I'm not sure I can even ask the right question.

I understand lust. I understand commitment. I understand trust. I understand the desire to care for and protect another. I understand how your heart may flutter when you're with someone. But, is that love? Is that all it is? Do people stay together for 60 years (like my mom and dad did) because of love? Or is it an act of the will?

Help me out, please.

Well you come here and let me show you lol.

You can't understand Love ...... well the answer is in the Bible ...... but it just happens

Since we can't get into each other's heads, it's hard to decide what the proper behaviour is in "love", why poeple do it, and if it exists in the first place.

In my opinion, and in my case, love does not exist. There is infatuation, there is a love-high for six months, but this love-high may last less or more depending on the individual.

Afte the love-high is gone, then it's no longer love that holds the couple together. instead, it is a combination of many psychological things, and social - sociological ones.

1. The purpose of marriage.
Humans are beleived to couple up in order to raise more children to sexual maturity than two. These days it's a synch, even for the last two hundred years. But in the far past in our evolutionary development, it was not easy; and a one-person parentage-guardianship could not do it. Two persons are needed to bring multiple children concurrently to sexual maturity.

Hence the importance of coupling up.

2. The mechanism of how to couple up
Humans are capable of extremely diverse reasons and formations of marriages: coupling, bigamy, polygamy, biandry, polyandry, poly-poly, these have all existed in one or another of human societies. In the current set-up in North America it's unigamy-uniandry, that is, the marriage which is brought forth primarily to make children, is a couplehood of one man, one woman. Gay marriages are valid in my eyes, but not a subject of this topic, since gay (male or female) couples can't produce children.

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In coupled marriage, the tendency is this:
1. An approx. six month relationship in which both parties get blinded to the other's faults, and fall in love, which is accompanied by a strong desire to devote one's life to the other.
2. Hopefully within this six months the couple makes a decision to stay together.
3. Some time after the decision, within or outside the six months, the couple makes a public ritual to announce their couplehood. This means that in front of many witnesses, they exchange oaths to screw only each other from then on.
4. After the oaths have been made, in any culture or social arrangement, then the couple is bound to not split up due to:
- their thinking or being convinced that it's a good idea to stay together (voluntary commitment)
- social pressure by the guests / witnesses at the wedding
- religious pressure to keep the commitment, incl. threats of excommunication or a life remaining without sex (ie. in Catholicism, the decree of non-divorcableness), and finally the threat of hell, as a couple acts against god's will in many religions, if they split their holy matrimony, because there is an understanding that god willed the couple together. This is what actually helped many brute husbands over thousands of years to beat their wives in Christian cultures, totally unpunished: God's will was their marriage, to defend the wife from being beaten was in a circumspect logic an act against god's will.
5. Legal pressures, which dictate a continued financial and often other responsibility by the parties. For instance, even if divorce takes place, there is child support payments by one spouse to the other, and sharing of the responsibility of raising the kids. Many societies demand an even split of assets in monetary value at times of divorce. These laws aim at keeping the couple together, not only do they aim at making the split fair.

In this point four, a couple free of religious or even of social pressure may stay together (like in socialist countries, where divorce is very easy, and people are atheists, like in ex-communist block countries). They may decide to do that because they know that it would not be easy for them to find another person to marry. This is true no matter how happy or unhappy the atheist couple may be with each other.

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The religious, social, familial, legal, and personal pressures, the last in this five starting with the feeling of love, all aim at one thing in societies with coupling: to sustain the marriage until at least three children of the parents reach sexually mature age and an ability to live independent lives, incl. marrying themselves to other people.

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Long term love

In most marriages the partners realize they are not well suited. In almost all marriages. But they stay together.

In a few very rare cases, the couple is well suited. They don't feel love, the so called amorous love; they may care for each other, and have an inner wish to do the best for the other. But this inner wish is not stronger than one felt by the indiviual partner for his or her children, partents, friends.

The couple will not feel the "love", but they will be happy together if they are a good match. This most commonly means that their key personality indicators should not be farther away from each other than 15%. For instances: Their age should be close enough so that their energy levels should be compatible for sex, child rearing, work, and recreational activities. Their educational background should be close, so their social interests and choice for circles of friends should be compatible with both. Their earning power and social status by birth should be similar, so they, again, have compatibility with each other's social circles.

These three indicators have been well known over the ages, to matchmakers or to anyone in Western Societies. But there are much more many compatibility indicators, that we, researchers into the human condition, only seem to discover and have been discovering since recent times.

Some of these have to do with learning styles, which are nevertheless completely independent of IQ. IQ also plays a part, again, in the 15% zoning. Cleanliness, the smell of the other, even when nobody notices consciously what the other smells like. Taste of mouth when kissing gives indication of probability of successful child conception and childbirth. Relationship of the self to ideals such as religion, origin of man and the physical world are important to many, and form a basis for continued compatibility. Many others.

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To answer the OP's original question, no, amorous love with one person is not sustainable. But pleasant coexistence is sustainable, and is not rare. This is not an on-off quality, but a graded quality, ie., many levels exist of compatibility, on many different axes of human nature.

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If I was right in the above, then one might ask, why are spouses so hugely distressed when they lose their spouses? Does this huge distress not indicate a strong bond, and love?

The answer is that marriage creates a very strong bond through continued sex. There is a constantly renewing and reinforced positive reinforcement to feel good about the partner, if one has sex only with that partner.

The other answer is that it's more likely for old or very old people to become widowed, and as such, they are less confortable with the prospect of having to rearrange their daily routine. This sounds stupid, but in effect it may come out as a feeling of desparation and loss of projected enjoyment of life.

There are other reasons why a spouse may go into shock when they lose their partner. My guess is that the bond they build with sex, and secondarily with a lifefime or shorter with common goals, common worries, common interests, like raising those children right and well, create a strong bond. It is not love, per se, but it does relate to the original bond that has been first established by the love feeling for six months, and then the official establishment of a commitment.

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Why love in the first six months only?

Because it is long enough to dupe the partners into a commitment, which can grow from there. People tell the young, to open their eyes when falling in love, but that's idle instruction, and coutner-indicative of progress, too. We, as a species, ARE supposed to feel blinded by love. This is the best we can do.

Why can only couples fall in love? Debates exist if it is possible to fall in love with more than one partner at a time. I think not. I think we are putting the cart in front of the horse by asking this question. I think the proper thought is when we say that love exists between two people only, and possibly, because in our evoltuionary past, in the beginning and in its most critical times of its formation, the coupling was the type of marriage that prevailed. It's due entirely to personal psychological mutations, namely, that an ability to love one other person in amorous love mutated, and that's that. It is equally conceivable that another mutation may have happened instead, which it did not, but then our ability to love many more than one at a time woudl be possible. which it is not.

The many different forms of coupling what ensued later in history are the results of man's ability to change his environment, including his inner psychological and outer social environment, according to the conditions and freedom of activities available.

Men and women, for instance, like to screw around; and leaders are known to have become leaders due to a strong sense of theirs being cruel, self-serving, and strong. It is not easy to be cruel for the everyman. So self-serving, cruel men or women scored many spouses for their own exclusive use. Harems.

In other societies, mainly in small cultures of primitive societies, with few members and no links to societies beyond themselves, the people were more forgiving, more sticking together and up for each other; less greedy, more supportive. This was necessary, because their vulnerability as a society was not defended by the power of large numbers. So they shared their men, women, and children. In these societies, as we can observe also in modern times when Polynesian and Pacific Island societies were discovered, or small tribes in Africa, the notion of a god was always a very friendly, helpful god, who would go out of his way to be nice to people. This was so because there was no stratum of society, established stratum of society, which was in a position to hijack the god image and create a religion to serve their own purpose more then the purpose of others in their societies. Again, think of cruelty, think of a feeling of entitlement by leaders for their self-serving.

I am getting away from marriage here. The upshot is that in my opinion the coupling was the result of a mutation that has emotional-social ramifications. This manifests in the feeling of amorous love for one other person always and only. The feeling lasts six months, and then it passes. Commitment is created during this six motns. Commitment is carried on to other forms of commitment to keep a couple together in marriage, in order to enable them to bring more than two children to sexual maturity and independency of life.

Love is possible between spouses, but it is more reasonable to think of it as love between friends, than as love what a couple first experiences in the six months of their falling in love. the bond between the spouses is strogner than between friends, because of the effect of sexual bonding and bonding due to common interests. The commitment will continue past the first six months, even if, possibly, the couple is not compatible and develops any amount of resentment for the other spouse. However, if sex continues for the couple, then there is a higher chance that the two will NOT split up. When death splits up a couple who are still in the throes of having regular sex (of any frequency) then the shock for the surviving partner is huge.

My parents just had their 50th. The joke in my family is we are like the mafia. It is more acceptable to kill your spouse and hide the body than it is to divorce them. Though my sister is on divorce number 3 and I am divorced once.

The love that I feel for my ex husband is still there. It is not lust. It is true concern and love for him as a person. We will never remarry but we will always be friends. I know some people nay say that one but screw 'em. Most of them did not have as smooth divorces as mine. I was the one who filed. He said he never would have. We are like siblings. I miss his company but I do not have sexual or romantic feelings for him.

There are types of love you feel for different people. The way a woman loves her husband is not how she loves her children or mother. Though the common concern for their welfare and willingness to put them first is there in all case (in normal families).

P.S. Someone close to me asked if there was anyone I loved so much I would take a bullet for them. I had to really think and I only have one. My brother's god son who is serving in Af. Why? Because when my brother became his god father he became is protector. When my brother died, I felt Kody's welfare if I could help it was up to me. Not that he is not capable of caring for himself. But in the true god parent sense, I do feel I would need to fill my brother's very big shoes.

Love is the ability to be completely vulnerable with another, and trusting that it will not be violated. Loving is also not violating that vulnerability that another shows towards us.

It's also subjective, everyone has their own interpretation and perspective on the matter. That's what may be confusing you. Regardless of how others see it, how do you yourself see it? Figure that out, and you will see the answer to your question.

I don't think you can answer this question with words. In my experience (and I do mean my personal experience of wrestling with this very question) the more you try to pin it down the more you can become convinced that you don't have it. It's like a butterfly in that respect.

Remember that according to the Greeks there are many different kinds of love. In our day, with the encouragement of television, we tend to think that it only refers to sexual love or parental love. There are many other kinds that are just as valid, but not accepted as "real love" in our current worldview.

I found that agonizing over this question only made me miserable and increased my self-doubt. I don't think there's any benefit to trying to niggle about it. Let your heart be free and listen to what it tells you. Just listen carefully.

Perspective matters. No matter how much you care, if the vision is different, the focus will remain skewed. At some point you have to put on the glasses (or take the rose colored ones off.)

Relationships take work even when it's a shared vision.

Kudos to all the couples who've made it 50 and 60 years! You are to be admired.

Love is what held my late wife and I together for as long as we were together. That love was founded on something that was greater than the two of us and independent of the two of us.

That love resulted in she and I having a permanent and formal relationship (marriage). That love existed between my late wife and me before we were married. After our wedding, she and I consummated our love for each other by beginning a sexual relationship with each other. Years later, when cancer crippled my wife, love held us together even though she was no longer capable of having sex with me.

Sometimes such love requires one to not pursue everything that one's flesh desires. If one makes the satisfaction of one's flesh the center of one's life, then one can easily miss out on the love that I am describing.

Do I believe in an emotion called love that just drives two people together and magically holds them there? No. Love is the act of constantly rekindling your feelings of affection towards your partner and not letting those feelings die out. Love is a choice, it takes dedication and hard work to make it work.

Imagine two wells, one full and one empty. The full well represents your capacity to love and the empty well represents your love for a particular person. The act of love is to take water from the full well and move it to the empty well with a bucket. Every day, you have to take that bucket of water from the full well to the empty well. Some days, it will be easy and the bucket will be huge. Some days it will be hard and the bucket will be the size of a teaspoon. Each of those buckets don't amount to much by themselves, but in time what started as infatuation will become so much richer and deeper than you ever expected it could be. All that it takes is hard work.

Love is the conscience effort to remain infatuated with the same person. It used to be that everyone did that, they picked a mate and made the relationship work. Today, divorce is too easy and people break up too freely. People expect love to come naturally and freely and that is just not the reality.

People come together and stay together for many reasons.
Sometimes it is love. Sometimes love might require an act of will.

Aristotle distinguished 3 types of relationship.

1. Friendships arising from utility - In this friendship, the
motivation arises from some commodity which the friends can
provide to each other. A friendship between a student and a teacher
for example or a friendship between business parters. It is shallow
and lightweight and dissolves whenever the commodity is no longer
available or needed.

2. Friendship for pleasure - Here there is no consideration of the
utility of the friendship but only for the present quality and
satisfaction deriving from spending time together. This type of
friendship is exciting and highly fulfilling but is somewhat
selfish as it arises from the needs of each to experience the
pleasure. This friendship ends when either party finds other
alternate sources of pleasure.

3. Altruistic love. This is the highest form of friendship and its
defining characteristic is that the partners do what they do out of
concern for the well-being of the other without concern for their
own desires or needs. This friendship endures.

read also

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/love/

Like every other emotion, it's a state of mind.

Stay away from it. Love is balanced by hate. You can't know one without the other, and everything requires balance.