Love

What is love?

Is love affection? Is it lust, sex, attraction? Is love possession or entitlement? Is it obligation or resignation? Adulation, idolatry, infatuation? Is it devotion or enchantment?

To me Love is safety. It's feeling secure, knowing (without having to be told) that regardless of situation or circumstance love will remain. Love bears no grudges, it exists only to soothe and comfort. Love can sustain in the depths of despair and yet be sustained by no more than a caress.

For all it's resilience though, Love is tenuous, the strands may be stretched only so far before they snap. It may die of neglect, it may be stamped out by indifference. It must be shared, for know matter how much one wills it, one cannot make another love them. And love is fickle, it knows not what is right or sensible, but insinuates itself where it may.

The bible says 'love is patient, love is kind', but love cannot wait forever, and love can cut deeper than a knife.

Why do we devote so much thought and angst to something so completely out of our hands?