Love.

This crazy four letter word has the power to move mountains, create smiles and create tears, and to change lives. All too often, we overlook how powerful love actually is. We take for granted this magical feeling, this incredible sensation. It's so prominent in society today that we frequently forget what it actually means.

As I'm in this really weird stage in my life (being a young adult is hard), I have friends getting married, family I grew up next to getting married, people are getting engaged and finding their forever love right in front of my eyes. It's just strange that we're all old enough to be doing that now...I still eat dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets, y'all. I mean, I spend too many hours pinning my perfect wedding on Pinterest, and sapping over the overly romantic proposals on How He Asked, so when my time does roll around, I'm not unprepared. But really, what is the center of these beautiful weddings and proposals? And we come back again with the word "love".

What is love? (Baby don't hurt me)

Society likes to paint love as this magical experience that is cliche text messages, #wcw posts on Instagram, being in everyone's face with how photogenic you are together, favorited tweets, and the dog snapchat filter. I would like to, first of all, state that while that's just the romantic gestures nowadays, that's not what love is about. It's not. You don't survive a relationship because you got 100 likes on your cute picture. We spend too much time getting our hearts broken over social media that we spend more time hurting than actually living.

Love is holding your significant other while she cries because her grandpa passed away. Love is always caring even when you're disappointed in one another. Love is letting someone go because you need and want them to be happy. Love isn't easy. I see my parents struggle daily with the hardships that come with growing girls and raising a family, but they never give up. That's what love is. Not favoriting your tweet, getting just the right angle, or the perfect #mcm caption that's actually some song lyrics. We have moved so far away from the actual feeling that we forget what it actually means. It means struggle. It means never giving up.

Love is mysterious and works in the most confusingly wonderful ways. It's finding your way back to each other after months, years apart because love will always keep your hearts together. Love is forgiveness because we are imperfect humans and we screw up. We screw up way more than we want to admit.

Love is patient, kind, rejoices with the truth, bears all things, believes all things. We seem to have this misconstrued idea of love that we forget the roots of the feeling. We are too busy painting our lives as perfect that we all too often forget what's happening behind all of the filters. While I know that the expressions of affection have clearly changed because technology has advanced so much, I still try to wrap my mind around it all.

I try to line my ideology of love with the verses briefly referenced above, and I'm beginning to see that these words ring so true than I ever imagined they would. I’m writing this not as an expert on love, because I’m far from it to be completely honest with you. I’m writing this as someone that hates disappointment, and that wants to see everyone being happy. I don’t want anyone having this misconstrued idea of what love actually entails. Remember what I said when I said saying love was magical was an understatement? While it is magical, it’s so many other things. And I honestly can’t wait to find it someday. Tears, smiles, hand-holding, kisses, arguments, and all.

There’s a reason why the Bible account describing love ends with “Now, however, these three remain: faith, hope, love; but the greatest of these is love.