How do you explain love?

“To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.” DAVID VISCOTT

Being in love is a powerful feeling, and understanding the importance of love is critical when answering the question: “What really is love?”

Love is a mere four-letter word with a lot of conviction and a deeper meaning. Not just that, it is a four-letter word with multiple meanings. The definition of love is intangible in all its true essence. It is subjective in nature, as the definition and core concepts of love vary from person to person. Love stands on the foundation of trust, understanding, care, and respect. Love is a powerful emotion that knows no right or wrong, love is what singers sing about, writers write about and philosophers ponder about. From cradle to grave, love is all that exists. Love is defined by emotions and behaviours such as passion, commitment, companionship, and affection.

To furthermore define, love is complicated because love is a feeling which can only be understood when you have had the opportunity of being in love; it is a feeling which can only be understood when experienced. Love is not possessiveness, love is not painful, and love is not blind, yet there is something perplexing about love. Love is unconditional and understanding, love is divine and boundless, it knows no boundaries and has no limits. Love is the coherence of good emotions and tranquillity that flows through each and every single human being that breathes on the surface of this planet. Love is spiritual and the first step toward inner purification.

Love is omnipresent, and it exists all across the expanse of our planet and our existence in some form or the other. People experience love across various verticals, including maternal love, sibling love, friend love, self-love, same-gender love, heterosexual love, and a lot more.

We, the people, have stereotyped love to such an extent that we try to reason with love based on somebody else's perception of love which in consequence takes an ugly turn, which by extension blinds us and pushes us to not believe in the power of love. However, what we forget is one bad experience doesn't account for the whole idea of love and more importantly magic only exists when you believe in the power of magic which is the same when it comes to love. Love is associated with feelings of excitement, happiness, zeal, zest, and satisfaction amongst other things. Love signals from another person can be easily identified through attachment, care, and mutuality. Love is the feeling of concern and care amongst people, it not just is restricted to two people, but to societies and civilizations as a whole. Love is a feeling of harmony that you feel towards a certain person, thing, or place and a feeling of ecstasy that initiates a sequence of chemical reactions in the brain. It is a euphoric burst of emotions, perhaps a bitter-sweet symphony.

Love is something we encounter, not something we already know. Love is not something that only a man and a woman feel towards one another, but love is something that is not constrained to any gender, not even to a single life form for that matter. Love is a universal feeling which does not relate to gender. Something that has been considered to be taboo, it is only in recent times that people have started to accept the idea of love happening between individuals of the same sex. What we are witnessing is a paradigm shift in opinions, reasoning and conditioning within the society as we further try to explore, break down and try critically understand the social construct we exist in.

Without love, there will be no harmony and balance in the world and humanity will fall prey to its own creation, which will be the doom of us. Love is the fabric which balances and separates the spiritual world from the material world, and without love, we all would just be flesh and bones working towards a cause which has no purpose. Communities will collapse and humanity would open a door to the abyss which will consume us. Love is an extremely powerful energy, perhaps something humanity does not understand completely yet. Just as love has the power to create and conquer, it also has the power to destroy and disintegrate, and that is why the power of love is not to be taken for granted and neither should it be feared. If anything, it needs to be accepted with open arms and acknowledged for all its enigma and charisma.