What is Love?

My boyfriend and I are coming up on a year and a half now. I've been doing some contemplating lately now that we live together and occasionally talk about making future plans beyond next week - reading journal entries and past posts and other paraphernalia. The question I found that came up again and again was one I think we all ask ourselves at one point or another: What is love? What is it, I mean, exactly? We definitely know what it isn't. We know it's not what is displayed in the movies. We know that portrayed version love is heightened, unrealistic, and over dramatic, but we also know, or at least many of us do, that love - I mean real love - isn't what was displayed at home growing up either. My parents were one of the 30% of marriages that didn't last and finally made the split when I was 17 and before your mind comes to a thousand assumptions and conclusions, please just trust me when I say the following things: I don't care, I'm glad it happened, and the only thing it has changed is that now I have to endure the drama that ensues with who I stay with when I come to visit while everyone forgets that I'm an adult. I've known that my parents were not a good example of a "healthy" marriage for as long as I can remember, so I looked to my best friend's parents for guidance. They always seemed so happy and playful and in love with each other, but I have recently learned that they are headed towards a split too. 

I often feel unjustly criticized by our predecessors.  Maybe it's because I spent too long working in a fine dining restaurant, listening to middle-aged rich people tell me about how lucky I am, how rough they had it, and how my generation is lazy and has doomed our world to fail. May I point out that their generation has FAILED at providing good examples as to the people we should become? The economical "repression" that apparently happened, global warming, the appointing of Stephen Harper, and those divorce rates are all a result of you, my friend, not us. And don't think that we are ignoring your sage advice. In fact, it is quite the opposite. We heard about how you all jumped into marriages that you thought were right and then we watched as they crumbled. We heard about the tough journey that woman have had to climb up their career ladders and we have heard what a shitty job we are doing at living our lives by your definition of "properly" (we, I should add, the children that you raised). Now, every 20-something-year-old lives with the immense pressure to succeed, afraid of failure, and thinking they have something to prove. We are afraid to get married in fear that it will fail like yours did, or because we think we have to establish ourselves as a successful career person before we can even think about something so medial as sharing ourselves with another person. We don't have anything to prove except that we are an entirely different group of people that need to do things in our own way - because we didn't grow up in the same world that you did. Not a world that was better or worse, but a world that was different.

I'm no expert, and granted, I'm just a 22-year-old nobody, but I do have a couple things to say about love that I've learned through my observations of the world. So here you are - straight from the mouth of a babe:

Love is a choice. It's not some inexplicable force that pulls people together, like some magnet working from across the universe. It's the coincidence of seeing someone you were attracted to and it's making the decision to talk to that person. Chemically-speaking, the brain starts to send all sorts of things all over your body - things like dopamine, pheromones, oxytocin, but when the alternative was to walk away, you didn't. You took the risk of rejection. In the animal kingdom, pairing up with a mate is a survival tool. Finding companionship is not just instinctual - it's a defense mechanism. Because nobody wants to go through life alone. Feeling safe and secure and possibly, in the very itty-bitty back corner of your mind, finding parental support for your (future) offspring had enough weight in your psyche to reach out and touch that person in those first fleeting moments. 

Time passes and psychologically your brain sorted out that what you feel for this person is unlike the feelings you have for your mother, your son, your dog, your God, your best friend, your hometown, the world, or even yourself. You process and categorize and eventually opt that this thing, whatever it is, is worth nurturing and developing into something we might call a passionate commitment. This is usually the point where love takes a drive of its own. It leads the way for a little while. It glides over obstacles and feels like a force to be reckoned with. This is temporary, though, as eventually you must enter the paradoxical phase where love feels both freeing and binding at the same time. And you must make the decision to stay. The choice comes to stay and love this person despite all his flaws, and your own flaws, and the flaws you've created collectively. Love is acceptance.

Life is funny. It expects you to be logical when the circumstances it throws at you are illogical, it gives the test before giving the lesson, and sometimes it just doesn't make any sense. Love though, is anticipating that things are going to change and being prepared to reevaluate as time goes on. Love is the choice to stay and change together, but it's also the choice to smile and move on, because love doesn't come with a guarantee that it will last forever. It doesn't owe you anything, but if you got out of it even a single moment of happiness, then I think it deserves at least your best shot at it. Above everything else, love is the respect you have for yourself, all-encompassing. It's the confidence in knowing you deserve happiness, in whatever form it may come it. And then, most of all, it's the decision you make to take a risk on someone.