As someone who has run the dating column for half the semester, you would think that I would know all there is to know about love — well, I don’t.
I don’t have the answer to every situationship or romance qualm. I couldn’t tell you how to rebound perfectly after a breakup, or how to win over the person of your dreams.
But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand how love works, or what it feels like. I think the harder part is finding a way to aptly put this multifaceted emotion into written words.
So yes, I am no relationship therapist, but writing about love is my second nature. Here’s what I do know about it:
Love goes beyond just relationships.
This finicky concept is one that transcends all boundaries of adoration and heartbreak. It is not merely a narrow feeling one experiences, but rather a process, a commitment, a testament to yourself.
But one of the most important people we must express love to is ourselves. The crux of being able to love is learning to appreciate the person you sit with each night when you’re all alone –– away from all other people, separate from all relationships.
But outside of that, it also exists in both the most obvious, and unsuspecting places.
When you first arrive at college, who or what you love becomes very obvious. You love the people at home, of course. But more than that, what you miss is the parents who cook you food and care for you when you’re sick. You miss the siblings who sit on your bed and gossip to you for hours, and the four-legged friends who curl up next to you on a cold day in bed.
There are the boyfriends or girlfriends whose smile brightens your whole day.
There’s also the friends — the people who have grown alongside you and are now departing for their own individual self journey.
We only notice all the love around us when put at a great distance from the kind we have always known.
But that’s another good thing about love — it seldom dissipates quickly.
You can stop talking to people, live a great distance apart or even get in a fight with them — but at the end of the day, you’re still going to love them. You’re still going to come back to each other, one way or another — it’s a fact of human nature.
Love and hate also aren’t mutually exclusive. If anything, they exist in the same sphere. You can hate some things about a person, but still love them unconditionally.
Although it’s hard to get rid of, like the gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe, it can come almost instantly.
Maybe that’s in the form of really awesome roommates, whose laughs echo through the wall.
Or in the form of a girl who you sat next to in your first semester lab –– it’s funny how the inability to do math brings people together.
Don’t count out the person who you met standing on the Warren Towers escalator, or the one who folds you an origami heart.
(Most important of them all) There is no shortage of it.
With a campus of over 18,000 undergrads, you are bound to find new people who love you as much as you love them.
But really, you can find this feeling in just about anyone –– even the people you had one discussion with, one FY101 class (sorry Chloe), or a huge lecture twice a week with. Each smile or wave they send me in passing on Commonwealth Avenue is a continual reminder of the love that is always around.
For me, however, I found one of the most pertinent forms of love in a small office (of all places) located right underneath Insomnia Cookies. The doorway is lined with stacks of newspapers, and there’s a frog that permanently sleeps on the dusty old couch by the walkway.
The figures behind that long desk — Lydia, Casey and Brendan — and all the other section editors in the room were no longer strangers, but people I loved.
It’s funny because I used to think a love like that was limited, and unable to be shown or shared by many. But I was wrong. Love is coming at us all the time, in so many different directions and from so many different people
Without a doubt, love is an ongoing and transformative process.
Some of the best people I have come to love are the ones I met along the way.
I love the women who ran the lifestyle section before me. The ones who started off as random sophomores and seniors, but soon became friends and cheered me on the whole way –– I’m looking at you Peyton, Kendall and Katrina.
I especially love the ones who have pushed me to believe my work was worth something. The ones who are always there to support you, and make time in their busy schedule to sit down with you in a Tatte to debrief (thanks Emily).
And it goes without saying, but love can also be found in the inanimate.
I love writing. I was the last one in my first grade class to learn how to read chapter books, and now here I am wrapping up my second semester as an editor for The Daily Free Press.
But I also love clothes, City Co. hummus and watermelon gum. It’s a spectrum.
Above all, I know that our capacity for love is infinite.
And I personally think one of the best things about it is that it isn’t solely tied to our involvement in a romantic relationship. We can love just about anyone, and anything.
We are the keepers of our own love –– it is our finger that rests on its pulse. And with that, we get to decide whom we give it to, and when.
So whether you’re “asking Abby,” or just Analise, I’ll tell you this: Never be afraid you will forever be without love, for it is everywhere and in everything if you are able to look hard enough.
