Growing up I had always been intrigued by the idea of love and finding love. I watched movies where princesses find their princes, movies where the unpopular girls get with the popular guys, and listened to music about a girl being Juliet finding her Romeo (if you thought I was lowkey referencing Taylor Swift there, you're absolutely 100% correct). I even watched my parents love each other for 26 years—of course I've only alive for 19 of those years though.

Here I am nineteen, almost twenty, years into my life and I've experienced many different forms of love in such a short amount of time. I've experienced those 2 week long middle school relationships where all you do is hold hands, a couple half year relationships, an abusive two-year long relationship, and a crash-and-burn 3-week long relationship. And now, a new type of love I've never experienced. A love that feels right—a calm love, a safe love, an effortless love even when the effort is there in the relationship.

We grow up in a society that places this expectation on us to be in a relationship at almost any given time. We are given the idea at a young age that the right guy will swoop us off our feet and save us from the evil monsters of the world. What I've come to learn is that is in no way true. In fact, sometimes the guys that are meant to save us are really the evil we need to avoid. I've been a victim of one in fact.

Growing up we are exposed to the idea that love comes easy. Movies, for example, give us this false sense of hope that we will bump into a random guy in our high school hallway and instantly fall in love at first sight, or that we will find them when we are off at a music camp for a summer (sorry Camp Rock, I still love you). Here's a hard pill to swallow that I've learned: love doesn't come easy.

When I say that love doesn't come easy, it doesn't mean that you have to go out frantically searching for someone that will give you attention and make you feel like you're in love. In fact, the right love usually comes when you don't search for it. Saying that love doesn't come easy means that you have to go through horrible heartbreaks in order to find the one that'll make all those heartbreaks worth it. In a world full of no, find the one that'll be a yes for life. There will be people that come along and trick you to make you think that they love you, but then you come to find that really, they were just using you.

So, what does love REALLY look like and feel like? Love is finding that person whose laugh you adore and will never get sick of. Love is binge watching your favorite TV show with him even though you've already seen it three times. Love is being the big spoon even though he is ten inches taller than you just because he likes being the little spoon. Love is waking up to kisses and on other days waking him up with kisses. Love is those three hand squeezes. Love is when he comes to pick you up at midnight because you just can't stand being where you are. Love is him calling you at 5am after he gets off a 12-hour shift and you waking up to talk to him for an hour on the phone. Love is when your pet becomes their pet as well. Love is when you make up weird names for each other, like jellyfish, that no one else gets but you. Love is all this and more.

Instead of jumping into relationships just to say you're in one, really take time to understand what true love is like. Yes, it can be big things you do together and for each other, but it is mostly the little things that most people don't even see. Wait for a love that is truly something, not just the idea of something.