Love is a passionate four letter word that all of us have experienced before. Love can be express by mostly actions and words. Love is a feeling that can increase one’s personal strength, it’s the way your mom would give her life for yours without blinking twice, and it’s the way you would sacrifice what you want to put that smile on other people’s face. Love is also countless giving with no expectations of anything being returned. All of these aspects of love fall in these 6 categories: family, self-love, friendships, sexual, and committed. Each of these different flavors of love has unique aspects and characteristics. But all share a common trait of deep caring and respect.

Self-love, the term greedy would come to the mind of many people when they hear that word. What exactly is self-love? To me, self-love is about loving yourself for who you are. It’s about accepting your flaws and mistakes. From my point of view, you can not truly love someone else and allow them to love you when you do not love yourself. Love is about respect, and how can others respect you if you do not respect yourself? According my opinion, I think this is the most important aspect of love because you need to love yourself in order to have the confidence you need to survive in this society.
Family love, the most important, stays with you until the day you die. It will never fade away. Family love starts between you and your parents when you were born and then your siblings. Most of us have experienced this type of love after we were born, but some of the people are not fortunate enough to have their birth parents to love them due to the society today. They still have family love towards the people that raised them, foster family, and the people they grew up with. Your family might be angry at some point, but no matter what they will eventually forgive you and still loves you because they care about you and they respect you. I find this love to be powerful because our family is the foundation of who we are.

As you grow older, you will experience friendship love. Friendship love is the love from one friend to another. When we were young we express this love to everyone we were surrounded by because that’s how we were raised. We considered everyone in our age group as our friends. But things change as we get older because we know what kind of friends we want to hang out with.

There are two levels of friendship love, one between you and your best friends and another one is between you and your friends in other words acquaintances. The love between you and your best friend is deeper and no matter what happens, you will always remember that love. The love between you and your friends can fade away and soon will be forgotten when a new friend comes along.

Friendship love is about being there for each other, loyalty, and enjoying each other’s company. For example, when you find yourself in a difficult situation that you can not your parents, siblings, and others adult, who do you turn to? Of course your friends because you trust your friends and you know they will support you by giving you advices. Your friends are the one who understand and can relate to you best. Loyalty is the key to a friendship love. For instance, when people make up rumors about your friends, you need to defend your friends by confronting the person who spread the rumor. Sometimes you turn to your friends for company, well at least I do, by calling them up to hang out, go places, or just talk.

Most people in the world today are caught up in this type of love. It is called sexual love. They love a person not by their personality, but by their physical attraction. This type of love does not last long. For instance, when a group of teenage guys hanging around the corner of the street, and they see a beautiful girl walks by. They will instantly develop sexual love toward that girl because of her physical attractions. This is also vice versa. Most adult have this type of love too but they expressed it by having a sexual intercourse with the person they feel attracted to.

Some people find sexual love acceptable because they think sexual excitements in part their life due to messages sent in the media today. I find sexual love to be disgusting and immoral because some people look at a girl or a guy as a sex object instead of a human being. Sexual love can only be share between the husband and the wife because God created that for the purpose of joining two people becoming one. Most people failed to do that because they tend to have sexual intercourse before marriage.

Most couples tend to share a committed love. This type of love is powerful between a husband and a wife. This type of love can be long lasting if there is no broken commitment between the two persons. This type of love starts out with romantic love, which is the getting to know each other period. Romantic love can be express by walking on the beach or by having a candlelight dinner at small, elegant restaurant. When you are in a romantic love, you will think about that person constantly and day dreaming of that special one. Slowly over time romantic love will turn into committed love when they realize that’s the person they want to spend the rest of their life with. Then that will lead to matrimony in which the person promised to be committed to their husband or wife.

Committed love does not always have to be in the form of matrimony. It can be a commitment between you and someone else. When we are in committed love, we will always be there for that person. I find this love to be dangerous because people can easily get hurt if we do not keep our commitments or promises. For example, when a man broke his commitment between his wife and him, this can result in an ugly divorce.
In the end love is powerful. Throughout life, a person will mostly like to experience most of the five categories of love in different stages of their life. As long as you learn to love yourself and others for who they are, you will be happy. Love can have a strong effect on people by making them feel great and happy or miserable and lonely. If it weren’t for love, we wouldn’t have the chance meet many wonderful people and to over come many obstacles that make us who we are today. Without love we wouldn’t be human beings, but just an inanimate object.