love, to love, and to be in love

I think we are done a disservice by the English language for only having one word for love. The simplification of such a complex and omniscient emotion leads us to overlook the hidden nuance within this word – love. On a societal level, we tend to use the word love as an umbrella term. We use it to describe our favorite fast-food chain while simultaneously using it to describe our most sacred relationships. We’ve stretched the word so thin that its true meaning no longer lies in a singular realm. It just seems a bit odd to me how we use this word so flippantly, yet so sparingly. We love everything and everyone, until it comes to the person we are interested in romantically, then rather magically the word seems to disappear from everyone’s vocabulary. It taunts us and mocks us from inside our own heads. We fear it slipping from our lips in the off chance that we speak in a way that portrays how we genuinely feel. It’s safer unsaid. Better implied than explicitly stated. 

Love gains this power over us through its illusions of scarcity. We are under the impression that love is a rarity. That we will truly love someone or something just a few times in our life. In this way, we reserve love (the word, not the experience) for instances we deem worthy enough to speak into reality. In actuality, we experience love in abundance. The discrepancy lies in the way we define love and the ways in which it exists in our lives. 

It is unlikely that we will fall in love with as many people as we love in our lives, but what does it mean to be in love with someone as opposed to simply loving someone?  

To be in love with someone requires the time, energy, and commitment of learning and loving someone with all their virtues and perceived flaws. That is, to be in love is to love someone actively, continuously, and unconditionally. Even having said that, this is simply the way I would define the intricacies of love for myself. We have such rigid definitions of what it means to love or to be in love with someone, but through this sort of universal nomenclature, we let go of the love that exists on the fringes of our relationships and oversee all the ways in which this vague, confusing, and utterly consuming emotion exists in our lives. 

There are people from my past that I love, but I am not in love with them. Yet, these are still people I don’t currently believe I’ll ever be able to love on a merely platonic level. It’s just the very nature of the undertone that exists within the relationships I have with these people. When you’re in love with someone there is an air of proximity – a sense of engagement and commitment. When it comes to loving someone, I don’t believe you need either a sense of proximity or engagement. That sort of love simply exists, unattended and undeterred. To love someone is to care; to empathize. To wonder how they’re doing and hope that all is well, in the most honest way possible.  To love in a way that lingers like a soft, stale fog. One that permeates your vision at almost every turn, but allows you to move along with your life as you once did before.

It’s simply in our nature to have this incessant need to define the human experience. We strive to articulate even the most complex emotions, including those that refuse to be contained under a fixed set of words. I suppose that is exactly what I am doing here with love. I know that regardless of my efforts to define the complexity and wildness and persistence of love, I will fail. I will fail because I can only speak from my personal experience. I will fail because while we all share the same diction, it will always be impossible to define love because of its vastness and variability. Love is not just the way we feel towards one another, but the amalgamation of the experiences we share, the weight of memories in our minds, the kisses and hugs and nights spent and coffee chats and silences shared. How could we possibly expect a single syllable to successfully delineate all that love encompasses?