‘Love is a word I don’t understand, the simplest sound, four letters.......’ Marlon Roudette
The longest word in the English language has 189,819 letters and is the chemical name for titin (the largest known protein). Love, on the other hand, is such a small word but yet has so many depths and meanings. It affects us all at points in our lives, it’s often the goal we grow up with, but can we truly define it? Can we capture it? Find the words for it? How can we sum up words for an emotion that has a strength that is so strong and over whelming? Love has the power to build us and destroy. It has the power to let us go free and the power to trap us in. It can change us for the better and it can change us for the worse, it can consume us and it can frighten us. It can create an intimacy like no other and it can just go with no explanation. One day it’s there, the next it’s grabbed its walking boots and hit the high road. It’s the tears when the love has gone and the hurt when what you thought was real turned out to be a lie. It’s looking at a person you thought you knew only to see a total stranger looking back. At times you give everything and get nothing from love. It can be a cruel task master.
But how do we classify being in love? How do we know? Is it the depth of a conversation about the arts, laughing at films and feeling the excitement of a joint adventure? Knowing that your sharing something you are so passionate about with the person you care about can be an amazing experience. Letting someone in to the inner part of who you are and what makes you tick. It’s the crazy moment when you don’t know if you want to talk to that person all night or just kiss them. It’s wanting to hold that person so close and never let go. It’s wanting to crawl under that person’s skin and stay safe there forever. It’s your tummy flipping when that person says they miss you and knowing you would do anything to see that person smile.
Yet in all this emotion, we live in an age of social networking, where your relationship status is not official until you have updated your time line accordingly and the joined at the hip, loved up obligatory profile picture is firmly in place, you have to wonder, how much of this is for show? Does updating your status every hour with messages of love for your beloved or tweeting saccharin tweets whilst sat next to each other mean you are more in love than those who don’t? It always flickers through one’s mind that is this show for someone else’s attention. Can love be immortalised in the cyber world? Surely it is more than a quick tweet for the world to see? Love has to be more than this, more than romantic nights away in amazing hotels, meals in cordon bleu restaurants, flowers, wine and romantic words. Love is a doing word. It’s a text to ask if you got to work ok, its remembering the little insignificant things, it is loving every part of your relationship even the difficult parts and its laughing together. Its private, it’s just the two of you and it can never be repeated.
As I write this blog, I need to be honest. I have never been in love. The ideas I have discussed here are merely my thoughts, opinions and general meanderings of what I think love could and should be, some of which happens to be based on experience. I must thank all the people who have so generously shared their own personal experiences, answered my unending questions and given their time to explaining to me there deepest feelings. All I am sure of in the very complex game of the heart is that the man I do eventually fall in love with will be so amazing he takes my breath away, he will let me run free, we will laugh, lots and if he also happened to look like David Beckham, well that would just be a lovely bonus! But most of all I believe love is hope. The belief that one day, the frog you kiss will turn into your prince charming and just maybe that will lead us to the road of love
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