What is Love?

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I used to think you could only ever love one person in your life, romantically speaking.
So if you fall out of love, that means you never really loved the person in the first place.
But I've realized being "in love" is such a pop culture invention. For a long time I didn't understand that love is so much more than what Hollywood and magazines make it out to be.
I thought being in love was a feeling, based on how the person made you feel. Butterflies and smiles. But I see now that the love of that feeling can be disguised as love for another person.


Love is not feeling special.
Love is not feeling beautiful.
Love is not feeling loved.
Love is not a feeling.
And love is not a magical spell that once you're under, there's no reversing it. It's not even a temporary spell.


is
Being "in love" and loving someone, I think, are different.
Being "in love" with someone is so much deeper than that feeling. Being in love with someone means loving who they are, even the tiny little details that aren't visible to the naked eye. Being in love means you're committed to loving that person through thick and thin, "I'm in," so to say.


I think that being in love can be a feeling, though. If you pass the test of knowing the person deeply, and really loving their qualities, then feel away. What else are we gonna call that intense, wanna-scream,  can't-eat, can't- sleep, reach-for-the-stars, over-the-fence, world-series, kind of feeling? 


Loving someone is less emotional, more a decision. Sometimes you can't help being in love with someone. You can't help loving their laugh, or the way he/she thinks, or just the way they make you feel. But you can helploving someone. 
Love is a commitment.
Love is an action.
Love is a choice.
And loving someone is not easy, by any means.

1 Corinthians 13 

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It is not self-seeking. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice in evil but delights in the truth. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and always perseveres.

Well, I sure can't recall the last time I was able to treat someone in all those ways.
But, that's what loving someone is.




all in all
Love is capable of being a feeling if and when accompanied by commitment and action.
But love, in and of itself, is not a feeling or a spell. Love is a decision. 


And that's what I've learned about love. Romantic love, that is.
But who knows, really?


I do know
God is love, perfect love. The magnitude of his love is incomprehensible by my finite mind. And that's the love we try to mimic, and that''s the love we try to find everywhere else but the one place it can be found.