Love is many things. But simply, it is a natural feeling. The reason why it is hard to define it is because you only know when you know. Love is a mystery, a case that has missing evidence. That evidence is experiencing it yourself. When you know, you know.
Love can be familiar, a sense of comfort, a sense of anger until it becomes a feeling of hurt. Love carries a hefty weight on your shoulders, the weight of commitment. Whether you feel genuine love towards family members, friends, or your lover, it comes with the heavy weight of commitment.
With family, we show that we care for them, that we are happy to spend time with them. With friends, we have to be their biggest supporters or critiques when necessary, the pedestal they need when they cannot reach. With your lover, and especially marriage, one has to be committed to a promise – the vows that are spoken during marriage ceremonies: “In sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, til death do us part.”
Genuine love is many things but it should never be a burden. If you feel that you are caged in, is it truly love? Love is the freedom you feel, the glint in your eyes, the light in your life.
We are human, we are meant to feel connected, interlinked with one another. Even the loneliest of the lonely, they find the path that will lead them to discover that very feeling. Because that is how we live.
Ernest Hemingway said, “The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.” This is one of the things that is being referred to when hurt is associated with love. When you love too much, you can easily lose yourself.
Ask a million monsters if they had ever felt love, I’m sure they did. Perhaps it could be the reason why they turned that way. Maybe because when others love too much it ruins them. Love can be an accomplice to many crazy things. With that, to feel is to know, to know is to feel, isn’t it?
And it is inevitable to love. When you feel genuine love, sometimes you feel like there is no happy ending to it. Because you always end up feeling hurt. Though, that is life and fate, once again it is inevitable. But it builds character, and character is an important asset to life. Everything is temporary. Even permanent markers are temporary. The only happy ending anyone could get is the ending of peace.
Where you made peace with yourself, life, or anyone for that matter. We all feel it through our family, friends, even that first elementary crush. Love is there and it always will be.
Johana Manabat Valenciano, 13,
Grade 7, Angeles University Foundation