What is love?
What is love? It’s the one question that has been asked time and time again and yet, no one has been able to give a definitive answer. There have been so many writers, poets, philosophers, social scientists, and experts in the field who have given their takes. It’s understandable that so many people just try to rationalize it. As human beings, we all have an inherent desire to just rationalize everything. We try to make sense of the things around us to gain a better understanding of it. Our relentless pursuit for knowledge and wisdom just fuels our passions and interests even more especially in our noble journeys towards true love. We want to be able to figure love out. We want to be able to recognize it when we see it. We want to be able to be sure about it if we are ever fortunate enough to find ourselves caught up in it.
But that’s the problem right there. Love has never had, doesn’t have, and is probably never going to have a definitive definition. If we haven’t come up with one by now, then it’s likely we never will.
We can try our absolute hardest, but it’s always going to be impossible to generalize love. It’s impossible to give a universal definition for love because love can mean so many things to so many different people. And it would be downright arrogant and foolish to try to define love for others. It’s foolish to try to impose one’s standards of love on everyone else. A lot of what makes up love is intangible. These are things that are arbitrary. They can’t be measured, quantified, studied, or held. Whenever we start thinking about the idea of love, we immediately jump to think about the butterflies in our stomachs, the lightness of being. We start to think about the increased heart rates. We think about the shortness of breath. We recall the feeling of being smitten at the first sight of someone incredible. We think about how the knees start to buckle when we’re face to face with a person who makes our hearts skip a beat. We think about what a lifetime of eternal bliss would be with his person. We think about what forever really means and whether it’s really possible to find forever in another person.
But we have to remember that while these feelings and emotions can come attached with love, they’re not entirely what make love up as a whole. There is so much more to love than just these things and it’s important that we are able to make that delineation.
We take a glance at the relationships that we find ourselves in and we have to wonder if we’re really in love. We question our state of being; our emotions. We wonder if we are just getting caught up in the thrill of the moment and we mislead ourselves into thinking that we’re in love even when reality says otherwise. We develop an attraction for someone, but we can’t really figure out for sure if the attraction is purely physical or whether there are also hints of something spiritual or emotional involved.
But that’s just the thing. Love can never be relegated to being a mere feeling or emotion. Love is a verb. Love is a choice. Love is a direct action a manifestation of a great and overwhelming sensation that takes over our senses. Love is a risk that we are all willing to take. Love is a chance an opportunity that none of us are ever willing to let go to waste.
There is no truth to the fact that love is always going to be simple and effortless. There is no truth to that at all. Love is going to be messy. It’s going to be complicated. Love is going to be a tangled web of complications that we need to make sense of. And that’s also what makes love so beautiful. The nuances of an imperfect love are what make them so much more human so much more real and relatable. Real love isn’t always going to be gentle and kind towards us. Love can get very heavy and unfair at times, but that just comes with the package. Love doesn’t mean that everything is going to fall into place, but it should inspire us to make sure that everything is always where it should be.
Love isn’t just made up of smiles, flowers, rainbows, and sunshine. Love is also made up of tears, slaps, stumbles, and downfalls. Love is not always going to be energizing. In fact, a lot of times, love is going to be downright stressful and exhausting. But the best thing about this kind of love? It’s real. It’s something that you can feel without touching. It’s something that you can believe in without seeing.
