a definition of love

"In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each one of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel... I am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it."

(Eleven Minutes, Paulo Coelho)

When do you know that you are finally in love? Do you realize it or do you just feel it? How does it truly feel? Does it have to make sense?

I was once told that I know nothing about falling in love because I haven’t experienced it yet. The books, the movies I have seen are not enough for me to even try to talk about what love is. At that moment, I shrugged and remained silent. My silence seemed to send a signal saying that I accept what I have been told.

When I look back at that moment, I know I felt differently and that I had an answer in mind. Not that it mattered at that time because I know people have different opinions and there’s no point arguing. Yet it haunts me. Every time I remember that moment, I want to explain myself, not to that person, but more to assure myself that it is okay for me to talk about love, or anything else that mattered to me.

Is it not falling in love when you are not in anyway committed to that person? Is it not falling in love when you feel it even if you’re contented seeing that person from afar? Is it not falling in love when you dream of being with someone, you feel secured, loved and imagine how this someone completes you? Is it not falling in love when you feel it even if most of the time it does not make sense why you feel that way?

Are couples the only ones who fall in love?

Perhaps my answers to these questions won’t change the view of the person who once told me that I know nothing about love. How can that person say that I haven’t fallen in love yet?

Perhaps I fell in love once.

Perhaps I haven’t.

Yet I still believe that inside the books that I have read, the movies I have seen, I caught a glimpse of what falling in love is and whenever I feel the urge to speak about it, no one should stop me because no one owns the sole right to define what falling in love is. We are free to talk about falling in love.

We are.

We should be.