What even is love?

Love- the essence of so much literature, music and art.

What even is it?

The tip of your tongue tensely touches your palate; your incisors make slow contact with the cushion of your lower lip, and a warm, gentle sound is created that means so much yet so little.

Love.
Love, in the form of being cared for, is the fuel of our lives. Children not nourished with love decay mentally, developing personality disorders. They die inside, like a suffocated child deprived of oxygen.

Love.

Love is seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling, hearing something of great beauty, and receiving emotional gratification from it. You love that song, the way it conjures a burning feeling of nostalgia; you love the way cities look on a rainy night, the way the street-lights reflect off the puddles and create glowing pools of silver. You love the comforting smell of baking bread the same way you love the safety of your warm bed.

Love.

Love is infatuation and obsession. You brush shoulders with a stranger, turn around and meet their depthless eyes,  feeling a painful yet glorious sinking feeling in your chest. Their beautiful face remains immortalised in your memory, haunting you day and night.

Love.

Love is lust. A carnal instinct, so vile and animalistic yet so wonderful, which causes such happiness yet such frustration. Intimacy, warm bodies moulding together to become one entity. A desperate need that must be fulfilled.

Love.

Love is attachment. A need for someone else to care about you, to be there fore you. A need for you to be around someone all the time, to hear them, see them and feel them. A need for both of you to desperately crave each other’s attention. If one person stops loving, the other falls into the abyss.

With so many meanings to love, what  do we mean when we say we love someone? I care about you? Darling, spending time with you makes me happy? Honey, I am obsessed with you? I really, really enjoy having sex with you? Sweetheart, I feel attached to you?

And really, why do we even announce our love any more?

It doesn't matter.

Someone can say they love you, and change their mind. And as we've already established, they might not mean it they way you think they do.

It seems as if love has become a blanket term for so many things. We make such a big deal out of someone saying that they love someone else in a relationship. Who said it first? How early in the relationship did he say it? 

Love has become an empty three letter phrase we hear so often that it’s lost it’s meaning….only in literature does it carry any sentiment of romance, because in literature people take the trouble to explain what they mean by that vague five letter word. 

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin:

"When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are to become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No ... don't blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn't sound very exciting, does it? But it is!"

John Donne

"I wonder by my troth, what thou and I Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then?"

Persuasion

“You pierce my soul.”

Clarissa

“By my soul, I can neither eat, drink, nor sleep; nor, what's still worse, love any woman in the world but her.”

Wuthering heights

"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

Dangerous liasons

And it was only when I began to feel actual, physical pain every time you left the room that it finally dawned on me: I was in love, for the first time in my life.

Lady Chatterley’s lover

“All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.”

Adam Bedbe; George Eliot

"What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?"

Jane Eyre; Charlotte Bronte

“Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.”

But, does romantic love actually exist the way it does in literature?

I'll leave it for you to decide.