Proposal

I am going to research the topic of love and how a person’s definition of love adapts and evolves with age.  Is young love merely infatuation?  Is there a finite age when love becomes “achievable”?  Does the perception of love become more positive or negative as a person grows?  My first goal will be to form a baseline definition of love and understand the context of love, including what happens biologically when a person is in love.  Then I will complete multiple interviews with young children, teenagers, and adults.  Through this process I hope to also determine whether true love exists and what the relationship is between sex and love.  I have never been in love myself.  I have, however, had the privilege to grow up with many examples of loving relationships all around me.  For example, both sets of grandparents are about at fifty years of marriage, my parents just celebrated twenty-five years, and my aunts and uncles are still married as well.  I have also been exposed to the hardships and confusion that love can produce.  The majority of my close friends all have divorced parents and a few of my friends have experienced some extreme heartache themselves.  Even though love within my families’ lives have been so inspiring, seeing the negative side of love has made me question what love is.  At some point, those people too believed they had married their soul mates.  So what was different in the relationships, or was anything different?  I think being exposed to both sides of love will help me to maintain a more unbiased and unprejudiced view about love and will give me reliable sources that depict multiple views and interpretations of this immense emotion.