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Love Is a Forge
Like a forge, real love transforms mercurial adoration into something everlasting.
Love holds a privileged position in our hearts and minds. It is the be-all and end-all of relationships. It’s the strongest connection two people can form, to love one another. But when does attraction, liking someone, and really, really liking someone become “love”?
What even is love? For some people it seems to be mostly fear, fear of losing someone. For others, it is joy — joy that another person exists, joy at being in contact with that existence. For yet others, it is anger, a fiery fight to hold onto someone and get them to love you as you want to be loved. And sometimes it is sadness, a heartbreaking resignation that your love is unrequited or its object vanished. But, most of all, it’s all of these things. Love is an intense sensitivity of all the emotions to the object of our devotion.
Yet, if we view love as a purely emotional concept, we achieve no threshold, only degrees of difference between really liking someone and loving them. I believe love should, instead, be viewed by its endurance: Love is permanent. This establishes an easy litmus test: If a day ever comes when you can say to yourself that you don’t love that person, then you never did.
