Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition. The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet all the most astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.
I spent years searching for a meaningful definition of the word ‘love’, and was deeply relieved when I found one in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Traveled, first published in 1978. Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s ...
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