Love changes the fiercely independent into couples committed to each other.
Love transforms a group of strangers into friends who are supportive of and are there for each other..
Were it possible to empower a nation wholly with love, then no other nation would conquer it.
With unconditional love, though, sex is a silly waste of time.
For sex is not the end-all and be-all that love is.
This is because love is forever, while sex only lasts until the happy ending.
I don't care if you can have multiple happy endings, the amount of time taken to get to it could have been spent learning about your partner because sex is only a tiny part of the intimacy.
Many a relationship is cut short because both parties just wanted to hook up.
Even animals that are monogamous do not spend the amount of time human beings seem to spend on sex.
Then again, apart from bonobo chimpanzees, no other animals use sex to form close bonds like human beings do.
Maybe it is due to our higher intelligence.
Yet it is still possible to form close bonds with other human beings without sex since it is but one form of expressing love.
This is why poets wax about unconditional love, and why a certain religious writer had this to say about love:
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 death that I may boast 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 and does not count up wrongdoing; 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. — I Corinthians 13
Seen from the Buddhist perspective, love is defined as "wanting others to be happy."
This implies freedom from conditions that attachment brings to human love, which only fulfills our needs temporarily.
By admitting that we love someone because they make us happy, we become attached to that person. Thus such a love is conditional. If they no longer make us happy, what then?
True happiness ought not be dependent on our attachment to others; it should be free of attachment.
Being free of attachment, the only thing left is unconditional love.
Reference:
I Corinthians 13: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+13&version=ESV
The Four Immeasurables: http://viewonbuddhism.org/immeasurables_love_compassion_equanimity_rejoicing.html
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