What is love?

With Valentine's Day just around the corner a person can't help but think about love. Either you're in it, want it, hiding it or running from it. Whatever your current love state is, how do you know when you're in it?

I've been contemplating my status of love lately. Trying to figure out when or how I know that I love someone. Wondering if I base my state of love upon my feelings or my logic. My logical side keeps my feet on the ground so that I don't float away by infatuation and ultimately react to something that just doesn't exist.

The three words "I love you" can easily slip from my lips towards a family member or close friend; however, sending those words towards a boyfriend is a different scenario. When I was younger, I projected those words within the first month of having a boyfriend. My young naive self was in such a rush to be loved that the holding of hands and first passes over a couple bases were the closest things to feeling love.

As I've matured and had more relationships, I have started to realize what love is and what it is not. I have had more opportunity to love and be loved. With opportunity has come frugality (less desperation). The downside of this is that the lusty love that once filled my young body with butterflies, brain with romance, and afternoons with fairytale daydreams has began to disappear and with it some of the excitement that I've believed my whole life of what love can and should be. I was desperate for love as a teenager. Now as an adult, I'm content with it or without it. Of course I want it, but I'm able to live without it. And that is where I find myself today, wondering what is love? 

Is it the fear that you could not live happy without that one person in your life? Is it a feeling you can have for multiple people? Are the words "I love you" only to be said to the person you plan and can see yourself marrying? Is it just purely accepting someone for exactly how they are? Is it ok to love someone and to know they will only be in your life for a limited time? Does love give up? Is love boring? 


I guess when I think about old people who love one another and put aside all of the excitement, romance, sexual stuff....my definition would be: Love: being committed and respectful to someone you admire and accepting them for who they are. Hmm this was just something that was on my mind and I felt I needed to share it. Happy Valentine's Day everyone. May love knock on your heart and may you be able to invite it in.