As perhaps the most overused word in the English language, the spoken and written word called love has lost some of its magic. How many times have you yourself used the phrase, “I love you,” without meaning it? Think of moments when you had made fun of someone, and were playfully trying to persuade them to forgive you. How about that time you were a receiver of that phrase, and didn’t know how to respond other than with the clichéd line, “I love you too.”? The sacred virtue of love is thrown around in our society as if it is meaningless. That fact is hard to come to terms with, because this sole word is the purpose for our existence.

Love is defined as strong admiration felt toward another. But does that even begin to describe it? An emotion of this caliber, with such passionate bonds, cannot be summed up in one sentence. In fact, the prettiest wording in the world cannot rightfully tell its story. Love itself is close to meaningless as a word, but a natural phenomenon as an emotion. The best and only way to continue the tragic, wonderful, mesmerizing tale of love is through action. Little things such as a thoughtful note in a child’s lunchbox or remembering a friend’s birthday are just as important as the more obvious signs of love: holding, kissing, understanding.

Love has the uncanny ability to morph into leagues of different types. Watching a mother arrive home exhausted in her tattered clothes day after day in order to properly feed and clothe her children displays the maternal cherishing a parent feels toward their offspring. A young boy with a wardrobe of Bulls gear and walls covered with Michael Jordan is admiration in the form of hero worship. True love between and man and woman is the most clichéd, but also the most difficult to describe. The final form love assumes on earth is the unconditional love that God holds for everyone.

What gives humans the power to see a feeling that is so intangible and complicated and take it upon themselves to give it restrictions? People think that they can control everything, but fully understanding this emotion is beyond the grasps of the greatest technology. What are churches and governments to deem themselves superior enough to tell people who or what they are allowed to love? When love acts out of the ordinary and brings people of the same gender or different social classes together, it is human instinct to automatically bid the relationship forbidden, and offer punishment for those who merely followed their hearts. Forbidden love is often the most powerful, because of the boundaries the participants had to overcome in order to act in accordance to that love. No person has the authority to or ability to control love, so why do we even try?

Love is scary , and not an emotion that I would choose to tangle with if the choice was mine. But herein lies the problem. Love has nothing to do with choice, and everything to do with fate, trust, instincts, raw desire, and other elements that are incomprehensible to me. Argumentative and opinionated by nature, most everything in my life is based on carefully thought out facts categorized into pros and cons, and weighing the results based on what I choose is most important and correlates with my ideals and values. A sensible debater, I am accustomed to convincing others to view things the way I feel are right. But try as I might, the greatest debate I fight is that against my heart and I fear. I know that I will never win. For the heart has a mind of its own, or a section of the mind if we wish to get technical, and no facts that I hold against it, no matter how strong the alibi, or how fancy I word things, is going to sway its pick. In the end, it makes decisions solely on its personal feelings, refusing to listen to logic, reason, or the warnings of danger you are screaming at it. Love has the ability to unintentionally strip a person of their independence, and is more likely than anything else known to man or woman to encroach on even a strong mind’s freedom of thought.

Love is an emotion that is felt, seen, heard, read about, and surrounds us in our environment every day, but it is so much more than that. It is what ties everything in this world together, and what keeps it spinning. It has powers that seem, and are in fact superhuman. Love is the purpose for our existence, the reason for our joy, the motive for our heartache, and the fault of our destruction.