What is Love?

Love is such a weird feeling. It knows no shame, no manners, it has no bounds and is ever so far reaching. Nothing can stop its arrival and no one can predict its loss. The more you try to avoid it, the deeper its essence engraves inside your heart.

We tend to keep a lot of ourselves inside the confines of our own minds, where we constantly churn out memories and fantasies, making us lose ourselves in a sea whose only bounds are the seemingly infinite past and the unknown boundaries of the future. But it is when we love, that we find ourselves truly and suddenly in the present. For a moment, it doesn’t matter whether life is derailing, it doesn’t matter how our careers could be a disaster, because in that moment, our hearts have been flooded by “Love”.

But true love isn’t as merry as it seems. Its filled with broken hearts, poisoned with often humiliating and really hurtful fights, mean words getting exchanged, disagreements, and yet we continue to chase it throughout our lives.

Why is it that even after a million years of evolution and constant upgradation of our three kilogram brains, we still aren’t able to control this feeling of love, no matter how hard we try! There is something about this feeling, something that is easier to feel than to explain. The sharing of vulnerabilities between two people, although comes with uncanny discomfort, is ever so soothing.

Love is so incredibly complex, it is almost impossible to express its true form in words, but there is a line by Pablo Neruda that describes how close two people might become when they are in love, and it is a beautiful line indeed -

“So close that your hand upon my chest is mine”

I would not ruin the line by trying to explain it, but I want you to read it as carefully as you can, and am sure eventually you will get the depth that this line brings out.

Love is also associated with grandeur, the scale of which has no bounds. But is it only the grand and unfathomable gestures in life, that deserve to be written down in tandem with love? I recently came across a poem on twitter, and here it is —

These are excellent lines! But keeping the analogy intact, what if the roses were appreciated right where they belong? If not wrecking would it still be love? What if love could just be a stare going down the street, or a two minute conversation at the bus stop. What if love sometimes could just mean seeing the rose on the bush and passing by…

Wouldn’t it be unfair to limit love to romanticism and people?

Love is our way of filling the infinite void within our hearts, a void that’s always present no matter where we go or what we do. But when in love, we truly believe that our significant other has that void too, and that brings comfort. Comfort that is not directly expressed, but subtly felt. A sense of satisfaction, that we are not alone fighting the constant battle between happiness and sadness.

So that day when you were passing down the street, and saw that beautiful rose in the bushes, a weird sense of happiness creeped inside your heart, and that is love.

That day when you were endlessly scrolling through youtube, and suddenly came across a video of a child playing joyfully with a dog… was there anything majestic in this moment? No. And yet you feel an innate sense of satisfaction, a weird sensation of fulfillment like no other. That is love in its purest form, love for yourself and the world around you. Love that’s uncorrupted by expectations and desires.

In the end, isn’t merging voids, embracing the chaos of life and appreciating what there is with a subtle sense of irony and companionship, all that love is?