The odd nature of love.

The strangest thing about love is that almost everyone knows what it feels like, yet almost no one can explain what it is. Including me. 

We use the word casually. We love our parents, our friends, our pets, our favorite books, even places we like to go. The same word carries all of these feelings, even though they are not identical. To love a person is different from loving a place, and loving a friend is different from loving someone romantically. Yet something connects them. Love seems to begin when something outside of ourselves becomes important enough to change us.

That may be exactly why love is so difficult to define. A definition gives something boundaries, while love seems to exist by crossing them. It makes another person’s happiness feel connected to our own. It makes their absence noticeable. It can even change the meaning of ordinary things simply because someone we love is attached to them.

 Romantic love is perhaps the clearest example I can think of. A stranger can become part of the way someone imagines their future. Decisions that once belonged entirely to one person begin to include another. Where should I live? What should I sacrifice? What kind of life do I want? The questions remain personal, but the answers no longer belong entirely to you, because now you’re considering them aswell.
This is why romantic love can seem irrational. It can make people hopeful without certainty and vulnerable without guarantees. We do not simply see the person we love. We begin to see the world with their existence included in it.

 But romantic love is not the only kind capable of changing us.
Friendship. It doesn’t always involve the same promises as romance, but it can still make another person’s happiness feel drastically important.
Perhaps, then, romantic love is not necessarily deeper than friendship? They may simply be different ways of allowing another person to matter…
Human beings like to categorize things because categories make uncertainty easier to handle. That’s a fact. We call one relationship friendship and another romance, as though feelings will always respect those boundaries. But they do not always. Friendship can become romance. Romance can become friendship. Some connections refuse either name.
Maybe that is the uncomfortable truth about love: we want to understand it because understanding makes things feel more controllable
But love is rarely controllable.
To love is to admit that something has gained the power to hurt us by becoming important. Yet avoiding that vulnerability would also mean avoiding one of the things that makes relationships meaningful?
So the question is not, “What kind of love is this?”
Perhaps it is, “What has this love taught me to care about?”
Love may be romantic, friendly, familial, or something that refuses a name. There may never be one definition capable of containing all of it. That is fitting, I think. Some things become less true when we reduce them to an explanation.
Love may be one of them. We recognize it not because we can perfectly describe it, but because somehow, someway, another person, place, creature, or memory has ceased to be merely part of the world and has become part of our orbit. 

Okay, love you (how ironic) bye bye!!!!!!!