What is love?

It’s not romance. It’s not a surging moment of excitement around some person. It can’t be. That’s like a hormone. I’m talking about love.

Maybe I should start with platonic love. What is this love stuff made of? How do you know when you’ve felt it? I think it’s much more describable than we make it out to be. And I think it’s much more common too, for some of us. For some, maybe this new definition will destroy all notions of love they thought they had in their lives.

Love is a genuine, deep care for the well-being of another person. I think that’s it. It’s just taking yourself into the shoes, no the heart, even, of another human being and empathizing. It’s feeling their heaviness, feeling their joy. It is becoming the other person for a moment and having an almighty desire for them to find true happiness in life.

I believe that.

But it leaves me wondering where romantic love begins? What is the difference?

I don’t know if there is some sort of mystical element to romantic love, besides the fact that even mere love itself is a miracle.  But for me, at least… being in love, is to sort of allow someone the honor of reciprocating that.

It’s sort of like affirming to another person’s desire to empathize with you and say, “Yes, you can feel what I feel. You do understand. And I would trust you to feel it the right way.” It’s to allow another to sweep in to all of your feelings, your greatest hopes, your most secret fears, and to trust them in the middle of it all to know it as you do.

If you think that my definition here is saying that the person you allow to do this, must agree with you in all things, that’s not what I mean. I haven’t explained it quite right.

I mean only that the person who you love could come in and understand the paths in your brain… why they trail off in the mixed-up directions that they do, why they are wide in some areas, narrow in others… And that their mind would be wired in some way to be able to converse with your  mind. Maybe not one’s mind, maybe their very spirit…

And also, maybe there is some mystical element to it. I have no idea. These are just my most honest thoughts on the subject, perhaps wrong. Perhaps hinging too narrowly on my own personal experiences with life. But I want to know what this “love” is. What’s making the world turn? And how can we understand it, and feel a pure form of it?

Love.