Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool,
though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare

Lately I’ve been considering the subject of love.
From a philosophical perspective. And, by that, I mean in the light of reason, in the pursuit of wisdom, the love of truth. Most of us have experienced love either as a receiver or a giver or both. Even if only in the context of family or friends. Most adults, and many young people have loved, been in love. Love is such an important part of us, part of life, bust mostly we struggle to understand it. It truly is one of life’s great mysteries.

Typically love takes a particular form e.g. we love a person, a companion animal, a favourite piece of music or a place. We might love a particular food, an idea, a belief, a principle, a focus of worship like a god or a religious figure.

Are these all the same love? Or are there many kinds of love.
Or does love bend itself to the form that is adored. Is it transient, temporal, impermanent? Or is love much bigger than mere concepts of personal attachment.

Without doubt the superficial aspect of love does change.
What we once loved may become a figure of contempt or, at least, forgotten.
We fall in and out of love quite regularly. So what is it that came into being and then passed? Was that love?

Something I’ve considered is the example of the mother of a son who has committed a heinous crime. Does the mother fall out of love with her son because he has done something truly contemptible like murder or other violent crimes.
Generally speaking, that isn’t the case. The mother continues to love the son even though she may hate what he has done.
The love itself doesn’t “alter when it alteration finds”.
The relationship may change somewhat but they are still fundamentally mother and son, one of the most foundational love relationships.

When two people fall out of love and choose to end their marriage.
Were they in love to begin with? 99% of the time the answer to that question is yes. So where did the love go?
And when the pain of separation passes and some fond memories emerge, from under the cloud of disdain, and feelings of affection re-present themselves, is that love?

What Mr William Shakespeare seems to be saying is that love is eternal, it doesn’t change.
And yet in our own experience it clearly does.
Was he just a deluded romantic? Maybe the answer is that the essential love force doesn’t change. But the love image or appearance does. Maybe love truly is all around us like the air we breathe.

Consider love as an ocean.
The ocean is always there. Vast and deep. Apparently still or moving. And the movement may take many forms. Waves, foam, storms, spray, vapour and eventually clouds, rain, snow, ice, rivers and more ocean. But all the while it was actually still ocean, just assuming many different liquid, solid or gaseous forms.

Should we think about love as an essence, a force, a kind of ever-present consciousness?
Capable of external or formal change. If we identify with the change then love appears to change. If we remember to consider the essence of love, then it may be possible to see that it hasn’t really changed at all. Ocean is still ocean. Love is still love. It has just changed in appearance and form only.

Maybe that is what Mr Shakespeare meant by “Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,”.