What is love (Part II)

Love is a pre-requisite element of life...

Love is such a powerful emotion and feeling, it should never be defined by a few words that will never do justice in describing all that love truly is. For that reason alone, it is safer to keep love as something subjective, something that is unique to the person experiencing it, not something poorly summed up into a sentence found in Webster. The moment we are able to accurately define what love is through a definition, is the same moment that any true meaning behind it is lost.

Love is a huge trial and error process passed on from relationship to relationship. Out of all the relationships we have in life, interpersonal, family, and friendship, the type of love we experience in each relationship stratus differs greatly from the next. We love our family because that is the only way we grow up knowing how to feel about them. Sure, we may love some family members more than others but, some form of love is constant throughout our family trees. We love our friends in an entirely different way than we love our family and partners. Love for our friends is more of an unspoken connection. We love our friends, and would never want to loose the true one's, but we're not exactly going around saying that we love them. In that sense, friendship can almost be seen more as an expressed appreciation to have them with an unspoken sense of love for them. Interpersonal relationships, by far are the most difficult relationship stratus to experience love. We may have many serious relationships in our lives, each one leaving us thinking we loved the person but the moment it is over we're left wondering if we ever loved them at all.

It is the relationships we walk away from with a sense of "the one who got away" that can more than likely be interpreted as a true love. The relationships where we pick our brain and question our sanity as to why we were ever with the person are the one's where love was probably misinterpreted for another emotion, usually lust. Lust and love have many parallels and is easy to see why they are often confused. When you're "in lust," you love what a person can do for or to you, leaving people under the impression that they are in love but if they really thought about it, they would probably realize they don't actually love the person, just what the person is capable of. Being in love, in the simplest of terms, is when you unconditionally accept and like all that another person is, represents, does, believes in etc. Love is by far based on the whole person and lust is picking and choosing what you like about a person.

Love is also one of the scariest experiences we can ever go through. It is so powerful, when it's genuine, what we are willing to do to keep it should be terrifying to any sane person. We find that the things we try so hard to keep hidden as to who we are personally can't stay hidden from the person we love, whether it is by our choice to disclose certain things no one else would ever get to know, or because we find that it can't be helped and those details are leaving our mouths before our brain is telling us to stop. I am a strong advocate that everyone has their personal baggage we keep hidden from people we know are unworthy of knowing it and can't handle knowing. When you're in love though, it's almost as if you want that person to know everything. This is good and bad. It's good in the sense that it is a telltale sign to you that your level of disclosure has increased more than it ever does normally, and that should be a huge sign that the person you are disclosing information to is someone you probably subconsciously know is worthwhile of truly knowing you. As humans, we are very superficial by nature, it is the people we are genuine with that we need to pay attention to.

I think everyone falls in love at some point. I think the term "falls" or "falling" is more than accurate because it happens unexpectedly and once we realize it has happened, we see how hard and fast it happened, and by the time we realize it we see just how lost we let ourselves get. It's the people that take love for granted, thinking it can easily happen again and that it isn't something to appreciate, are the one's who will never know what love is because they will never let themselves be loved.

Letting ourselves be loved is almost as scary as loving someone, if anything it is probably ten times harder to let ourselves be loved. When we let someone love us, we are putting our guard down and exposing our very core and just how sensitive and easy it is for us to get hurt in the process. Letting ourselves be loved and letting ourselves love are much the same, and in the end, it all comes down to why we go through all this just to say we have been in love. That is something that makes up a huge part of what love is, why we go through all this for one emotion, and on the same note, that is something we will never know. No study or research will ever be able to describe accurately all the emotions and feelings love produces; sure they can explain all the physical and brain activity that is associated with it, but never the emotional framework. “The moment that love can be studied and described and put into a universal nutshell of meaning is the moment it is worthless and no longer worth the wonderful hassle of experiencing” (Borg, 2001, p. 12). Everyone wants to know that their love is unique and what they are feeling is something only shared by them and the person they love. In life there is love.