Love is taking two extra soy sauce packets when ordering out. Love is knowing yes, I want two forties. Love is being on call. Love is a handwritten letter left unwrapped in the mailbox. Love is a new watch. Love is carrying them home with two skinned knees. Love is gentle hands on the back after a double. Love is fists on the door. Love is dialing 911. Love is hanging up before the cops answer. Love is sneaking into their room at their parents’ house at night and leaving before they wake up in the morning. Love is a work delivered chai. Love is a face in the toilet, sick from sobbing. Love is washing the dishes. Love is a song sent in an email. Love is one hand on the ass at all times, even in public. Love is chasing them into the street. Love is pushing. Love is a bloody elbow. Love is a two am call two weeks later, a You know I still love you.
I love love. I’ve been in it many times. There is no quantifiable measurement I use to determine it. It has nothing to do with their job or hair color or relationship with their mother. It has nothing to do with their character, either. Unlike most other things in the world, love is one of the few things we can all feel without reason, that we can recognize without evidence. The closest I can get to putting logic to love is by figuring it into an equation: I add the number of moments in which my heart felt insurmountably wide to the number of times in which if felt impossibly swollen and wham, I’m waist deep in a sea of obsession, letting the tide of my emotions pull me further from shore. My idea of love deals in extremes. Perhaps this is why most of my relationships have ended in melodramatic theatrics. Long, drawn out endings that even writers hate to watch. Love is the most universal yet simultaneously individualized experience humans can have. Love is like the dialectic difference in tomayto to tomahto, except my tomayto could be another’s oatmeal.
The problem with love is people’s dependency on it. Especially with young adults, I find that we are quick to make our significant others a top priority. We lose touch with friends, miss workouts and parties, forget to finish assignments—our thoughts and time consumed with this other person. Even when we’re not in love, we’re chasing the idea of it. How many hours have been spent swiping right or scanning the dancefloor for a pair of eyes to interlock with? Love is more addictive than any physical substance imaginable. Nothing has love’s capability to make it’s feelers simultaneously full yet starving for more. And who can blame us? It feels good to feel. There’s a reason romantic movies wrangle in millions of viewers per showing. Who can resist watching the lives of others play out our heart’s sappiest, most shameful dreams? We’re a society of suckers for one liners and first kisses, reaching for the tissues as we reminisce our first time, our best.
When I think about it, it’s crazy how often people put themselves out there. We reveal our throats to the world, laying the bet over and over again that someone will kiss rather than bite it. That sensation of raw vulnerability is alluring because it makes us human. Time shows us that risk of denigration and heartbreak is worth less than the reward of companionship. Otherwise people would just resign to their couches and house pets after the age of thirteen. A skinned knee heals quickly, the child fast to fall on it again.
