How OU students define love:
Love is just realizing there is someone else outside of your own self and being able to recognize it.
- Jackie Clifford, junior studying philosophy
I don't know if you can define love. It's a weird abstract thing.
- Kelsey Sidwell, senior studying English
Love is about making sacrifices.
- Matt Nelson, junior studying aviation
Love is a bitch.
- Evan Webb, junior studying aviation
There are a lot of definitions of love
but I think unconditional real true love is when you put the other person in front of yourself.
- Shannon Welch, freshman undecided major
I really don't have a definition of love. Love is different for different people.
- Nathan Prosch, junior studying civil engineering
Love is something you can't control. It's the only that can make you 100 percent happy all the time.
- Courtnee Blake, sophomore undecided major
I would define love as someone who respects you just as much as you respect them. Someone who will be there for you all the time. Someone you can laugh with enjoy and have no judgments. You can call that person your best friend and know that they truly are your best friend.
- Elizabeth Bailis, junior studying information telecommunications
I would define love as a feeling for someone that means you would do anything for them
no matter what condition they're in.
- Matt Davenport, junior studying nutrition and journalism
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Two years ago one college student gave her honest thoughts about love to more than one million people.
Marguerite Fields, a senior at Marlboro College in Vermont, won The New York Times' Modern Love college essay contest in 2008 with her piece, Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define.
Fields wrote about the men in her life, hook-up culture and the lack of definition in relationships - becoming an unofficial voice for the changing concept of love, as defined by college students.
Daniel Jones, editor of Modern Love, chose Fields' essay out of more than 1,200 entries from 365 schools in 46 states and Puerto Rico.
Her essay really did represent a lot of the sentiment of being jaded too young and being in relationships where you can't ask for anything more beyond being hurt
but still getting hurt by that
Jones said.
Fields' outlook on love changed for a while, as she developed a relationship with a boyfriend for about a year and a half.
Until three weeks ago
the article was almost obsolete because I had moved on to a very stable relationship. We were talking about moving in together and marriage
so I really felt like I didn't want to date anymore
Fields said. Now it's all kind of confusing again and I'm right back where I was when I wrote the article.
The concept of love changes over time, said Katherine Jellison, a history professor at Ohio University and author of It's Our Day: America's Love Affair with the White Wedding.
There were times when again
the kind of love that one makes a great deal of self-sacrifice for was only supposed to be reserved for loving God or your offspring or your parents ... Jellison said. It changes from time to time and culture to culture.
Jellison added that she agrees with other historians who argue that the final change in the definition of love came in the 1920s with the popularization of film.
You're seeing couples who have the 'love at first sight' experience on the screen. You're also hearing them
the language of
