What is Love, Anyway?

"We love because it's the only true adventure." Nikki Giovanni

While I have been traveling around the globe, I have also been doing much traveling and growing inside my own head. During this time abroad, I have learned many personal lessons, one of which is the value of quality relationships with those who truly matter. With Valentine's Day quickly approaching, I thought I would take a few minutes to discuss how my views on love have evolved. While I have never taken the idea of love lightly, perhaps I have been using the word a little too loosely with friends and acquaintances (although not as loosely as many others my age, who attach the three words casually to the end of every other sentence). After all, according to Dunbar's number of 150, the human being is only capable of maintaining 150 quality social relationships. So, in a world that encourages qantity vs. quality, love is at a risk of becoming extinct as we know it. Since my semester began in Austria, I have been forced to evaluate the quality of the relationships with those friends that I did have back in The United States to figure out which were worth keeping up and which were not. Sounds somewhat harsh, but it's a reality. And I am not saying that I have successfully kept in contact with all of those who matter to me, because I have not. After all, I am not perfect. So if you are reading this and wondering, well she hasn't contacted me so I must not matter, you are probably wrong. I have really realized who the important people are in my life, and who I can live without. This has definitely not been an easy process. Maintaining relationships- especially those involving the forbidden four letter word- require work and lots of it. Love is all about action and the decision to be committed to someone or something bigger than yourself. If you are not putting your whole self into something with every fiber of your being, then you probably can not say that you love it. You might like it, but you do not really love it. If you love something or someone, you will go to great lengths to make sacrifices for the sake of love. Think about that before you say "I Love You" next time.