"My Love" by Jaeyeon R.

      Love is “a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person” as defined by the
Webster dictionary (Love). I believe this definition misses a lot of the feeling and the importance of real love for another person. Emotions are hard to define in simple terms since it is often we rely on our own experiences to come up with our own internalized definitions. Personally, I feel love is the hardest emotion to define due to everyone loving in their own way. Love is such a raw emotion that varies from one person to another. My love is being able to give myself up to someone, trusting them with my emotions and to continue making connections with one another.
Alan Watts did a lecture on love and defined it as, “an act of surrender to another person” which I feel helped to better capture the emotion of love (Watts). When you say that you are “in love” with someone, it is about letting go and entrusting yourself; mind, body, and soul, into another person.   Love is all the little things that build up into this great emotion we have for someone. It’s waking up with someone in the morning and making their coffee the way they like it, it’s the inside jokes you keep between yourselves that have developed over the years, it’s looking into their eyes and feeling at ease. No nerves, no anxiety, just relaxation and the ability to surrender to them.
     Falling in love can happen fast, almost like lightning. When it’s real, we don’t really know that we’re in love with someone until we are. There’s almost a complete lack of thought

that happens when you fall in love. You might think, “this is someone I’m going to fall in love with” but it almost happens on a whim where you stop and think to yourself, “I am in love with this person.” There wasn’t any looking for it, it just happened spontaneously. While it happens fast, it continues to grow after the initial, “falling in love.” Love doesn’t seem to end, as time goes on there will always be moments with the person you love that increases that love. Maybe that person decides to surprise you with a romantic dinner, or they buy you a pair of shoes that you didn’t even say you wanted but they saw you looking at them at the mall. An article by Marni Amsellem, Ph.D, a psychologist, states that, ”the most memorable things that partners can do for each other are these thoughtful and personalized gestures which communicate care or love” (Amsellem). Everything about love is personal, it’s all about the connections you make with another person and for the rest of your lives, always seeking to please one another in big ways as well as tiny little gestures which carry just as much weight.
     While the dictionary does its best to define love in a very general way that can apply to everyone, we all feel love differently. Personally, love is being able to trust someone with my emotions that allows for growth with one another. Alan Watts does a great job lecturing on the idea of love as an act of surrender to another person while Marni Amsellem finds love in finding little gestures that allow for a deeper connection with another person. At the end of the day, love will always be what we feel in ourselves that gives us our definition. Love isn’t something that can be searched up in the dictionary, it’s what we find within. 

Bibliography
Amsellem, Marni. “The Little Things Can Mean Everything in a Relationship.” ​World of Psychology​, 8 July 2018,
psychcentral.com/blog/the-little-things-can-mean-everything-in-a-relationship/.
“Love.” ​Webster Dictionary,​ G & D., 1966.
Watts, Alan. “1.4.4. – Divine Madness.” ​AlanWatts.org​, www.alanwatts.org/1-4-4-divine-madness/.