14 - What Is Love

"Feeling"

Everyone at some point in their lives has experienced love, whether they were loved or have loved. Love seems to be the main underlying goal that we all strive for in our lifetimes. It is the one thing that we all, as humans, have in common. There are many different types of love: family love, friendship love, conceptual love, and intimate love. Many people have a hard time finding words to express this intense feeling because everyone’s experience and meaning of it is different. The thing is that with love, it is not positive or negative; it seems to have its ups and downs. However, we still go throughout life searching for it, without ever giving up.

 Family love is unconditional, meaning it is timeless, and everlasting. It is a feeling shared between a young girl listening to her grandfather stories of the olden days. It may even be the strict rules that a parent enforces, that a child feels are unfair. The great part of this love is that you can be yourself, make mistakes, and you will always be forgiven.

 The love shared between friends is similar, but there are boundaries not to be crossed. These boundaries are different with each friendship, but are usually somewhere along the lines of, not messing with each other’s boyfriends or bad mouthing behind each other’s back. Friendship love knows that you have someone there to talk to, especially about things that you could never tell your parents. This type of love is sharing your experience of your first crush in elementary school. Even taking blame for a childish act that your best friend committed, such as stealing a pack of gum from the convenience store.

 Conceptual love is a love of material things, and ideas or characteristics. This love we feel toward objects, such as jewelry, flowers, and other material things. It also is the feeling of loving characteristic traits, such as kindness, humor, and others.

It is the strength of this feeling that makes love the most powerful emotion that most of us will ever experience. People can do some dreadful things out of hate and fear, but love can push us to do much, much worse. And it is often love that can cause us to hate, whether it’s out of jealousy, or anger because our loved one has been hurt. Love, ultimately, is a sacrifice, whatever the relationship, and it must be the most powerful force in the universe because as human beings, we make true sacrifices for nothing less.