Define Love
What I mean when I say love.
The name of this site leans its whole weight on one word, and it is a word that means something different to almost everyone who uses it. You already have a definition of love. Maybe you chose it. More likely it was assembled for you, out of your family, your heartbreaks, your religion or your escape from one, long before you were old enough to argue with it. Mine was too.
So before anything else here can make sense, I owe you mine.
Let me clear some ground first. I do not mean romance, or not only romance. Romance is one room in a much larger house. I do not mean a feeling, the warm one that arrives on its own schedule and leaves the same way. Feelings matter, but you cannot build anything on weather. And I do not mean being nice. Niceness asks nothing of you (although it has its price). This does.
Here is what I have arrived at, so far.
Love is letting go, in the moment, of what I think I know. About you, about myself, about how this is supposed to go. Most of the time I walk around inside a story I have already written, and everyone I meet gets handed a part in it, whether they auditioned or not, whether they want my script or not. The moment I set the story down and open up to a rewrite, and actually look at the person in front of me, something else becomes possible. That opening is where love starts. (It is also where understanding starts. I suspect they are the same door.)
Love is an action. You have heard that one before. Here is the part that gets skipped: it cannot be stored, measured, or proven in advance. It only exists while it is being done, which means it has to keep being done. You do not have love the way you have a house. You do love, the way you do a day’s work, and tomorrow it is there to do again, and again, and again. Perhaps that is the gift.
Love is setting yourself aside for something bigger than you, a person, a child, a stranger, a piece of work, without believing for one second that this makes you smaller. That last clause is the whole thing. Setting yourself aside only counts as love if there is a self there, one you know well enough, and are strong enough, to hand over willingly. Do it without that and it goes by other names. Obligation. Fear with good manners. You do not vanish when you set yourself aside. You are more here, not less.
Which is why everything on this site starts with understanding yourself. Not because the self is the destination, but because it is the thing you bring, and it is the only true thing we have. You cannot set down a story you have not noticed you are telling. You cannot give yourself away, freely and without loss, until you have some idea of what you are giving.
That is my definition, today. It is a working one, and I expect it to keep moving as I do, in fact I hope it keeps moving, because that implies growth and expansion. If yours is different, good. Write and tell me what I am missing. I would sincerely love to know.