"Some people believe that love and lust are the same thing. Do you think they are the same or different?"

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I didn't even know some people think that, except for one poor deluded soul I saw on IRC arguing for hours with people that he didn't love his children and that it was disgusting of us to suggest he did, because that would mean he wanted to have sex with them. (I don't think it was a language barrier.)

I think it's obvious that love is a lot more than lust. If your wife is sick and you make her a sandwich just because, that's love--where's the lust in that? It would take some really convoluted rationalization to chalk that up to some desire to have more sex with her in the future.

And that's to say nothing of love *outside* of romantic relationships... just the humanitarian kind of love for your fellow human or animal, or even your children. It's a shame that love in its purest form takes such a back seat to romantic, primarily transactional relationships that people use the term "love" to refer only to romantic relationships and only think of them when they hear it.

Though, that being said, I do think that lust itself is, largely at least, a form of love: even at its basest, it's the desire to please another sexually and to intimately share that pleasure. E. g., when I feel lust for a girl I see out in public, I literally feel a yearning, a reaching out, feeling in the center of my heart chakra, but maybe I'm just somehow odd that way.

But even so, that would mean that all lust is love, but not that all love is lust. All chickens have feathers, but not all things with feathers are chickens.