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.