Quest for Love

A brief, obligatory history is in order. My quest to create a definition of love began in roughly tenth grade, when I challenged myself with the question of, “Is what I feel for this girl love?” My conviction in the reducibility of things even as abstract as the concept of love motivated me to pursue and design a definition of love by which I could answer the original question. There were two criteria for success. The first was that I had to believe it. Definitions, by their very nature, are whimsical. They cannot be proven or justified. A word, by itself, means nothing.

The second criterion was that it had to be generally acceptable. Inside this criterion, I add the proviso that the definition might be poorly or at least insufficiently well worded: thus, acceptance is permissible even if I must explain it again. Love is a completely different game when compared to dating and having fun. It is not what you have for a girl when you meet her in a party. It is not what you have for a girl, when you hit on her at a party. It takes time and it means complete understanding between two different people.