What is Love? Baby don't hurt me...

"Love is a many splendid thing."
"Love lifts us up where we belong where eagles fly on a mountain high"
"Love makes us act like we are fools"
"Love is like oxygen"
"All you need is love"
"Love is patient, love is kind"
"Love is a lie"
"Love is when you can't stay mad at each other for long"
"Love is the golden Rule"
"Love is what makes the world go 'round"

Any of these sound familiar? How many times have we heard others or we ourselves attempted to define what love is? What are some definitions you've heard? Perhaps it's a scripture from the New Testament, perhaps it's a good old saying from a grandparent or parent, perhaps it's a definition that's gone through some evolution as you've evolved yourself with experience, perhaps your definition is cynical at this point. Whatever the case may be, I've discovered- from what (little) I've tried- that defining love with words is impossible.
I cannot think of one definition I've heard in a speech or a song or a conversation that perfectly defines love in its  all-encompassing nature. However, I do believe that it is possible to define love through actions. We define how we show love and why we love someone/something by the way we treat that someone/thing.
This week in class we've been talking about the beginning processes to how families are formed: dating and marriage (*insert most quoted scene in movie history of the priest in The Princess Bride beginning the ceremony*). This was a super fun topic of the week, especially for us college students because it's even more personal and relevant to us. Dating alone was an intriguing discussion as classmates opened up about what they consider to be the definition of a "date", or even the term "dating"- should the guy always pay for everything, should the girl plan any of the dates, when people are "dating" does that mean they're exclusively together as boyfriend and girlfriend, etc. The deepest part of the week was when we moved onto engagement and marriage, specifically how to prep for it. Relating all this back to the topic of love, I think one of the most important concepts I learned was that when it comes to your romantic relationships, you CANNOT make proper judgments just going off of feelings.
Now, that alone seems like a controversial topic in and of itself. Doesn't loving someone mean you feel love for them? Aren't your feelings involved quite heavily when you're becoming attracted to someone? What about all those butterflies in the stomach things that seem to go hand in hand with falling in love?
Our teacher, Brother Williams, is seriously one of my favorite professors I've ever had. He's so energetic and really knows how to connect with his students, and I love the fact that his profession is marriage & family therapy- the very career in which I am interested in pursuing. I value his opinions highly because he has decades of experience as a therapist, and he's seen all the patterns of relationships, especially marriages, that can determine whether or not the relationship makes or breaks it. I loved when he said towards the end of class, "Stop trusting your feelings so much! Who in the world told us that we need to use our feelings to gauge our reality?!"I was inspired by his passion and how vehemently he implored us to see the bigger picture when it comes to our romantic relationships, and the see it for others as well. With what little experience I have with romantic relationships, I can testify alongside his words that that is SO true. I wish I was clever enough to come up with something to switch out the phrase "falling in love"; I've come to have a bad taste in my mouth about the idea of "falling" in love with someone. I certainly agree that you can love someone and not be in love with someone, but truly loving someone is no accident. There are countless, purposeful decisions made towards investing in that person because of some kind of attraction. I do believe love is meant to be very natural and it most certainly does involve our feelings, but our minds are very involved in the process of love. We decide how much time we want to spend with them, how much money to spend on them, how many pet names to refer to them as, where to go on dates, what to talk about, etc.
There was a book mentioned in class that I've yet to get into (just started it) called "How Not to Fall In Love With A Jerk", and the author became famous for what he refers to as the RAM- Relationship Attachment Model. I wish there were a way for me to draw it out here, but it's a model to illustrate the proper levels of certain feelings towards a special someone. The list goes (from left to right on the model) Know, Trust, Rely, Commit, Touch. The idea is that everything to the left should be higher than the one to the right; so you should know someone more than you trust them, you should trust them more than you rely on them, you should rely on them more than you commit to them, and you should be committed to them more than you touch them. I LOVE this model because it perfectly depicts what the ideal, most healthy romantic relationship should look like. All too often we mix these things up so it's completely backwards- there's a lot more touch than commitment, there's even less reliance, then even less trust, and even less knowledge about a person. You might trust the person you're macking on is a good kisser, but that's besides the point.
I've definitely been the girl who has all those attributes mixed up and been backwards in how my relationships with guys progressed, and thus they didn't progress. The important thing now is that I know I can work on these things, not in the sense that every new relationship can be a love laboratory where I use someone to better myself, but in a way it is like a laboratory; love is full of experiments that you don't always know are going to work, there's observations and testing done, and conclusions are drawn. Both partners are meant to be the scientists working on experiments together, mutually studying and working together to see if the experiment between each other works.
I hope that when I find my special someone someday, the man whom I'll marry and be an eternal teammate with, I can be smart enough to know how to run those tests and observe carefully. I know now better than before how to guard my heart and be careful with my romantic decisions because they do always have an impact on both parties of the relationship. I want to be aware of both of our realest intentions with each other and believe in wisdom more than compromise. I believe in love and I love love, and it's because I love the idea of being in love so much that I want to prepare myself for it by being a good, smart scientist:)