For ages the history of humanity has survived with an infants understanding of 'love'. Yet, in the last century it has lost all understanding of what it is to like and what it is to love. While many different languages and cultures carry more than one definition even multiple words to describe how and one likes and loves, since English seems to change it all with one word of each it is the most confusing and misunderstood.
Seemingly, many merely like something, someone, a feeling, a situation, or a result, yet when there because a great dwelling of intense liking, we automatically go to thinking it's love. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of vocabulary and words to express this jump is now not even a baby step, in implication or context, one will throw love to another, to which at one time was a heavy and intentional weight to pass much like a ton of gold, while now it's no more than a text of a catchphrase or passing suggestion. With this the significance of the vast difference between one's liking and loving has become nearly void of differentiation, but there are those who still feel the weight and intention of loving not simply liking and need to know the difference.
-To prefrace myself, I am no expert, I have lived, I have loved, and I had learned, my understanding comes from these gifts of experience and the understanding from God's word and his example in my life-
If one was to make a simple distinction and attribute a clear difference between liking and loving it would be; selflessness. Anything less than for which one would not lay down not only their life, but also their own desires, their own well-being, and their own understandings, is to 'like' someone, something, a feeling, a situation, or a result. And yet, to love is still even more limited than the opposite of what it is to like.
For one could be so distraught and give up their own life in selfishness. One may also allow another to control them in a relationship to which their own desires become forgotten. One may be addicted to drugs, food, perversion, greedy, or other things that take away from their own well-being. One may acknowledge lies and deceit on place if their understanding of the significance of life and happiness due to appetizing promises. These are not love, so as simple as selflessness may be too address the difference between to like and to love, there is far more that most be understood and these can be found in God's word:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:1-13 ESV
- https://bible.com/bible/59/1co.13.13.ESV
This is given by the author of love and the example to which we should strive, anything beyond or less is for personal attribution. And with selflessness we see the details encompassed by God's word and clarity defined.
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