Love is a concept that motors poetry and engenders uncomfortable laughter among the English-speaking peoples (Tennov, 1979, p. 170). It has not always been so - but that it the "tradition" handed down to modern-day Americans and, as such, it is what we have to work with. Certain analyses of love are beside the point: a German maid's concept of love circa 1900, a la Freud; a Japanese noblewoman's feelings on the subject five hundred years earlier, in Lady Murasaki's erotic novel Tales of Genji; the sinuous influence of Persian attitudes in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as felt before the 19th century English translation by Sir Richard Burton - these may be valid perspectives on love, but they do not contribute to the American zeitgeist of the 1990s. Ours is an English-derived culture, reshaping itself to a new form only in the recent past by the sudden contraction of world space caused by two 20th century World Wars. Love is not an homogenous entity with shared perceptions around the world. It is not even a consistent perception within the Anglo-American context (Epton, 1960).
It should be pointed out from the start that "love" itself is a term fraught with ambiguity (Fell, 1987, p. xxvii). "Love" is bandied about in the modern vocabulary as a synonym for affections deep and slight, for sexuality, for religious emotions, for unfulfilled passion, and for psychotic obsession (Tennov, p. 167). In attempting to define love, then, we must first eliminate those versions of usage that employ the word to safely trivialize stronger, more socially-challenging terms, for example, "making love" as a polite form of expression for the sexual act. There is an intrinsic danger in doing this, however, one that has been pointed out frequently by translators and linguists: the English language is noticeably poor in its descriptive choices (Reik, 1963, pp. 9-10). The comparison of English to the Eskimo language has often been cited - the Inui...