What is Love?

Can love be so shallow as a fluttering of feelings with pounding hearts and sweaty palms that awkwardly awaits a first kiss? How can the butterflies in our stomachs and the anticipation of a meeting transform into deep hatred resulting in heinously brutal crimes?

If love is packaged and sold in small boxes of glistening stones and heart-shaped confection, how are you still so lonely after receiving everything your heart desires? The world sells and packages for you promises of love through matches at your fingertips, dream homes, and self-care is self-love. We empty our pockets and hearts only to experience painful and dark shame.

The world didn’t teach you to purity your hearts for love. Love desires to be with you, not own you. When you try to obtain love for the fulfillment of yourself, you remain continuously empty and unsatiated. The hollowness in your soul echoes from the ego that tells you that you deserve more and better than what is in the present. You find ways to justify the defect of the love you are given, and this must not be the “thing” for you because you are still unhappy. You must find something defective and unlovable about love before you’re rejected. 

You move from one disposable person to the next to fill a bottomless faceless soul that you know is foul and hope the world doesn’t see the mask you’ve constructed with charm, fillers, and designer attire. When you look into the mirror, you see someone you don’t recognize and don’t know where to start to love. How can love desire you when you don’t desire yourself? When True Love shows up looking at you tenderly, you are confused if She loves the mask you constructed or if She can love you. You fear the mask slipping off your sweaty brows and run away from Love, fearing being seen and your true self revealed. 

If True Love is an external object, your mask is met with a front; both are hidden, and neither is true. True love isn’t looking at you; She is behind you. She sees the world as you see it and experiences your pain as you experience them. Love sees your mask affixed upon your face and loves the soul beyond your empty shell. Her eyes see you and patiently wait for your eyes to lift from the ground of shame and darkness. As your shoulder pulls to the ground in defeat, Love longs to wrap you in Her embrace and comfort you.

 Love intertwined with your spirit trapped inside your hardshell. Love pushes you past your cowardly ego into Her darkness to catch you before you fall into the pit and melt away. Love knows your adulterous heart and weak flesh to advocate for you before the face of God.

Love guides you to meet Her; when you meet Her, you can choose to recoil or embrace Her.

Only when you realize you are eating from the trough made for hogs will you recognize the feast She made for you.

You search all your life and will desire all your life for Love... You fear entering into Love and stretching yourself beyond your hollow ego, fearing to expand yourself into another. Life in Love welcomes life into yourself; you resist because you must be destroyed to make room for Her.

Only in destruction will there be the resurrection; without both, you will melt into emptiness for eternity.

Image: David, Jacques-Louis. The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis, 1818. Oil on Canvas.