Who can you 'love'? Summary

[John Myhill]

Dear Funknetters,
I have finished my little survey of who people can 'love' aside from
romantically, through family ties, and hyperbolically ('I just LOVE Frank
Sinatra')--in other words, friends. I'm sorry I took so long to put
together the
results. I foolishly sent out the question when I didn't really have time
to deal with it, so it took me a while to get answers I could put into a
framework
for presentation. Of course, the biggest problem, aside from generally
small numbers, is that the respondents were self-selected. Oh well. Anyone
else out
there who feels like giving me more data with their own usage, I would
welcome your contribution very much.

Here are the results; thanks very very much to those of who who provided
the data:

In the end, I received 13 responses. I guess 14, if I count myself.
Actually in the end there were 9 men and 5 women (presumably as a result of
me specifically encouraging men to respond after my first attempt). Of
these, we can make a general division into three categories:

(1) For 4 people, all males, they would not use the word 'love' for anyone
outside their family (I include in this group a gay male who said he could
use the word 'love' for one `gay personal friend, with whom I never had a
sexual relationship--the relationship was more like he was a son to me.)'

(2) For 2 people (1 male, 1 female), there seemed to be a more or less open
set of non-family, non-relatives they 'love.' One was a male who describes
himself as a Christian `as a result of commitment to basic truths of
Christianity', who approximated the number of people he 'loves' at several
dozen. The other is a woman who attributes her understanding of 'love' to
the fact that she lives in Southern California (`I am in Southern
California and here you can love anything or anyone-from bare acquaintances
to broccoli-(similarly, nothing is fine it is either great, wonderful, or
fantastic)'); interestingly, when she described her understanding of 'love'
(she wrote `I'm not sure it is actually a semantic difference but a
pragmatic one; in other words, if the 'Default" is loving someone, what is
that attitude of the speaker towards the referent if he/she merely 'likes'
that person?'), it sounded remarkably similar to what Israelis have said to
me about ''ahav'.

(3) For the remaining 8 people (4 females, 4 males), 'love' can be applied
to a limited number of very close friends. All of the women can use it
towards either males or females, but all use it for more females than
males. For the men, on the other hand, there is no pattern-one uses it only
for one male friend, one for 2-3 female friends, one for 7 male friends and
one female friend, another for mostly female friends.

There seems to be considerably more similarity in female usage than male
usage. There also seemed to be, initially, considerably more willingness on
the part of women to volunteer information about themselves before I made
my second posting. On the other hand, once I had gotten men to participate,
some were surprisingly forthcoming and much more specific than I had
expected in terms of exactly who they love and who they don't love.

The impression I had is that the women seemed to know what to answer, and
they  answered in a generally similar way, whereas the men seemed to be
applying some criteria which they had made up for themselves somewhere
along the way, which they didn't agree on among themselves at all (after
having conducted the survey, I realized that perhaps part of the reason I
feel that I only 'love' people in my family is that otherwise I would have
to make up some other criteria for non-romantic 'loving', and I have no
idea of what these might be).

I seem to be saying 'seem' a lot in this report.

Thanks again for the input.

John