Someone Asked Me, What Is Love?

A few months ago, someone asked me, what is love. And although I have written so much about this one emotion, I still couldn't respond properly at that time. But on this New Year's Eve, I finally wrote it before going to bed. I still won't call it my definition of love, since I believe emotions are open-ended and their freedom of thought and action shouldn't be restricted by putting them within certain parameters. But yes, this is my idea of love, what it means to me.

Please understand that the following idea holds true only in extreme manifestations of love. Although it's not limited to only its romantic connotation, since a mother's love for her child would carry all of this, and perhaps a lot more than this. But this isn't for the usual form of love, like when we tell some of our acquaintances how we love them. Now this doesn't mean that we don't mean it when we say this to them; for me, every love is true love, if you know how to do it. But like they say, there are so many different stages of love in Arabic language. This idea belongs somewhere around its fourteenth and final stage.

You can say you love someone when their smile makes you happier than your own smile, and when their tears hurt you more than the ones you shed upon your pillow every other night. When their success reflects from your face brighter than they glow on theirs, and when the fear of their failure haunts you more than it scares them. When their life seems more precious to you than your own, and when you can tell them about your notion of afterlife, but have to shush them up the moment they start talking about anything even remotely close to their death.