Love. It’s something we try to fit into a little box of what the media tells us it should be. It tells us to dismiss young love, how could it be “real”? Our culture tells us “You haven’t lived long enough to know what love is.”
I think that’s bullshit, does that mean we don’t really love our parents or siblings? Does it mean we don’t love our grandparents or pets? If we are capable of loving family why are we supposedly unable to love a partner?
We dismiss love at the most unnecessary times, we build it up when we think it’s “real” or “right” but tear it down when we don’t. We say “you’re young, there will be others,” we invalidate them, telling them their feelings are wrong. That the way they feel isn’t right and not to trust themselves.
To look for this unattainable idea of what their love should be, we even tell them WHAT their love should be. Well, I have news for you, their love is just as “real” as yours, maybe more so. I recently fell in love and found myself afraid to tell people, for fear that they might tell me I wasn’t in love or question how I could be in love after such a short amount of time, I hate that I have that fear.
My response to that is: there are so many different loves out there, there isn’t just one. I love someone and it may only last a few weeks or a few year, it may grow and change into something different and I am totally okay with that, I welcome it. I fall in and out of love on a daily basis, I fall in love with the trees I walk by, I fall in love with my friends, I fall in love with myself, and I fall in love with people I have passing glances with.
Love is nothing more than a wonderful little chemical cocktail in your brain, mixing together to make you have feelings. Love, it’s a beautiful thing and we need to stop trying to make it into something and just let it be what it is. We need to stop fearing the word. Love is a beautiful thing, not something we should run scared from. It’s a feeling that can change and grow as you change and grow, once you love someone you don’t need to love them forever.
I fall in love easily because I do not fear it, I rejoice in it. I have fallen in and out of love so many times in my short seventeen years on this earth. I let myself grow and change with it, never regretting because even if it was short it was something, and that means it was real.
Xoxo,
Emi