Mind map about love

In this VeryRelated.com mind map discussion we talk about a four letter word referring to one of the most basic human needs, nothing other than love itself. Love expresses sentiment, a strong positive sentiment. But what else can we learn about love?

According to the VeryRelated mind map about Love (generated based on analyzing how words are semantically related on the Internet), the following words are most associated with the word Love on web pages (in order of relevance):

Have, Know, With, Go, Great, There, Life, Music, Would, Which, It, May, Look, Song, Him, To Be, Keep, A Little, Heart, Thanks, Death, Hope, God, True, Special, Children, Woman, So Much, Movie, Thank You, Eyes, Mother, Week, Love It, Father, Sex

The VeryRelated algorithm (discussed here) identifies words which are likely to occur together on web pages. It doesn’t have a conscious “intelligence” to actually know what the words mean, but it does reveal a lot about the words’ meanings by showing which words are their “friends”.

There is a saying that you can tell a lot about a person by knowing who their friends are. Of course, by definition friends are people who you are close with or related to in some way, whether it be through physical proximity or in a virtual way through Internet.

(As an aside, the social network Facebook expands the definition of “friend” to include loose connections, such as someone you may have met once and want to stay in touch with or follow their updates in the anticipation of interacting with them in the future).

Words identified by VeryRelated on the mind map of the word Love are like the friends or close relations of Love. Let’s discuss some of the words and ponder why they are related.

“Have” is a very common word on the Internet, but surprisingly the word Love is even more common. (In the Very Related mind map graph, the word Love is in a larger bubble than Have). This indicates how important Love is to English speakers.

“Have” is also the most strongly related word to Love. This suggests that love may imply (or be associated with) the concept of possession. A wedding vow that is traditionally spoken includes the words “To have and to hold”. To love someone and for them to love you back in return means that you “have” each other’s love.

In some countries today or in some times throughout history, possession in love takes an even more extreme form: marriage or guardianship may imply legal ownership, such as a man “owning” his wife or child as a form of property.

In a non-personal sense, we are often expressing love or positive sentiment for things that we own or wish to own. For example, consider the sentence, “I love that car; I want to have one.”

“Know”, the second word on the VeryRelated.com love mind map, is also no surprise. Wasn’t it the character Linus on the Peanuts cartoon strip who said, “To know me is to love me”? (I had a cartoon pillow case as a child with that quote.) To love something or someone deeply, you have to know the object of interest well. Perhaps lust is love without knowledge of the object of desire.

I won’t discuss all the words in depth, but the following are also interesting to think about in relation to love: Life, Music, Death, Hope, God, Movie, Eyes, Mother, Father, Sex.

It seems strange how Movie is more related to love than Mother or Father. Maybe this is the result of how web page content might be skewed towards commercial promotion rather than personal declarations of love – such as more web pages saying “you will love this movie” rather than “I love my mother”.

Life and death, music, eyes, hope, and God: these are all hugely important words with significant meaning to the human experience that we all share.

Here’s hoping that you experience many kinds of love in your life. Until next time, be sure to explore some of the free mind maps on VeryRelated.com.

-Geoff Peters