What is love?

First try. Love is romance. Love is relationships. Love is dating, kissing, fucking. No. Scrap that. I can date and kiss and fuck people without calling it love. Second try. Love is the sweaty tight grip when holding hands and strolling through the streets. Love is the smell of the bedsheets after you shared a bed. Love is the breakfast after a long night together. No. This still ain't it. There is more. Third try. Love is comfort. No. Three and a half. Love can also be challenging. And love is worth going through tough times with each other.

But that's not all. Fourth try. Love is feeling home. Not a perfect home, but home. Love can feel like family. Love lets you be yourself. No. Love lets you expand on being yourself. But love can also be a lot of pressure. Four - Let me deviate. Being loved can be really difficult. Accepting a mothers love, having to hide certain sides of yourself, feeling unworthy of love. Loving someone just the same. Finding out what you actually feel, managing expectations and the constant push and pull between needs and boundaries. Wait. Why am I talking about loving someone specifically? Fifth try. You can love life. You can have a general, present feeling of being loved. You can love ice cream. Can you love ice cream? Can you love ice cream? I mean if you tell your mother that you love her and then go for a long monologue on how much you love the vegan pistachio ice cream from the ice cream store a few blocks down the road. Can you compare that? No. Do you need to compare that? Also no.

Loving one does not devalue loving another. And if thinking of the ice cream makes butterflies buzz in your stomach (not that vegan) and you are filled with joy and energy, radiating it to every being on the street down to the ice cream store. Isn't that love? Anyway. Sixth try. To me there is a phrase stronger than I love you. It's I care about you. It carries so much weight. Sharing and reflecting passions. Wanting to see others grow to what they want to be and more. Deeply caring about someones wellbeing, feeling pain when they do. Wanting others to receive all the love they deserve for being themselves. Receive all the love. Well, defining something with itself doesn't really work. So let me rephrase. I want the people I care about to have people thinking of them full of warm emotion. No. Last try. I know that there are so many people thinking of the people I care about. I know because I love them. And that's what love is.