Right. H3 - "love is a verb, love is a doing word" is a Massive Attack lyric, from the song Teardrop. It popped into my head as I writing up my last post. So my idea, is that love can happen roughly in 3 different ways (this is a pretty rough outline, doesn't cover everything etc).

The first stage is what I've sometimes described as 'love feelings'. These are what you feel early in a relationship (primarily) when you're with the person, and you get a tingle, or a glow - you feel love for that person in that moment. It's too early to say "I love you", because the feeling is fleeting. This can come from romantic entanglements, and it can also come from friends, relatives, anyone who makes you happy, I guess.

Then you have love, this is where you love someone. I love my parents, in a way, I love my brother, although we aren't the closest brothers in the world, I do. If something bad happened to them, I'd be upset. If someone tried to hurt them, I'd fuck them up. As I go through life, they aren't always on my mind though. I don't walk down the street overwhelmed with how much I love my Mum. When I do think about them, though, I think nice thoughts. So it's sort of passive. Loving my family is not something I'm doing 24/7, but if you ever ask me if I love my Dad, I'll say yes, and then I will feel a nice feeling as I think about the things I love about him, for instance, the way he (and consequently, I) nit-picks about grammar. But I don't think of this as active, it's not something I'm doing all the time.

Finally, there is being in love. I don't want this post to turn into an ode to romance, so I'll keep this short. Being in love is characterised by constant desire for the adored object. It resembles obsession in many ways, you think about her first thing when you wake up, last thing before you go to sleep. Whenever you have an inspiration, you feel that somehow it came out of your love for her. It's something you're constantly in the process of doing. I'm not saying it lasts forever, certainly statistics indicate that it doesn't always go that way. It's not just something in the background of your mind; it's not just something that you think of when reminded. I cannot imagine being in love with two people at once. Nearly all of us love multiple people, but being in love is something else. It's reserved for romantic love, and it's a constant action.