Love

I've been receiving a lot of backlash for my views on the word 'love.' Let me address this as openly and concisely as I possibly can.

Love is the most dynamic and fulfilling emotion that human beings are able to experience. It is able to transcend multiple emotions, bringing us joy as well as misery. We rely on it for our society to function properly but ironically its misuse has become detrimental. I personally value love very highly. I regard it with the esteem it deserves, and I refuse to use it as flippantly now as I did in the past.

It seems that every form of media capitalizes on this emotion to evoke response from its audience. Subsequently, just like violence, we've become so completely desensitized that it has lost a significant amount of its meaning. We are so regularly inundated with the phrase "I love you" that we can hardly escape its prevalence. The entertainment industry glamourizes it so well that we all want to experience love. We want to be like the current celebrity couple who are so madly in love for a few months. We want to be like any number of characters on any number of shows who find the love of their monthly love life everywhere they look. We want to fall in love left and right, essentially trivializing its foundation with the frequency we've been taught.

Love is not something you merely say, it is something that you have to build. It is something with significance that you have to work at, something that must be earned not with a few words but with many actions. Instead, we have people declaring their unequivocable love to one person on one day, then to another person on another day. When you've said this same contrived thing to so many people during your life, at what point can you realize that you are truthfully and honestly in love? And, more importantly, how can you believe somebody that has said this so many times?

Saying that you love somebody should not be a conditioned response, it should be a heartfelt and sincere declaration of a deeply valued emotion. There are so many ways to express your adoration for somebody verbally which can be more accurate. As individuals, we must reach an apex of sincerity with ourselves, if only to be more capable to function properly as a society. By continually neutralizing this positive emotion, we are doing ourselves and the people we love a disservice.

I can't ambiguously denounce everybody who has ever said "I love you" as absurd. I can, however, question their intentions. I refuse to believe that people fall in love with accurate realization within a few months. I personally believe that those who claim they do and are still together twenty years later were merely guessing correctly. When I fall in love, I don't want to guess. I want to know with absolute certainty. I want to be able to believe in myself as much as I want to be able to believe in her.