Nope.
Although I agree that friendship has a LOT to do with it, I don’t think I have ever associated it with reverence…? I associate respect with reverence, sometimes admiration.
I tend to sometimes do that with the universe…but i do think that reverence comes closer to what real love is than some of what we look on as love.
Another thing though, if we truly love someone, we will reverence then. It goes beyond respect and is deeper than simply valuing them. Reverence recognizes and reveals another’s core, where they truly * live* and holds that as precious.
J.SS.
Please answer this, do you believe in true love as you described it? does it exist? This goes for everyone really.
Because real love is so important to humanity and in this universe and in order for us to grow into love, as it is an ongoing process, it is necessary to define not just what love is, but what it isn’t. Every little piece of the puzzle that we put in gives more of the larger picture; it becomes clearer what it is that we are looking at.
Do you think that we were born knowing how to love? I don’t know; perhaps we were but have to be re-educated in the ways of love.
How do we learn our equations in school? By studying them, looking at them, figuring out how everything equals everything, naming their parts and/or balances everything else. It is the same with love.
Of course, we can be romantics and assume that we don’t really have to learn how to love…we already know how to. We feel it and we know what we’re feeling and we know what to do with it. Would we know what to do with that butterfly that alighted on our shoulder? Most of us would try to grasp hold of it without killing it and take it home and put it under glass. But are butterflies meant to be underglass or in a cage? 
I’m rambling. I need coffee. But I still know what I’m saying with my musings.
You obviously know to little of Me.
When the world was saying that it could not exist. I was alone in proving they were most certainly wrong.
Most definitely not.
If Jesus could be said to have ever erred, “Everyone knows how to love” would be it.
He, like me, gave too much credit to the Apes.
nameless, is that you? 
Actually your statement for some reason brought tears to my eyes…Mr. Saint. 
Are you being romantic? Love is not logically achievable, at least your version of it.
I don’t have to like my dad to “love” him, because he’s my dad.
I don’t have to like a woman to recognize she is honorable and trustworthy.
These things seem more like reverence to me than an actual bond. Both are all too common examples of relationships these days. Neither constitutes love, in my opinion.
I was being facetious, Mr. Saint. 
Well, aside from Jesus…that would have taken away our free will to love which is about will you know mostly.
To the apes…and what about the chimps?
How does knowing how, translate to having no choice of will? 
And yeah, I probably should get more precise with my name calling. 
Toward others or yourself? That was actually directed toward you, what I said of C
Good question here. I’m not actually altogether sure.
Being born knowing how to love wouldn’t necessarily presuppose that we WILL love.
Some of us are born with many gifts and we do not utilize them or value them.
But perhaps having to learn how to love would be the push or the drive that would open the floodgates into which Love may flow.
Please tell me if I am not being logical. After all, I am a S, Mr. Saint.
Well…
You CAN spell it…
That isn’t true, I don’t feel. We can love someone and hope that they return that love (though it isn’t necessary for Love) but at the same time, we can still see our own separateness from them. Don’t you think, James, that it is the individual who is able to see his separateness that can love in the right way?
If we are only loving another part of our self, then who are really loving, James? Sure, it is sort of romantic to feel that the people we love are a part of us, and this is true, in a sense, but at the same time, it isn’t true.
Well, let me tell you something, James…this is where many people make their mistakes…because they cannot and will not see their separateness. Your above notion of what love is can create a symbiotic relationship, which is not actually love, but a dependency and if the other does not behave, think or feel as the one does, that, my friend, is where the trouble really begins.
That is also the source for compassion. It was only when I began to see the separateness between my own mother and myself, to see her as an individual who was only human and made her own mistakes, that I was able to begin the process of truly forgiving her for abandoning me.
You know, it’s possible you and I actually agree on certain things but the meaningof the words are getting in the way. I do recognize and feel spirit – I am capable of feeling a loved one’s presence and at the same time their absence and missing that person. I wouldn’t use the word intent in this way though. Intent to me is more a willing, goes hand and hand with action, with what it takes to truly love…intent, rightful intent. As we go on here, if you want to, that is…we may come to understand each other more. And I am not a materialist – I flow between the material and the spirit.
You’re correct – harmony may not exist in conflict of intent. But sometimes it is necessary when it comes to loving the right way to forego harmony in place of intent. Sometimes right action in love may feel or look like the most unloving thing to others…but it is just that right intent that is the act of loving. So we may not feel happy or harmonious about it but we come to realize that it is the only to love (the particular act, that is).
I’m not speaking of independence here – though we also have to grow into that. I am speaking of INTERDEPENCE HERE. Wouldn’t you say that the individual parts of the human body are interdependent upon the human body as a whole and upon each other as a whole. 
I hope I said that correctly. 
See, some people mistake love for dependency. It isn’t that. It has is taking me a long time to see more of what love isn’t than what love is. Sometimes it is in the seeing what something isn’t that we come to understand more of what it is.
Well you could have explained. I don’t want to assume…but perhaps you were speaking of when a couple have a child. You might have just said that. And yes, that can bring two people together. It also unfortunately separates some. But that AGAIN is interdependence.
I do agree with you here but Nietzche I believe here was speaking strictly of individuality, as I was above…that psychological separateness from each other. Some people feel that they should breath the same air - and I mean the same air. 
What he’s talking about here, I feel, can also be based on real love. It doesn’t have to be about emotions. We are sometimes able to love better when we are not emotional, I think…though love does go hand and hand with one’s emotions since we are human. But sometimes emotions do get in the way of really loving. That is not contradictory. Sometimes people do use loving and falling in love as a bandaid for their emotions, for their pain.
We love what we perceive as signs of hope? Don’t you mean we desire it, wish for it.
Is it that separateness part of yourself that you love? OR the part that is unwantingly separated? When you love something/one don’t you feel a natural desire to be closer to it (not that you give in to such).
You ARE your perception of hopes and threats embodied. Your perceived hopes (often what you see as “beauty”) are what you end up loving because to Love is to desire for and work toward something’s continuance. Thus what you love, (the perceived hope) is actually of your own continuance because your hopes begin through your own perception of your own hope. It might be hard to grasp (and definitely hard to express), but in fact, everything you have ever loved, began as a love for some part of yourself being seen outside of you. All life is life, only because it endeavors to continue itself, thus all hopes are born from that seed, and thus all loves are also born from that seed.
a couple of comments--------
i think separateness is essential in a relationship…
i dont like the idea of soulmates…
and i am not sure there is a right way to love…
men and women typically differ about this…
And you say that you are depressed?
Interesting.
Yes I am depressed…
In what way do you find that “interesting”???
Perhaps it is what you believe that has led to what you feel.
Depression is the lack of hope. Love is hope in sight.
saint are you depressed???
saint are you helptheherd in past posts???
saint i would still hold those views if i wasnt depressed…