Love. It has only four letters, yet it is the most vague word I know of. It’s hard to define love correctly, because it could mean so many things. To some it’s an emotion that controls their lives and defines them. For others, it’s simply an expression that they would rather not waste ten-seconds of their life on. It all really depends on the person. If you look deeper into love, you will probably hear the expression “true love.” There are countless plays, movies, musicals, poems, and books based upon the topic of true love. It is truly amazing to me that in a world of scholars, professors, and scientists, society is yet to have one definition for love. Maybe it is because one definition cant really define love.

As a child of divorced parents, I always questioned what true loved was. I come from a long line of people that got happily married thinking they had found their soul mate, only to get eternally scarred in the end. After being an involuntary witness to my parents brutal divorce, I began to think that love was more of a curse than it would ever be a blessing. The older I got and matured, the more I asked myself: What is true, real love? Does it even really exist, or is it just another fable that we tell ourselves to sleep easier at night. That we’ll find true love, that one day our prince in shining armor will finally come and rescue us from the cruel world in which we live? Dr. Neder defines true love as caring about the health, well-being and happiness of another person to a greater degree than your own health, well-being and happiness. However, is it possible that true love does not have one definition. I believe that the definition of true love varies from person to person. It too often seems to be more of a fad or trend than an emotion.

True love should never be easy to find, because thats what makes true love so special; it’s rare. Society seems to have a problem with accepting that true love is worth the wait and struggle that often comes with the process of looking for it. Has society ever considered that maybe the reason people so often get divorced is because they rush when looking for love? Apparently not, because approximately forty to fifty precent of marriages worldwide end in divorce. After pondering the statistic for multiple years, I have yet to understand how society can tolerate this. It truly baffles me that we can pay hundreds of dollars for dating websites that more than often do not work, Yet we cant encourage people to not give up on love or rush into relationships that they know will end badly.

You see, the thing about love is, it changes. Love is an ever-changing tree of pain and suffering, but also joy. It experiences seasons as the dead leaves fall off until new ones can fill their shoes. The colors shift from cool orange to vibrant green, but the one thing that stays the same is life. Throughout my fifteen years of life, the one thing I have always believed is everything has life in it. Whether it’s a dead leave siting in the ground slowly decomposing, or a blonde toddle playing in the sandbox at her favorite playground, life remains constant. Its always there whether we can see it or not.

The challenge and ultimate goal of life should not be to find love as society urges us to believe, but to find life. To be able to find the life in the alarm clock that you war to hit every morning as it's piercing sounds wake you from your dreams, or the beat up tire swing, swinging aimlessly in your backyard. It is only when you can see and find the life in every object, that you can truly experience the love that this universe gifts us every day of our lives.