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I love love.

Always have. Always will.

I fell in love for the first time when I was 13. Pretty much every grown up around me told me that I couldn’t possibly be in love. That I was too young to know what love really was. That what I was feeling was lust, puppy love, or just a phase.

I thought every single one of those people was full of crap.

So instead of listening to them and their limited, pessimistic opinions of my feelings, I dove deeper into love.

I spent hours in my bedroom reading poems by E.E. Cummings and listening to 90s R&B (yes, in the actual 90s), and collecting quotes and passages by great authors and philosophers who explored love for a living.

It filled my heart to read these words and know that my feelings were true and valid, and that they were the same feelings that had been felt by countless other hearts throughout centuries.

As I’ve gotten older and experienced different relationships and fallen in love (and lust and puppy love and phases) with different people, my definition of love has evolved. It has expanded to include the optimism and the pessimism, the overwhelming joy and the unbridled rage, the idealism of young love and the realism of love that lasts—the mundane and the magic.

And while my first experience of love is now nothing more than a memory, I still find myself seeking out new poems, new passages, new descriptions of love.

This week, I ran across three definitions that I automatically added to my collection. Three definitions that reminded me of the magic that comes with love—whether we’re 13 or 38 or 92, whether it’s our first or our last, whether we’re sharing it with one person or the entire world:

 

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