By Erina Vasilakopoulou

What is love?

Love is but an illusion.

Tainted by the ignorance of mind

And amoral gullibility

When are you in love with someone?

How many nights have you spent thinking about them and smiling to yourself like a 5-year old toddler that was given candy?

I’m sure that could count as love right?

Well, skip forward a few weeks, months, years.

Now they’re hugging someone else, they’re laughing with someone else, they’re happy with someone else.

They don’t see you anymore. You are nothing but a person from the past.

How many nights will you spent thinking about them ,

and crying yourself to sleep, like a 5-year old toddler, that someone stole his candy?

Do you still think it was love back then?

Yes, because you’re hurting. That means you loved them, right?

But is love supposed to hurt? Love and pain are set apart by a very thin line. It sounds so wrong, so very wrong. Love is not supposed to hurt. Love is supposed to have a positive meaning.

And did they ever love you? Is it possible for them to have loved you before and to have stopped loving you after a while? Can you stop loving someone?

And if you do, was it ever love in the first place?

So what is love?

Love is but a selfish obsession.

Obligatory devotion.

Passionate lust.

Hidden under a beautiful quilt.

That sounds harsh. An obsession is not a healthy  behavior, it doesn’t have a positive meaning.

Love isn’t supposed to have a negative meaning right?

Right, but then why are you so «obsessed» with them? Why does your mood depends on them to a great extent if not completely? Why do you want to see them everytime you’re not with them? Why do you find excuses to talk to them, for no apparent reason? Why, if not because you’re obsessed with them?

Maybe that’s not love either. Maybe that’s exactly what it sounds like, an obsession. An obsession with the idea of someone, the idea of being with them.

Love is but an idea.

That’s depressing. Love is such a beautiful word, for it not to be true. But maybe exactly for that, it doesn’t exist. Unicorns and Pegasus are some of the most extraordinary and beautiful creatures to exist. But wait, they don’t actually exist. They are not real. So maybe love is not real either.

Who is to tell though that unicorns and Pegasus don’t exist? How can you prove that something is not there? You can’t.

So maybe love does exist.

If so, what is love?

Well, I don’t know. I have no idea what love is, but maybe we can pretend. We can pretend that we know what love is, when we say I love you. We can pretend that we can set apart love from lust, passion, pain, fear, self-sacrifice, obsession.

We can pretend. Just for a while… And maybe by pretending you will actually find out eventually. Fake it till you make it, don’t they say? That doesn’t sound right either. I don’t like to think love is fake.

But then, what is love?

Love is but a fall.

We fall many times in our lifetime, we fall during the first months of our lives when we learn to walk, we fall during our childhood when we’re playing, we fall during our teenage years. But that’s a different kind of fall, that’s falling in love.

Maybe that’s why I prefer the term falling in love, than the greek word «erotevomai»

Because it includes the fall.

With that at least, I’m actually familiar.

I think I know what love is.

Love isn’t something you can determine exactly. Love is the X in an equation. It doesn’t have a form, or a specific feeling. Love isn’t supposed to be something. It just is. And maybe that’s the magic of it all. You just put the X in the equation and find the result.

And like equations are impossible, maybe love is nothing of the above.

And like equations are possible for every number, maybe love is all of the above.

 You can’t determine it, unless you solve it. So, go ahead.

Find out, what love is.

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