevalence of love, but what is it really? What is it that makes love so wonderful and how can we love in so many different ways and still just have one name for it? I think it is like an oval-esque Venn diagram. You have the main kinds of love, which are romantic, familial, and friendship, and I think they all overlap at the core. While they (and every other kind of love) each have their own independent lobe, they all come together at the very core. This highly shaded area of the Venn diagram of love is the only part that I think we can truly call love. It is the emotion that binds all of these seemingly different relationships together that we gave the name love. Love has as many connotations as it has spawned branches for precisely that reason. So now that I have identified "where it is" in relation to everything else, what is it? I think love is the equivocation if not elevation of someone else's well being with relation to your own. This feeling can be translated romantically into "true love," or in a family situation as in "I love my parents" but when it comes down to it, what really gives these emotions their validity is your general concern for the other person's well being. This explains why people can dwell in the un-shaded lobes of "love" and not really "love" the person, like the more common lust or adoration areas of the romantic lobe. This transition from adoration to love is what makes people want to stay together for years and years.
So why is love so important, then? I think because it speaks to the very core of what makes us human, which is our interaction with others. Someone placing your well being within the ranks or their own is the ultimate comfort and security. The truth is we are all connected. As corny and kum-ba-yah as that sounds we simply cannot and do not exist alone... ever. Since it is vital to our existence, our connections to each other must be very important. This is where love comes in. love is the ultimate reinforcement that we are all connected. Figuratively, it is like joining arms as opposed to joining hands. When you join hands you recognize you are connected but only by a few fingers and a palm. When you join arms however, you put both arms at the same level, joint to joint, joined at the shoulder producing an infinitely stronger bond and a sense of equality. This bond, this strength is the key to our psychological (and maybe physical) well being. Knowing that you have that particular bond to fall back on makes you infinitely stronger even if you never fall, and the bond is equally beneficial for the other person. It is so funny to think that simply by caring and no other effect do two people go from miserable and insecure to happy and functional.
Families are particularly important when talking about love because instead of a dual interaction there is a network of bonds that hold them together. This is kind of like ionic bonds and lattice structures, which are both very strong. I think it is this network, predominantly and not the biological bonds that hold families together and make family such an important part of life. This could be the reason the divorce rate in this society is so high. The lack of initial family life causes deficient bonding experience and therefore isolation and selfishness, but I digress...
The applications of this to Buddhist philosophy are also interesting. For example enlightenment is when you can feel equal love and compassion towards all beings. If love is a bond then to be enlightened is to not only recognize and understand your connection to all beings, but rather to transform that connection into a bond. This extends and forms the necessity for kindness towards all beings because though you may not understand your connection (rendering you enlightened) you know it exists. Thus to be enlightened is simply to truly understand what is already evident and so to conclude I think that very few things are more important or characteristic of humanity than love.