On the Definition of a Certain Word

Love ---a woman asked me once what the word meant. I didn’t know what to tell her of course. I wasn't well versed on subjects concerning the softer emotions. All I knew was that it’s a word that manly men should only use when referring to food, cars or gadgets. Using the word when referring to another person is highly inappropriate and should be frowned on. Writing about the definition of love in a public blog is an offense that should be punishable by stoning.

I told her that I may need time to figure out how to define it and I told her that I may need her help. Over the course of getting to know her, I slowly got to know what love does to a person. (This is on a case by case basis of course.)

• Love will make you eat exotic food
• Love COULD make you eat kuhol, given enough time
• Love will change your sleeping habits
• Love will make you go out of your comfort zone
• Love could make you more sociable
• Love will make you throw the man code out the window occasionally
• Love will make you more outdoorsy
• Love will make you a sentimentalist
• Love has an entirely different set of special logical rules which may be contradictory to normal logical rules. Love’s special logical rules will almost always win out.
• Love will make you join a race in which you may possibly have to endure a great deal of “bossing around”
• Love will make you emo occasionally
• Love will make you feel happier in general
• When the object of your love wraps her arm around your arm in a movie theatre, love will make you feel comfort, the likes of which you’re unlikely to feel anywhere else
• Love will introduce you to his cousin, jealousy
• When love leaves, it will leave a void in your chest that would be very difficult to fill

After a few months, she asked me again to define the word. I already knew what the word meant but I still couldn’t define it. So I said it’s like the color blue. How do you define blue without referring to things that are colored blue? You can try your best to define blue to someone who’s blind but you will never come close to giving that person any idea of what blue looks like. The person will need to have perceived the color to understand what it looks like. In the same sense, I don’t think that love, as a feeling, can be effectively defined to someone. You could describe things that are affected by it but He or she will have to have experienced love to fully understand what it is.

It took a while but I can finally say that I now know what love is. You wouldn’t know what you’ve been missing out on until you finally feel it and realize that your life wouldn’t have been half complete without it.

This is the color blue:

And this is love: