Many times, we say we “love” someone or something, but how often do we stop to think about what “loving” truly entails? “Loving” is not just a verb that rests in acts of protection, nor does it merely revolve around caring for and seeking another’s happiness. It does not lie solely in the desire to improve for and because of another. “Loving” or “love” should not be understood or defined only by what it is or what it does, but also by what it is not and what it does not do. Perhaps, if we delve deeper into this subject with courage and insight, we can find a more genuine, profound, and sincere definition of what “love” is or what it means to “love.”
To “love” is to give power to another; to strip yourself of the garments that clothe your soul and remove the bandages covering your wounds—not so that the other person carries the weight of your past, but so they can see where you were hurt and understand that the mere memory still stings. Not because of the wound itself, but because of who inflicted it. Unfortunately, the deepest and most painful wounds will never come from someone we dislike or someone we are indifferent to, nor from a stranger’s hands. They almost always come from those we once cherished—or even loved.
Yet, in the longing to feel again, our hearts give us the courage to trust someone new—someone for whom we feel, or are beginning to feel, affection or fondness. We do so with the hope that no more scars will be added to the tiger’s stripes, with the yearning that this fragile illusion will transform into certainty, and with arms full of withheld embraces, eager to find a new home in another’s arms and a new warmth in their heart.
Because in love, we cannot ignore the fact that we hold the power to hurt the other—but it is precisely because of love that we choose not to. It is because of love that we refrain from doing the things that once stole not just the other person’s smile from their face, but from their heart and soul as well. Love is lived daily, and the choice to love is made every day—not only through our actions but also through what we choose not to do.
A simple glance at the grammatical qualities of the word “love” is enough to see its vastness—not just in what it is but in what it is not. It is so immense that being a verb alone is not enough. It must also take on the characteristics of adjectives and, at times, dress itself as an adverb to fully express itself, as if it were an invisible substance trying to escape the linguistic prison to which it has been condemned by our relentless need to rationalize everything.
And this is no easy task for anyone. To open oneself, to bare one’s soul, means to let go of a part of yourself in order to merge with another—because, let’s be honest, no one is truly complete on their own. And here, precisely at this point, I find myself facing a dilemma that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. How many times have we heard the phrase, “You have to love yourself first before you can love someone else”? But damn it, how is that even possible if we do not know what love is? If we don’t know what it feels like? If we are unaware of its forms and essence?
How can someone who has spent their entire life trying to do everything right—who has done everything humanly possible to be loved, or at the very least appreciated—only to end up with a shattered and battered heart, with more wounds than when they began, and with more doubts than certainties about who they are and what they believe… How can that person feel love for themselves when the only message they ever received was, “You are not enough,” or something similar?
How can a person who gave away their heart to another rebuild themselves if they no longer know whether what they do, feel, believe, think, or avoid is right or wrong? Does the rebuilding of the castle magically begin when no signs of appreciation were ever received?
Imagine spending an entire life constructing an image of yourself, only to find that by the time you finally discover or finish building it, you already have one foot in the grave and the other knocking at Saint Peter’s door. Love is also about losing oneself in another and then finding oneself again through shared commitments—through the creation of goals, dreams, and desires that give life meaning. So much meaning that when love reaches its purest and highest form, the physical presence of the other is no longer essential. Because at that point, love has transcended the need for a corporeal presence to know that it exists.
And this is where I take my hat off to those who choose to love from a distance—because there is nothing harder in life than loving from afar. But I am not just talking about when the one you love is hundreds or thousands of miles away. I am also talking about when the beloved is no longer in this reality, when they have transcended. Because at that point, the daily act of choosing to love becomes the hardest of all. It means accepting that, for now, both souls cannot walk hand in hand. But it also means believing that sooner or later, somewhere in the vast cosmos, they will reunite—and this time, it will be forever.