Love is

I originally posted this in March 2016 on my defunct blog LEONEIL.COM as a anniversary message for my wife for our 16th year anniversary. I am now posting this on the Steem blockchain via my @engrave blog at LEONEIL.ME.

It’s been months since I made my last and only post to this blog. I couldn’t find time to write especially that I enrolled in another program in school. But I won’t let this day pass without making another post, and this time, it’s about love, how people define it, how I define it, and how it defines me. In the context of this post, I refer to love as romantic love.

I remember the first time I was asked how to define love. It was when a classmate in elementary asked me to write on her slumbook. Yes… a slumbook. It was maybe my first public profile page. There’s no Facebook then, but I think many of the Facebook info that we post in our profiles were first made available in slumbooks, if you happen to fill out one before. There’s a lot of questions then, my favorite songs, my favorite books, who my crushes are, and interestingly, how I define love. I can’t recall how I defined love when I wrote on various slumbooks during my younger years. But I still remember some of the “usual” definitions people give. “Love is blind.” “Love is like a rosary, full of mysteries”. “Love is unconditional”. “Love is the absense of hatred”.

People define love differently. It may be blind for some, as a person who’s in love cannot see the obvious things that hurt, the negatives that make true love improbable. But for some, it is not blind. It is seeing the truth no matter how it hurts, and continue being in love with the person despite the unpleasant truths. Sometimes, being blind is actually knowing, seeing, and accepting the ugly truths of another. People see love as unconditional, mostly for people who love blindly. But there are those who love conditionally, though not directly implied. These people continue to love their partners because they are being loved in return, and love ceases the time they feel they are no longer loved. These intricacies make it shrouded by mysteries, the reason why some compare it to a rosary. Some people define it as contrary to hatred. Hatred is not always the opposite of love – that is, the absence of love. Some people just feel neutral, neither they do feel hatred nor love. But for me, the absence of love can be fear. Because some people feel this fear that they avoid love, or avoid being in love, or deny its existence. They fear of committing themselves to another person that they cannot embrace love with open arms. There are times that love is just waiting to enter into our lives and we are just afraid to open our hearts, for the millions of reasons we can think of, and for that, it remains a total mystery.

For me, love is more than just a feeling. It extends beyond our emotional boundaries. It’s a journey. It is about embracing one’s destiny of growing old together with the person who matters most, through the best and worst of times. It was on this very night sixteen years ago when I overcame my fear of committing myself to someone, the night I fully embrace my fate… to be with the person whom I will share my life with, for I believe that’s true love. And whatever life may bring us into, I know in my heart, we will be good in each other’s hands. We bring our the best in us and the love that we have matures as we grow old together. To my ex, my bestfriend, my wife… Happy 16th anniversary! My love will always be with you. My love will always be you.

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^{Originally posted on Leoneil. Steem blog powered by ENGRAVE.}

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