By Keya Nijhawan
What is love? Well, “What is love?” is an excellent song by Haddaway, written in 1993, but the actual question is full of mystery and uncertainty; to my disappointment, not even Google can provide a quick and easy answer.
Love can be a different experience for everyone, according to my fully qualified sixteen-year-old classmate, junior Carlisle Stone. “It’s a feeling that you can describe but you’ll never really understand love until you feel it yourself,” she said. Carlisle explained to me that love is an unexplainable feeling. “There isn’t a way to capture the true nature of love,” she said.
But if you can’t capture it, how do you know when you have it?
For junior Ella Fletcher her love is Fortnite and every time she tries explaining this love to her friends she runs into a brick wall, as they all immediately shoot her down. “It’s like me explaining to y’all how I love Fortnite and y’all tell me to hush, but you don’t understand how amazing it is cause you haven’t played it,” she said. She explained that she knows she loves Fortnite because of the joy it brings her when she plays, but other people don’t always understand since they haven’t played the game, or it does not bring them the same joy.
Personally, the greatest love I’ve ever felt is for everyone’s favorite cuisine, chicken tenders. They hit the spot every time. But how is my love for them defined?
Well, I find chicken tenders to be reliable in every sense. If I’ve had a bad day, I know chicken tenders with honey mustard will no doubt cheer me up. But sometimes chicken tenders don’t have the perfect crisp and I love them a little less at that moment. So is love conditional?
I love chicken tenders when they’re hot and perfectly crispy, but when they’re cold and soggy not so much. Also, I guess they are limited in that they can’t have a conversation with me about my day or tell me how nice I look in my new outfit.
Knowingly or not, everyone has criteria for loving something or someone. Whether it is that they are reliable like my chicken tenders or that they give good hugs (unlike my chicken tenders) everyone has something they want in the thing they love.
For senior Noah Ottinger, who has been known on occasion (haha) to be with his girlfriend Virginia Lathrop, love is simply “what makes me feel good inside,” he said. But not everyone thinks as simple as Noah, so I had to go to dictionary.com to see what that esteemed website had to say.
The first definition touches on the idea of loving your family members, but it also says that it is a warm personal attachment to them. However, I do not always feel warm towards my family members, so I guess that means to love something or someone, you do not have to feel warm towards them in every moment of every day.
I guess this means I can still love chicken tenders even if they’re soggy every once in a while.
But another definition presented is “to be in love.” Don’t you just love when definitions use the word in the definition.
When speaking to English teacher Ms. Morgan to further my knowledge about what love is, she explained to me that love is a feeling you get when you know there is no one else you’d rather be with for the rest of your life. “Your heart lifts when you see that person, and you get a tickle to your tummy,” she said.
By that definition, I guess I’m setting myself up for an impossible choice each time I open my six-pack of chicken tenders. I want to say: “I love you all equally.” I imagine this won’t work quite as well when I open my heart to a human person.
