Love Essay: Love: What Makes Us Human?

Love: What Makes Us Human....

When most people think of love they mentally picture Cinderella and her Prince Charming happily dancing off into the sunset. They think of Noah reading his documented love story to dementia riddled Allie in attempt to make her remember him. They picture Michelle Tanner and Uncle Jesse solving the world’s problems with nothing but a ‘you got it, Dude’. People associate love with happiness, but love is also pain. Picture Ronnie as she clings to her cancer-stricken father who was once her closest friend. Love can bring people together, but it can also tear them apart. Love is defined as “strong affection for another” but love is so much more (Love 1). Love cannot be simply defined as affection because it does not

Romantic love is the baring of the soul to another person and that person CHOOSING to be as open in return. Romantic love is like a garden full of African Violets, needing specific things in specific amounts to completely thrive, in this case, honesty, compassion, trust, and stability. While some girls are giddy with the idea of wearing a bulky white ball gown and dancing the night away with the man of their dreams, some fear the outcome. How can anyone know for sure they have found ‘the one’? Couples like John and Ann Betar have been married 84 years and make the idea of love such a promising one, each still as in love as the first night they met (Shah 1-2). Then, couples like my parents can make a romantic leary of love. After 17 years of marriage, the lack of functional communication left a rift in the marriage only fixed by divorce. High school heartbreak, although not as legally difficult, still wreaks havoc on the heart. Teenagers think they have found someone to be theirs forever, which seems ridiculous at such a young age, yet they still fall in head first. Hearts, unscathed from the past, are ripped apart when he breaks up over text or she is seen on a date not even a week after the breakup. Love, something men have fought wars over, leaves the same carnage on a battlefield as it does in a broken

Great feelings like partnership, remembrance, and parenthood can accompany love, but feelings like heartbreak, torment, and grief can also accompany love. “A strong affection for another” is not an all-encompassing definition for love. Love is happiness and fairytales but is also pain and sadness. No dictionary could truly define human emotion, as words are to simple to convey the overlapping complexity of the feelings we experience. Love is what builds us up and what breaks us down, but most importantly, it is what makes us