I am figuring out just how difficult expressing love can be. I mean, how do you express love to someone? By saying, "I love you."? "Ich liebe Dich."? Those are just three words. "Those three words are said too much, but not enough."
What do words mean anyway? Words are just utterances made from your voice box and released from your lips. Just clear sounds. And those three words do little to capture this explosive feeling found in the heart when you love someone. Besides, words can be retracted. The mouth from whence kind and adoring words once came can at a later time expel the most utter and horrific words. "I love you" can just as easily turn into "I hate you". So what could telling someone three words prove? Nothing.
So, judge them by their fruits, you say? So to express love, I can do little things like making my boyfriend pumpkin bread? Doing the dishes without my being asked too? Bringing flowers to a sick friend? What do those things do to prove love? Food will be eaten, dishes will get dirty again, and flowers will wilt.
So just how can we validly express love? If you think about it, it truly is frustrating.
I feel this ebbing, pulsing warmth radiating from my heart, my very core. This warmth desires to be spread. It wants me to share it with the people I am feeling it for. But how? How can I explain to them something that I feel? Feelings aren't tangible; love isn't measurable. You can't see it, yet it is utterly beautiful. You can't touch it, yet it can literally lift you up or tear you down. It can touch you? But Newton's third law of motion proves that you can not touch something without also being touched by that thing. So how could love touch us and we can not touch it back?
I have one conclusion. Love is unexpressable and unexplainable. The only way to get someone to understand how much you love them is to get them to love you back. Love truly is a give and take. No one can truly understand the feelings you have for them unless they feel that way back. I can bake you goodies, buy you cards, write you a song, cry if you break my heart, miss you when you are gone, kiss and hug you, make love to you in my dreams, utter your name in sleep, take a bullet for you, but none of it will mean anything to you unless you feel the same. Only then will you understand why I would want to stay up until 3 in the morning talking about things that won't matter when I wake up. Or why I would want to spend 11 straight hours decorating a birthday cake for you. Why I would sacrifice everything I live for and believe in just to make you happy. What does all that mean to an unrequited lover?
So there is something scientific about love after all. Newton's third law proves that you cannot exert force on something else without it exerting the same amount of force back on you. When we cuddle, my cheek doesn't just rest on your shoulder, your shoulder supports my cheek. My hand doesn't just hold yours, your hand holds mine too. My lips don't just meet yours, but our lips meet each other. And I cannot just love you, but you must love me back with equal force. And you do. I thank the Lord above for that every time I see your excited eyes look at me; everytime I hear you tell me how beautiful I am as if it is a well-known, well-proven fact; everytime you hold me in that way that makes feel like I wouldn't be able to stand if your arms were not holding me up; everytime I nearly cry when you tell me, "I love you too."
Love is difficult to express because it must be simply understood. When I say "I love you," those three words turn into so much more than three words because you feel the same. You feel the meaning and the warmth radiating off those three words as they pass through my lips because you feel the same way I feel when you say "I love you." So love is not an expression, but a shared experience. One must experience it to understand it. And to understand how much someone loves you, you must feel the same amount of love towards them.
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