When you say "I love you" to someone or something, what do you mean by that? What do you mean when you say "I love you" to your mother? And is it the same love that you and your partner share? Is it the same love you have for your favorite food? Or for your favorite pet? And what about the love for your best friend? Is it the same love you feel about your clothes? Your car? Your city? And if the feeling of love is strong, raging, and flowing, is there a point where it reaches a certain peak and starts to weaken? Or is it constantly nourishing and expanding? Do you love yourself? And what about loving the people around you? Even if you don't know them? Love in my belief, and according to my enjoyable experience, is a large orchestra that contains multiple types of musicians, which each is enjoying and radiating a unique form of love, but all are harmoniously playing a wonderful symphony that connect all of them to the one source of everything. Love is an essential component of the pure and genuine human instinct, that is not contaminated by misconceptions and twisted doctrines (intentionally or unintentionally), or by the separation believes about the nature of the relationship between the tree and the branch, as the branch in itself is not separate or independent from the tree but to the contrary, it is an inherent part of it. Mawlana Jalal al-Din al-Rumi is one of the pioneers of the global love ideology that does not discriminate between human beings in any way, but melts them in one pot of kindness, compassion, and unity, and such wisdoms have echoed in the hearts of love longing souls around the globe, so his wis*dom have reached the 4 corners of the world and his words overflowing with divine love have become a global calling for human unity with the one and only source of LOVE. Some of his famous wisdoms go like this: "Your job is not to search for love, but rather to remove the internal barriers that prevent you from reaching it within you." Just as the lazy darkness dissipates in the presence of a glimmer of light, also the difficulties of the game of life will disappear by simply allowing the light of love to shine through the sides of the soul to replace the thoughts of separation, fear, and hatred for the self and for the other, whatever or whoever it is. Until today, I was able to count 71 forms of love that I lived as a personal experience, and in this book I would like to share them with you in the form of lite short stories, hoping that they might stimulate the same beautiful echo that I touched in my life and still do, for it is in fact seventy one gifts from the beloved, who enlightened my vision and my insight, so I saw, realized and loved all those gifts and their giver, and I still excitingly looking for more. These forms are what I have been able to see and practice until this day, but they are not all forms of love, because as I mentioned to you earlier, every creature is a unique substance worthy of love, and perhaps you and I could practice many other wonderful forms in the future, each according to our desire and the extent of our openness and acceptance of what the game of life offers us. My goal of this book is not to gain the acceptance and approval of everyone, because satisfying all people is an impossible goal, but I am sure that many, and perhaps you, dear reader among them, have refreshed their hearts with some of these wonderful forms of love, and this book is to gather those lovers who share common interests. You might not be interested in all subjects of the book, and that is fine because as I mentioned before, it is my own experience and yours is different for sure, based on your own interests. Allow me now to take you on a journey inside my heart, where these forms inhabit and share the spacious place with their different sizes, shapes, and sweet melodies that generously spread In all sides of my life. Let's go.... ANAS

Can poetry articulate something about love that philosophy cannot? The Form of Love argues that it can. In close readings of seven “metaphysical” poems, the book shows how poets of the early modern period and beyond use poetic form to turn philosophy to other ends, in order not to represent the truth about love but to create a virtual experience of love, in all its guises. The Form of Love shows how verse creates love that can’t exist without poetry’s specific affordances, and how poems can, in their impossibility, prompt love’s radical re-imagining. Like the philosophies on which they draw, metaphysical poems imagine love as an intense form of non-sovereignty, of giving up control. They even imagine love as a liberating bondage—to a friend, a beloved, a saint, a God, or a garden. Yet these poems create strange, striking versions of such love, made in, rather than through, the devices, structures, and forces where love appears. Tracing how poems think, Kuzner argues, requires an intimate form of reading: close—even too close—attention to and thinking with the text. Showing how poetry thinks of love otherwise than other fields, the book reveals how poetry and philosophy can nevertheless enter into a relation that is itself like love.

The relationships between female sex workers and their noncommercial male partners are often assumed to be coercive and anchored in risk, dismissed as “pimp-prostitute” arrangements by researchers and the general public alike. Yet, these stereotypes unjustly erase the complexity of lives we imagine to be consumed by social suffering. Dangerous Love centers a framework of love to rethink sex workers’ intimate relationships as commitments to collective solidarity and survival in contexts of oppression. Combining epidemiological research and ethnographic fieldwork in Tijuana, Mexico, Jennifer Leigh Syvertsen examines how individuals try to find love and meaning in lives marked by structural violence, social marginalization, drug addiction, and HIV/AIDS. Linking the political economy of inequalities along the border with emotional lived experience, this book explores how intimate relationships become dangerous safe havens that fundamentally shape both partners’ well-being. Through these stories, we are urged to reimagine the socially transformative power of love to carve new pathways to health equity.

The Four Loves is a 1960 book by C. S. Lewis which explores the nature of love from a Christian and philosophical perspective through thought experiments. The book was based on a set of radio talks from 1958 which had been criticized in the U.S. at the time for their frankness about sex. C.S. Lewis examines storge or empathy love; philia, friendship love; eros, romantic love; and agape, or God love. Excerpt: "GOD is love," says St. John. When I first tried to write this book I thought that his maxim would provide me with a very plain highroad through the whole subject. I thought I should be able to say that human loves deserved to be called loves at all just in so far as they resembled that Love which is God."

From arranged marriages to online dating, this four-volume work presents everything from personal accounts to empirical evidence to document what creates love in our culture as well as around the world. The field of biology views "love" as a hard-wired mammalian drive, akin to thirst and hunger. In contrast, psychology views love from a social and cultural perspective where our drive to find love—and our responses to it—are highly dependent on societal norms. In The Psychology of Love, esteemed author and educator Michele A. Paludi examines love through all lenses, thereby providing readers a deeper understanding of the ways we can express caring, sensitivity, empathy, and respect toward one another. Each chapter in this comprehensive four-volume work includes a scholarly overview of empirical research and theories about the psychology of love. In addition, individuals' own definitions of love are included. Special attention is paid to accepted standards of love across a variety of cultures, the ways individuals express liking and love across the lifecycle, and patterns in dissolutions of friendships and romantic relationships, making note of gender and race differences.

This text is a reflection on the meaning of spiritual darkness - especially those difficult places in human experience where meaning seems to elude us, where we are emptied out and are compelled to dig deeper into who we truly are. Douglas E. Christie takes up this facet of experience, in ordinary human experience, but also in relation to the Christian contemplative and mystical traditions, where such experience is often understood to be both painful and transformative, allowing the mind and heart to open in love.

This unique document of the Russian author's creative process is illustrated by facsimiles of original pages from his notebooks, which reveal at least eight plans for the story, each with numerous variations.