What Is Love?

What is love? Love is complex. The term "love" is so loose you can't possibly know the meaning of it from any single definition. The second definition of love can't even describe itself without using the word love. The first goes a bit further by using the term "affection", but even the definition of that is, "a gentle feeling of fondness or liking". Love can't be described, it can only be felt, and I will try to help you feel it with my most recent encounter with love. First I will start from the beginning.

I have been living for 22 years, and have never felt a deep connection with anyone, nor have I ever felt the need for a relationship. And while people have told me "you're young", in my mind I have gone 22 years without experiencing any romantic feeling whatsoever, what was another 22? Or another 22 after that? For a long time I believed it was impossible for me to find love, and I was at one point longing for love. That's when I settled.

In September, I met someone I *thought* I liked, but how could that be possible when I was constantly reading articles to tell me whether or not I really liked this person. The fact of the matter is if I was looking up whether or not I liked someone, odds are, I didn't. For a long time I was happy with this relationship I'd made, however I always thought something was missing.

Fast forward to the beginning of November, and I find this group of people that welcome me in with open arms. They were, and still are a rag tag group of people, and amongst those wonderful people, would be the person I found myself caring very deeply for.

It hit me around early December, and despite the oblivious person I am, and with a little help from all of the articles I read about being in love, I figured it out pretty quickly. The first week was a test run for me, I was an outstanding amount of aware and cautious, since infatuation is a constant thing that surrounds people. And with the kind of person I am, I can obsess on something for a week, and it will pretty much go away right after the week ends. So I sat for that week with caution surrounding me, and than I let a month pass, and than another. Because of this, the amount of time I talk to this person, and my stupid amount of analyzing things, I began understanding more, the feelings I was experiencing.

For the longest time, I believed that attachment and love were incredibly similar, because I didn't know any better but while I wanted to spend all my time with them, I was okay if they didn't feel the same. It wasn't until I watched this video that I truly understood:

This video made me think about the feelings I was experiencing, in a way that helped me understand love just a little bit better. Whenever this person was gone, of course I would miss them. Being the obsessive person I am it could be seen as infatuation. However looking more closely, I realized it was more than that. I began realizing that this person I cared so deeply for, meant the world to me; their happiness was all that mattered to me, even if it meant I wasn't in their life. This video explains this, but it's much harder to make yourself believe something, than it is to truly experience.

I consider this person to be my best friend in the short amount of time I knew them, and I found that to be impossible; how can you become so close in such a short amount of time? After taking some thought and looking into, the answer, just like love, is not black and white. Each person is different, each person experiences friendship differently, and each person experiences love differently. The answer to the simple question of "what is love?" well, there isn't one. There are many answers, I would wager 7.6 billion answers, and the only way to get those answers: is to experience them yourselves.