Well I was reading one of my teacher's Xanga blogs and one of her questions was how Do I define love? So while I was reading it and reading some of the posts that others had put onto her blog I realized none of them related to me. And none of them even came close to how I though. The people who responded to her all talked about saying the words "I love you." How it is said too much in the American society; which I do have to agree with them on that part but they missed the basis of the question. So this is kind of my own definition of love and my ideas on the subject in general.

I love many people and many things. I say I love you every day to someone. Whether it be my mom or dad, my best friends, my boyfriend, or just some random (ei: random person) for making me happy or helping me. I say I love ice cream or animals. Or maybe I love a certain song. But is that all love? In a way yes, but it’s a different kind of love for each thing.

I love Ice cream. Let's start there. When I say I love Ice cream or music, it’s not a feeling I have. It’s just more of a habit from American culture. It just means that I like said thing more than I like other things that are similar to it.

I love animals. It is a feeling to care for all living things, which many people now days ignore. I just happen to care for anything living, sometimes dead. Hehe. I grew up with animals all my life, I've always ridden horses and had cats and dogs as pets. I now have a fish in my dorm room because I get lonely without some sort of pet to take care of. But when I say I love my cat or I love my fish I'm saying it like I feel something that makes me want to take care of them. And to make sure that they don't die.

Now to my family. I talk to my dad every night before I go to sleep. And I always make sure to tell him that I love him. And I do the same for my mom. I care about them both a lot. I 'feel' a connection between my parents and myself. If something were to happen to either of them I don't know what I would do. I would feel the pain of not having them with me. I would definitely cry. I wouldn't take it well that’s for sure. But I am thankful that I have them with me now and that I can always talk to them and see them. I tell them I love them because I feel like it. I tell them I love them so they know that I care about them. I tell them I love them so that we both know that I am still a part of their lives. I tell them I love them because I feel like I love them. When it comes to family, love is something that you express, whether through words or actions, because you seriously care for them.

Friends. I have so many friends. It’s almost ridiculous. But there are only a select few that I would consider to be my best friends. Those are the people that know all my secrets and those are the people that really care about what happens to me. And vise-versa. I have some feelings for my friends. It is like a feeling that I always want to be able to have a relationship with them and have them be somewhere in my life that I can always connect to them. They are people that I trust and people who don't let me down. So I say I love them. Not in a literal sense but in a way that says I like you more than I do another random. Because I'm not just going to go around and say I love you to every person I happen to meet on the street. And I'm not saying that others who are not my best friends are not good enough just I don't know you enough but I learn new things about my friends and even some randoms everyday, so I can always make more friends. So this is my definition for a friend love.

Now let me talk about how I define love as in a relationship, a couple. I have had some boyfriends over my years. And with each one I learned a new thing. Firstly this type of love, the most commonly thought of love, is not something that you can make. But you also cannot sit around and do nothing while waiting for a certain feeling to come. But that certain feeling that you are expecting is never going to come. For every person it’s different. Love is the unexpected. You don't 'love' the same twice. You don't feel the same for your ex as you do for your current relationship. For example I won't feel the same as I did for my first 'love' as I do not for my current 'love.' Although there are some similarities. So for this definition of LOVE, I say: It is a feeling that you want to spend every waking moment in the presence of the one you love. You think about them all the time, non-stop. When you are with them you just want to feel that they feel the same as you do. When you aren't with them or not thinking about them you try to find ways to be with them or to think about them. Anything can and will remind you of him/her. And while any of this is happening, your breath catches and your heart beats just a little faster. You love them so much that you would be willing to do anything for them to make them safer and happier. You want to be able to take care of them no matter what. When you love someone this way it doesn't stop either. You will spend each day repeating these things as you did the first day you 'loved' them. That is how I define love of a special person.

Lastly there is one more love that I did not mention yet. And that is the love for something higher than you. God. If you don't believe in God you won't be able to comprehend what I am trying to express to you. The love for God is like nothing else in this world. While I am writing this blog I am doing some soul searching and I know, just know that the love of God is not comparable. I may not know Him as well as would I would like, and sometimes I doubt if I really believe in God. But when I think right now about love, and how much God loves me as well as how much I love Him, I can honestly say that I do love Him and that I am a Christian. And because of this I know that I cannot even begin to describe how this love feels to me. Or even began to comprehend it. It is such a massive and consuming love that it’s just more that I can understand. I learn something new about this love every day. Whether it is found in the small things in life, like getting a gift to be able to witness a beautiful landscape, or something major like feeling safe for no reason at all when everything else is crashing down. So love of God is the last love I wanted to talk about.

My definitions of love are something that I myself have come to understand. No matter how many times you may say “I love you,” it is different each time. And though it may sound the same the words mean absolutely nothing. It is the actions and the feelings behind those words that mean anything at all, and those actions and feelings make all the difference in the world. Maybe you think differently or maybe I helped you to understand something. There is a possibility that I left something out. But I did my best to help anyone who reads this to understand me. Now my question for you is the same as from my teacher, how do you define LOVE??