Of all the enigmas of the English language, I think the ambiguity of certain words has to be the most perplexing. 'Hatred', 'sadness,' and 'happiness' could be considered immensely vague, but if a survey was passed through the general public, it's without a doubt that 'love' would be the haziest of all terms.

Why? Because every human being is wired differently, emotions are not experienced exactly the same for each person. Popular culture and word of mouth create false expectations for youth and adult alike, and often one can be found disappointed that reality does not match cookie-cutter portrayals of love that Hallmark and Walt Disney endorse. Many people believe that, due to this mismatch, their personal experience and definition of love are inherently wrong.

By this point, I probably seem either madly intelligent or just plain mad, although the two traits typically go hand-in-hand. Like love, nobody can decipher the epitome of intelligence but merely work upon experience themselves, and on that note I can say that love has made me intelligent. Not stupid—many girls claim the foggy-minded atmosphere of true love—because my personal love affair has given me insight that no thorough reading of Nietzsche could provide.

For me, a combination of the most uncertain human emotions has provided me with a deep understanding of life that no philosopher could ever achieve. I'll begin with the first step into a tumultuous period of my life, one clearly marked strongly with apathy.

I was preparing to exit the tenth grade alone. Friendship was beyond me; the death of a best friend had scarred my outlook on life and made me wary to socialize. Although I could claim several close friends, on most days I found their juvenile antics and lack of intelligence frustrating. I found myself slipping into a state of a pleasant indifference.

Somehow, my teachers managed to see through my antisocial antics straight into my grade point average to deem me a legitimate candidate to attend a leadership conference. Along with a friend from the class below me, along with two boys in her class, we spent the day learning the true characteristics of a leader. The pinnacle of the day was lunch, where, isolated from other students attending the conference, I sat with my friend and a boy from her class, whom she viewed with comparative disgust and I, of course, viewed with disinterest.

My memory of that meal is obscure, but it proved to be a massive turning point away from my pathetic life and onto a considerably more interesting avenue. The boy (we'll call him Jack for privacy's sake) was miraculously more sarcastic and uncaring than myself, and carried himself with an air that was intrinsically arrogant. His eyes were green, constantly alight with a cryptic mirth, and contained a chunk of brown in the left eye. When I teased him later about his bizarre features, he stoically informed me that he had 'husky' eyes, referring to the capability of the breed to have multicolored peepers.

"I am the lone wolf," he told me openly. "I don't really have any friends. I prefer to be alone."

We had attended the same school for years, but as both of us had always remained in the shadows, neither was quite noticed by the other until the conference. The following day, we found ourselves sharing a seat on the school bus. Thus followed a friendship formed out of coincidence alone.

For a time, little meaningful dialogue passed between us, the capacity of our discussions being lighthearted. Primarily, I viewed his association with me merely as compulsory: as my friend's classmate he was obliged to be kind to her friend. However, this feeling soon evaporated and within several weeks we were chatting as old friends would, developing personal jokes and teases. Despite our plethora of personal differences (he was a freshman, and I a sophomore; he loved to hunt, and I was a vegetarian) we found it simple to communicate. Cynical, we both found solace in each other's obdurate bitterness with society.

Yet this placidity was ephemeral. Our disparities soon became stumbling blocks in our friendship, idiotic arguments brewing into bitter grudges. A shouting match during one afternoon the following year turned into a session of unmediated name calling, and I found myself cursing in implausible ways.

We were different in every meaning of the word, and I almost admired him for the myriad emotions he stirred within me. He was the only person I knew who rivaled me in obstinance, and while this created a bulk of enmity for both parties, it also happened to pique my interest.

On that day, however, he had pushed me over the edge that had been rapidly approaching for the past few weeks. Amongst other obscene names he had bestowed upon me, he spat the insult that extricated any semblance of tranquility within me.

"Tree-hugger!"

I fired back quickly, my words feeling acidic as I called him a name he deemed more odious than any other curse word: "Redneck!"

He was offended, and no doubt he left the bus that day livid, but I was beyond anger. I had stepped into the next stage of our relationship: hatred.

For me, hatred is a blister that burns within me until I can rectify the situation. Revenge was a given, but the extremity was debatable. His offense hadn't been grave enough to warrant anything more drastic than a few more pointed insults, but upon discussing the affair with a friend we decided to enact a risky venture: we were going to steal his precious baseball cap.

He never locked his locker and, feeling personally insulted as a vegetarian herself, my friend did most of the dirty work herself. She stole his hat and housed it in her locker, but naturally I was blamed. Jack boarded the bus that day with extra vigor in his step and slammed his entire body into the seat with the weight of an elephant. He glared at me, demanding to know the whereabouts of his hat. I answered, stating the reason for my retaliation, and although he began to open his mouth in protest, it fell shut, and he grew silent. The only sounds were those made by the creakings of the ancient bus, and Jack said nothing when he left the bus.

For the duration of my ride, my thoughts were comprised of the boy. I found myself entering another stage in my evolution: humility.

I found his number in the Yellow Pages and he answered, his voice gruff and sporting a quality I'd never seen in him before: vulnerability. He sounded upset, but not in an angry, testosterone-filled teenager mode. He seemed injured, personally wounded as if he wanted to tell me, "You see, I placed my trust in you and look what you did. I thought you were different."

He told me later that his feelings began to change for me with that phone call. I apologized for the incident, though not profusely, and he apologized for his actions as well, though he did so proudly and without an iota of regret. Although my sense of humility and culpability remained for weeks following the incident, I soon found those emotions evolving into something completely foreign to my personality.

The awkward ties that had suddenly formed in our relationship were blatant, and we weren't the only ones who noticed. Friends began making monetary bets on my future romance with Jack, and I found myself lying awake at night, trying to hash out who I thought would be the winner but never forming an answer. I didn't want to start anything with him, because I was afraid that by doing so I would relinquish a portion of myself that I had always demanded be harsh, cold, and unloving.

My dam of self-control finally shattered in December. We found ourselves at a debate conference in Boston and trapped in the confines of early winter morning next to a row of soda machines. Next to the illuminated Pepsi logo, I found myself spilling the details of everything I'd ever known about him, about everything I'd wanted to be, about everything I wanted out of him. Thus began the era where I exposed my soul so often that my skin felt permanently raw.

It took a while to love him. Love is not possible without trust, and neither of us possessed an speck of trust. Yet I felt myself becoming conglomerate to him, clinging to his phone calls and becoming anxious at his touch. I didn't like this feeling. I felt uncomfortable being reliant, for developing such a girlish characteristic. I didn't want to love somebody because I didn't want to become a cliché.

But I did. Days passed into weeks into months and then years where I found myself a shred of what I used to be. I came to adore my new self because I realized that what I was before was an imitation of what I truly wanted to be, of what I ultimately became. I had thought that, solitary, I had every answer, but I could never truly verbalize those ideas. Love made me a philosopher, a writer, a teacher. I became the epitome of what every little girl wants to have, but I reached that point without any fireworks, without any sugar.

I realize now that love has shaped me. My ambitions are formed out of the fuel that only a day in his arms can provide me. I can now see into my future, I can look with fond retrospect upon my rocky past because I have been touched by what few people can claim to notice. Love has made me observant of everything in the world, good and bad, and it has caused me to learn how to speak.

Few people know what they say, and even fewer say what they know. That is why true intelligence can be reflected only through a pen, rather than through the mouth of the general populace. There are pretenders and there are those who wish they had the endurance to pretend, and then there are the handful who truly understand. Those are the people who can summarize everything they've ever learned, ever wanted, or ever taken. Those are the people who can sincerely mouth, "I love you" and understand completely what those words mean. They can understand without any outside research, without any self-deception, or without the urging of romantic comedies, but rather the understanding formed only by an array of emotions that create the walkway to perception.