What is love to me?

A Story by Drex

My take on how I view love.

What is love to me?

What is love to me? A million people have asked this question a million times. Some people have sought out to find ‘what is love’, they never personalize it. Most people go as far as saying that love is just a misconception on the natural desire to repopulate, our animalistic instinct. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary love is defined as “attraction that includes sexual desire: the strong affection felt by people who have a romantic relationship”. So if you look at it with that perspective, yes: it is misconception on our natural desire to spread offspring. Personally I don’t find that as true.

Love itself is just a word, a four letter word derived from some foreign language. So the letters themselves have no meaning to me. But the emotional ties behind the word mean so much more to me. Love is an amazing aspect in the lives that we live on a daily basis. It’s something that can build the world in one single heartbeat and tear it down ever faster. Love is honestly a daily battle, some will go their whole lives in search for the one that their soul desires, and others will find ‘the one’ with the first eighteen years of their lives. I’ve personally experienced this connection with another person; I’ve also felt the pain of losing it. It’s really something else though. The feeling of some ones embrace, the look in their eyes when the passion of love is in their eyes. But above all that, the drive it gives you, the fuel. It’s like someone filled you up with gas and made you swallow a match. You burn. But you don’t feel the pain until the fire is gone, and I find that fascinating.

The pain you feel when that fire dies is something that will rattle your bones for a lifetime. It’s something that no other pain can compare to. It can break the strongest man, and drive the soundest man mind insane. It’s a poison, honestly. Sooner or later the love will die, whether it’s just from the fading of emotion, or in death (religious preference aside). It will eventually fade. So it makes me wonder why so many of us fight for it every day. I mean we are fed it throughout our lives, in school they show us families and teach us about our futures, they read us stories of happily ever after. But what is it all for? What are we taught to fight for?

I guess I can personally say that love is real, just from personal perspective. I also believe that it is far more than sexual desire. I see love in every person I have ever encountered: from a friendly smile to reaching out and giving what you have to someone who might need it more than you, from the embrace of one that you trust to the fullest. I don’t have to marry someone I love, because I love so many people, friends, family, significant others. My human soul is capable of loving. And I love that.

-Drex