What Is Love?

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about what love is. Perhaps, even more, about how it works...how it should work, especially when it isn't clear...how it should work.

Does it mean, for example, that it mean that we forebear with others or respond to them, about things that make it hard to 'be' together?  Is it accommodating?  Is it sensitive?  Or, it is tough?  Does it mean that we pursue or that we need to wait, patiently?

These questions put things in 'either-or' terms.  I suspect love isn't constrained by such definitions; that is, love is much more malleable, less prescriptive than we might like it to be...than simply this or that.

I have turned to a passage in 1 Corinthians for further perspective on what love is:

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
Love never dies. 

Love, it seems to me, is all these things, not just always one or the other. In other words, love is 'both-and', not 'either-or'.  There is a time for everything...and love encompasses time.

So then, the next emergent question appears to be one of timing.  When...do we love with patience, with waiting?  When...do we love with pressure, with confrontation?

At the very least, love appears to be quite imprecise...not very much about seeking to 'get it right'.  This, actually, is quite freeing.