ABSINRAW

We celebrate love, but do we ponder our definition of love, where does it come from? What evokes your sense of what love is, or isn’t? Do you remember the first thing you associated with love? How did you do it?

For the lucky ones, they start collecting the meaningful pieces through how they felt around their parents as kids, like the feelings of safety, being heard and taken care of. So, if you ask a kid who they love, the name they’ll take will be towards whom they feel these feelings, whom they trust unconditionally. But then how are we introduced to romantic love? Your parents are not going to come and talk to you about it as kids, even if they are to be considered the most reliable source on this topic. Who else? What else?

Sorry for an anticlimactic answer, but it is primarily media and literature consumed – books, movies etc. Even if you have heard about it in bits and pieces via the sacred grapevine of different generations of kids, it will lead to them. So, when people say these things don’t affect us, sit with that question for a while. How did you know about what romantic love was? Whom did you tell those symptoms for the very first time, and how did you receive the diagnosis? From heart flutters, butterflies in stomach, orchestra playing in the background, riding on a white horse, to the chase till the girl agrees and all bad boys need is true love, who showed these universal truths, to the boys and girls alike? Aren’t these tropes easily recognizable?

How was it established? If love was universal, why do we have different definitions of it? Why do your parents view love differently than you today? Why it felt different in their time? Not because love changes when travelling across time; people do, situations do, society does. We talk about our own interpretations of love based on all that we chose to accept under its name. We live wanting to emulate the circumstances, to regurgitate it all, deciding first what we want to receive, and in order to get that what we can offer, in the name of love.

I do not have an answer to you for what love is. It’s a journey of discovery itself. For some it will go through finding out all what it is not. For others the definition will keep evolving over time. For a few, the answer would lie inward. The one truth I can leave you with is that love sets you free. If you are not free, it’s not love.