[MancBoy]

I mean come on people use this word for fun. I hate those people who have been with someone for a week then claim they 'love' them only to break up within a couple of months or so. A lot of people do it and it makes me angry. However I haven't got experience of 'love' but I have first hand experience of someone 'loving' me within the first few dates! I don't know about you but I for one have to be with a girl for at least 6 months for me to 'love' her...but that's just me. Can you really 'love' someone THAT fast?

[Stevo112]

i was in love with my first proper ex, my god she was such an angel. It is one hell of an experience. Only took like 18 months before we both felt comfortable saying we loved each other /soppy stuff

But meh, i tend to view loving some within the first 2 months as a sign of insecurity. For freak sake, it is waaaay too early! You could be dating a raul moat who is almost at boiling point!!

[Zoya Khan]

Yes, it has. Love and hate are two intense words I don't use very often and when I do use them, I mean them. People just make fun of this word a lot these days and many take it for granted too!

[Mr.controversial]

You cant base your bias opinion and then generalise it to everyone.
Maybe to you love means nothing
But to others it has all the meaning in the world
Idiot

[redferry]

(Original post by MancBoy)
I mean come on people use this word for fun. I hate those people who have been with someone for a week then claim they 'love' them only to break up within a couple of months or so. A lot of people do it and it makes me angry. However I haven't got experience of 'love' but I have first hand experience of someone 'loving' me within the first few dates! I don't know about you but I for one have to be with a girl for at least 6 months for me to 'love' her...but that's just me. Can you really 'love' someone THAT fast?

6 months seems a bit short in my eyes =/

[singerpianist]

I fell in love with my BF after about 3months, and he was the same. I don't think time means that love is any more or less valid or means it's any more or less strong. Everyone is different and everyone can 'fall' for different reasons, and also factors such as time spent together can play a part.

Love is a feeling that is so describable yet so undescribable. It might feel different to different people, or mean something different to different people. I don't think true love is lost or fake, or overrated. It is what it is

[Perdiccas]

It's really a difficult thing to put one's finger on - no one can really explain what love is with absolute certainty; where does it differ from strong attraction/infatuation/lust/care etc.. Of course, we may each have our own idea of what love is ... that doesn't mean we can all quite literally agree on what it physically is. To my knowledge, a psychologist can't describe a set of behaviours that are completely distinct and compatible only with love.

Yes, it is something that gets overused. Everyone wants to be in love - they are in love with the idea of being in love. How many people find real, true love that keeps them together for a lifetime, I don't know. It's kind of tough when you have no idea of what you're supposed to be feeling and there's this pressure to feel it after a while.

Certainly the openness with which modern relationships are conducted on the likes of Facebook leads many to compete about whose love is best/strongest etc.. How often do we see people in relationships using the words when they scarcely know each other, as OP implies?

I have two yardsticks on what it means to be in love. The first is that you love someone when all those love songs start to make sense (heard this on Fresh Prince), which is a fairly sensible thing to say. The second is that you can't say you love someone until you've shared a bathroom with them - I interpret this on the points it makes about intimacy, trust and acceptance ... you can get the gist.

Maybe the best way to describe it is acceptance - an acknowledgement that you have someone about whom you would change nothing, whom you accept completely and unequivocally for the person that they are. It's about having a partner who is quite literally everything to you, from a lover to a friend to a confidant and everything in between.

Whatever the case, it requires maturity in a relationship; yet this should not set a lower bound on the time in which it is valid to say something. I guess you don't really know what it is until you feel it. Maybe you have said it in the past, but one day you have an epiphany where you realise: 'this is what love is!'.

There may even be a placebo effect/cognitive bias underway too, where convincing yourself that you are in love makes you feel that way. How often are people ignorant of the failings in their relationship because they've got blinders on? It could be rooted in insecurities - maybe the best relationships are those that take their time to discover love.

So maybe the word itself is overused and has therefore lost its ... power. That doesn't mean that love is dead by any means. You have to balance your wish to say it with its power that is inherent in its rarity. Besides, you could always try something different - 'I love you' starts to sound routine after too many repeats anyway ...

Looking at it in a different, very analytic way, you could imagine your compatibility with others as a normal distribution from 0 to 1, with 0 being completely incompatible and 1 being perfect for each other (I guess it could be some sort of Poisson distribution depending on whether you are a complete misanthrope or incredibly friendly). Most people you meet are somewhere close to the middle. Now, the value of your compatibility informs how long a relationship might be expected to last (where other factors are added in as things progress). Somewhere towards the top end is marriage material and somewhere further on than that is love and somewhere beyond that is the sort of soul churning love that I feel for the Domino's Pizza Company on a Tuesday