echo 
When people ask what love means to me, this is what comes to my mind:
Love is, waking up from a nightmare with your significant other beside you and all it takes is the steady sound of their breathing to calm you down. It’s the comforting feeling of going back home after a long and stressful day at work because you know that there’s someone waiting for your return. It’s staying up till the sun rises with your partner and making sure they get through their assignments. Love is choosing to stay, even when the road gets rough.
Love comes in all shapes and sizes. Whether it’s the unconditional love you have for your cat, or the boundless love you have for your family. It’s making sure that your person is safe and content. It’s putting their needs before your own because their happiness becomes your happiness. Paulo Coelho perfectly sums up what love is in one of his quotes, “Love is just a word, until someone comes along and gives it meaning.”
Love is patient and forgiving. Love accepts all your flaws and shortcomings, yet it pushes you to do better for yourself. This means that it has the ability to change a person’s life for the better. Someone very dear to me once said, “love is that feeling of calmness you get whenever you’re with them, that feeling that whatever may happen, you’re still accepted and cared for.”
Love has the power to soften us and to break down the walls we’ve spent years barricading around our hearts. That’s what makes it so scary at times, because it demands us to be vulnerable to someone else. But I believe that that’s what makes us human, our vulnerability, our softer side – which we so often try to suppress. But little do we realise, the longer we do this, the more we hurt ourselves, because at the end of the day we can’t ignore what our heart commands us to feel. In the end, we’ll be the ones who get hurt.
What I’m trying to say is, don’t let the fear of heartbreak stop you from fully experiencing love. In the end, the only thing we’ll take to our graves are the memories we made with the ones we love and have loved.
We’re bound to get hurt and have our hearts broken at least once in this lifetime, it’s inevitable, unfortunately. Perhaps you’ve already experienced the crushing disappointment from loving the wrong person before. I know it can be discouraging to lose someone you really care about; but I implore you, to not let that stop you from feeling, from loving. The world’s already hard enough on all of us as we speak. Don’t let it seal your heart from feeling what it was meant to feel.
So now that begs the question, what does love mean to you?
