The L word doesn’t exist

Love is the one concept I have chased, yet never caught.

Have you ever tried to hold something in your hand that keeps slipping away? You reach, you stretch, you almost have it, and then it slides right past you.

That’s love to me.

Always near, always present, yet never fully defined.

Love is the lens I see the world through. The filter on my vision. The pulse beneath everything. To me, the world is made of it, stitched together by it, undone without it.

But on some days, love feels like a mirage.

Today, after a long day, I found myself watching Dexter. A serial killer with no feelings, pretending his way into a woman’s life so convincingly that she believed it was love. And it made me think.

What even is love?

What should it look like?

What should it feel like?

What should it demand of us?

Friendship is the first place my mind goes.

How do you know when you’ve actually been loved by a friend? In this era of curated aesthetics, of people hanging around just for vibes, how do you separate true love from polite indifference?

I want to believe most of us have felt friendship-love. But if we’re being honest, how can we ever be sure?

Then there’s the question of romance.

How many times have I typed into Safari at 2 a.m.: How do I know when I’ve experienced love? How do I know if I really love them?

Because the truth is sometimes what we call love is just companionship.

One fills silence.

The other fills the soul.

And still, the lines blur.

Self-love.

The most preached, the most aestheticized. Buy yourself flowers. Take yourself to the garden. Cook yourself something beautiful.

And yes, these things are lovely. But do they prove that I love myself? Or are they just the normal rhythms of wanting and getting? If I crave ice cream and buy it, does that mean I’m practicing self-love or simply being human?

Sometimes I wonder if what we call self-love is just survival dressed in pretty clothes.

Most times if not all the time, what we call love is just attachment.

We meet someone. They feel like “our type.” They catch our attention. And suddenly, we start bending ourselves, shrinking ourselves, abandoning little parts of who we are just to fit inside their life.

We call it sacrifice.

We call it compromise.

But it’s self-abandonment.

And when the attachment breaks, we are left wondering: Did I ever really love them, or was I just terrified of being alone?

The way we love is rarely about the person in front of us, it’s often about the blueprint carved into us long ago. The love we received, or the love withheld when we were children. The way arms opened, or the way they didn’t.

And that’s why love is so hard to define.

Because it wears every background, every wound, every history.

Sometimes I wonder if love is even knowable.

You can be safe with someone and still question if it’s love.

You can set boundaries to protect yourself and then wonder if the love disappeared with the space.

You can spend months calling attachment love, only to wake up and realize it was fear wearing a mask.

So what is love, really?

To me, love is like threading a needle. You bring the string close, so close, you’re almost there, and then it slips. Over and over, you try. Over and over, you miss.

Maybe love isn’t meant to be caught in our hands. Maybe it isn’t meant to be explained or pinned down. Maybe love is not a definition but an experience.

A rhythm you live inside.

A truth you stumble into.

A mirror that reveals you to yourself.

Maybe love is everything and nothing.

Maybe love is the stone and the ripple.

The wound and the balm.

The question and the answer that never comes.

And maybe that should be enough?