Put all your cards on the table

Brandon Meawasige / Senior Sports Editor

For all that is worthy of time wasted, engrossed in discourse and studied from every angle, there is one subject that no equation or research can solidify. There is no way to measure either the quality or quantity of love.

The closest classification widely considered to be accurate is that love is an emotion. Taken at face value, we are told that it is something we can feel. However, love itself is malleable and takes many forms.

To simplify it as an emotion has left love susceptible to frequently cloudy, general descriptions that are in turn often sought as a necessity. In search of it, people manufacture expectations - unrealistic and naïve in nature - only to have reality come to fruition. Media, those who surround us and most other edges of our frames of reference dictate what love should be.

Pardon the allusion to the famous 1990’s nightclub song, “What is Love?”, but it may indeed be the most profound question known to humanity.

Some say that it is trust, some say that it is respect and some say that it is an unspoken connection. It has been described as a can’t-eat, can’t-sleep, over the moon feeling in the pit of your stomach. Some say it requires that one is miserable and some say that it is does not exist in its truest form.

If you are constantly searching for love, certainly you will not find it.

Anyone who claims to ever have been in love will tell you that happenstance, serendipity and chance played at least some role in their experience. Some call it destiny and others consider it to be the result of circumstance.

Even further contested is the idea of “the one.” Some believe that you can only truly fall in love once while others believe it is possible to be in love may times within one’s life.

The pessimist will tell you that love is not guaranteed and the optimist may believe it exists to a flaw.

At the end of the day, some things go beyond explanation; love is one of them. Love itself may escape definition, as many who find themselves bound by its capture seek to escape ever falling for someone in the first place. What constitutes being in love? The answer is different for every person.

Values supersede all else for certain people, others require physical attraction and to a select few just being able to spend time with someone is enough to conjure the ultimate happiness.

Love is not one thing in particular and it is certainly more than an emotion. You feel it in your body, mind and soul. You hear it in the music you listen to and see it wherever you look when you can’t sleep. It’s in the words that you say and the words that you don’t. There is nothing better and at the same time there can be nothing worse. It can fix you and it can break you, but when you fall in love with someone you will know. Doesn’t matter what you call it or how you express it.

In fact, nothing matters when you fall in love.

Put all your cards on the table, go all in and hold nothing back.