What Is Love? How Do I Find It?

I remember when I was a teenager, and I thought all I needed was someone to love me. Disregarding those who did love me, I would look for love clad as the image in my head. It isn’t easy, especially when you can’t exactly look for love. How can you look for something if you don’t know what it is you are looking for.

Do you know what love is, the many faces it wears, or the multitude of ways that we receive it? It is easy when you are younger to yearn for another’s heart, but time has proven that love is best received in maturity. That isn’t to say that younger individuals cannot find love, it is simply more difficult to find something when you don’t know what you are looking for.

No one can identify love for you; the feeling is objectively different for every living thing. However, anyone who truly has it can tell you all about what it is they love.

We can describe our perception of love to the best of our abilities, but we will always fall short. Even from a science perspective, the explanation of love is hardly simple and requires multiple dictionaries for in-depth discussions.

The scientific outlook on love is that it is a set of chemical reactions involving hormones and different neurotransmitters. Love can be mapped by brain activity, often leading to different stages of it. More on that further down!

On finding love, it seems the best way to do so is by not looking for it. Depressing answer to that question, especially since everyone who has had love will tell you that patience is key. While that response is torture to a lonely soul, it is the most accurate method of finding love.

Love has many faces, which makes it difficult to accurately associate it with one single form. That is relevant information when you take into consideration that 90% of the people who claim to ‘want love’ don’t even know what kind of love they are wanting.

What kind of love do you want? Well, that is a question only you can answer. Love has many tiers, tiers that tend to overlap while remaining entirely separated. A lot of people are given love automatically, everyone must work for love, and no one walks this earth without feeling it at least once. Different forms of love can include:

• Parental Love
• Friendship
• Relationship
• Fondness
• Lust
• Kinship

The love we feel for our mother doesn’t hold a flame to the love we feel for our children. That parental love is layered and strong, arguably one of the strongest manifestations of the chemical reaction. From the moment we are born, we become entitled to the love of our parents or caregivers. When we have children, an instinctual switch is flipped that forces us to realize we would quite literally kill for the squishy thing that you contributed to

While the love of parent and child is strong, it is a different kind of feeling than the love you would feel for your other kin. Your sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles all hold love for you. As you most likely love them too. Yet, these relationships in our lives can withstand more separation in comparison to parental love.

Love for our friends, and their families respectively, comes in a whole different form. The importance of this category falls more on the means of obtaining it rather than the feeling you get. This is one of the only loves we can choose (within reason) to have, or who to have it for. That is what makes the love for friends special, we can choose our friends more fluidly than we can our partners.

Lastly, we have fondness, lust, and relationships. These are the sought-after forms of chemical reactions in our brain. While they are most definitely different emotions, these are also the three stages found when falling in love with someone.

We tend to grow fond of people who trigger the right chemical reaction in our brain. Our different perceptions and ideals are what trigger this reaction. It is easy to say that everyone grows fond of different things, the same could be said for personality types.

With that fondness, lust can grow. Like a seed sown within your heart, the person who captivates your lust will occupy your relevant thoughts. Lust is often confused with ‘true love’ when those who can’t differentiate between the two. Time has proven that sex isn’t love but is an enhancement of love with the right person. Younger individuals get sex confused with love because they cannot fathom what real love is until they have it. But what they are usually dealing with is lust.

While lust isn’t a bad thing, you shouldn’t settle for it. The kind of love most people crave, because it is instinctual to seek out that companionship, is special in how it feels. While different love will trigger different neurotransmitters, true love triggers the most at once.

For me, I found myself changing everything. I settled down, becoming timid in comparison to my younger years. I met someone who I would move mountains for, someone who overpowers my mental health and makes me feel consistent pride and confidence. I quite literally wrote poetry for her; you can check out one of them here!

If you are looking for love, it will be harder to find. It comes with time; you just need to be patient. If we were to dwell on the perfection of all things in our lives, we would notice every flaw in the day. It takes around 25 years for our brain to finish developing, do not expect love to develop in an instant. It can grow from nothing, but it can wilt and die without proper care.

To find love, you must stop looking. When you focus on your goals, path, and plans, be receptive. We don’t find instant love because we don’t know where we are going in life. Figure your destination before picking a co-pilot.