What is Love?

What is love, or more importantly how do we recognise it? How do we look at a couple or look within ourselves and know true love from the imposter emotions. How does one notice the difference between lust for another person and true, deep love? How do we look into the eyes of our partner and know for sure that they love us? Can we tell this from looking into their eyes? Does love even exist?
Love does exist. Love is there always, around us, in so many forms and shapes. It occupies our lives from the simple whole hearted love for your favourite food, unconditional in every way to the complex love shared between a parent and child.
It is the most common thing around us yet also the most difficult to identify. It is an emotion envied by all others and they seek to mask themselves in its form. From a father who beats his child, mistaking his anger as ‘love’ to the wife who masks jealousy for her husbands infidelities as her love for him.
So how do we see love? I will tell you. Love is going out of your way to do a thing that will make that special person happy. It’s always being there for them even if it means sleeping with your phone at night. It’s staying up late talking to them even though you have to get up early the next morning. Love is every emotion being felt at once when you see that person for the first time in a long time. It’s feeling your heart break every time you say goodbye. It’s calling them 5 minutes after they leave to say you miss them. It is waking up in the morning and the first thought on your mind is to wish them a good morning. Love is not remembering the last time you stopped thinking about them and hoping you never stop. Love is embracing that person’s biggest flaw because they make it beautiful. It’s unconditional in every single way.
But the biggest fact about love is that it hurts, it hurts because you can’t believe you ever lived without them until now and wish you could have met them so long ago and then a sudden realisation that you are just happy that you can have them now and forever.
*exception*
Sometimes the pain never stops though…because you can’t have them and that is the worst pain of all. To love someone who cannot be yours and to wish everyday that they could be but if there is fairness in the world then…maybe…one day they can be.