My Definition Of Love: The Ever-Burning Flame

Love.

For such a simple word, it is perhaps one of the most complicated, confusing, and absolutely exhausting things in the entire world. There is no other feeling, no other emotion in life itself that has ever driven people to do things like love has. People have killed for love, have cried for love and saved for love. In many ways, that emotion is the world's most powerful double-edged sword. It is the worst thing in the world, but it is also the greatest.

People these days, especially in our media, throw the word love around carelessly, like it were nothing else except a word. It is almost as if people have forgotten what the word means. It means something beyond attraction. Love means respect. It means give, and it also means take. It means compromise and sharing. It means mutuality.

It never meant give up. There is no such thing as a perfect person, for one. People hold other people to too high standards. They've forgotten that no one is the pinnacle of perfection. No one accepts people for who they are. People change, but not easily. And if someone gives up on a person because of that… well, then it wasn't really love, was it?

Love means, to me, a simple word: Sacrifice. I have seen so many people sacrifice their own lives, their own futures, in the name of love. I've watched people stay with those that abuse them, that don't reciprocate their love. I've watched love fade, and bitterness replace it. And I've watched love seem non-existent in the most meaningless of relationships. I have watched so many be hurt by love, as if it were fire.

But maybe fire is the most appropriate symbol for love. Fire burns, but it also rebirths. Love can change people into the kindest of Samaritans, or into the most hateful of cynics. Love kills and saves. Burns and heals. It progresses, and shapes, and continues as it always has.

In the past centuries, people have changed drastically. One thing has never changed, however, and that is love. There are different kinds of love: Friendly, romantic, heterosexual, homosexual, transsexual and so on and so forth. But really, aren't they all but labels for the same thing? The same sort of feeling, one that transcends reason and logic in ways that seem out of people's grasp of understanding?

Love has never been just one thing. Which is why there are so many descriptions, types and variations of love. At its core though, it is an emotion.

The most powerful emotion in the world, actually. The most beautiful one. The most dangerous one. The greatest force in our universe today.

Love.