Love: A Terrifying Topic

     My friends and I are having a pretty deep conversation right now about love and I just wanted to share our combined thoughts with you. Not like any of us are experts on the subject or anything. It is, however, we've each agreed, a very scary but beautiful thing.
     Love seems like the most important thing in the world while you're in it, but then what? Once it ends, you feel like you'll never be the same. Your world completely transforms. You're used to constantly having someone there to talk to and once that's gone, what's next? You begin to isolate yourself and you wake up one day having about 4 friends? Not fun. Yet once you're in it, you're also transformed. You feel like you've been transformed into the best version of yourself that you've ever met. You feel constantly happy all the time. You never want it to end.
     Why can't we experience this more often? We love our friends and family; why don't we feel this certain bliss all the time, then? Because it's normal. It's expected. Obviously you love your friends and family, you have no reason not to. They're always there; they always have been there from the very beginning. So when someone new comes into your life and you begin to learn every tiny detail, you fall. The wall is torn down and you finally feel, for the first time, that you can trust someone else, you let them learn every tiny detail of you. They'll learn things about you that you will never know about yourself; you find a soul mate. This person is literally an extension of who you are. You make each other better and you're constantly there for one another. The only thing greater than being loved is loving someone else. One of the cheesiest sayings I've heard is "When you fall in love with someone, everything about them becomes beautiful." When you let yourself get to that emotional level, it becomes true. Tiny little flaws make up who we are and when you find someone that believes your flaws are not a vice, keep them. (Thanks to my friend, Vanessa, for assisting me in plowing through the thought process of this paragraph.)
     Some people fear that they'll never experience love, or will never love again. That's an even scarier thought. What if one day I wake up in a studio apartment at 30 years old, utterly alone? I'm sure everyone at my age has that thought cross their mind at least once...a day. We all want the storybook, fairytale, Noah and Allie, Augustus and Hazel, Troy and Gabriella, Cinderella and Prince Charming story. Hmm, a high school couple in the drama club who both have cancer, survive the cancer, go to prom together where one loses a shoe, and then live into their 80s where they have to tell each other their love story all over again. Excuse me, someone bring the Oscars back, please? I'm sorry to say that that is not likely. I always get frustrated, though, when people say "You'll find someone!" How do they know? I'm almost out of high school, and then what? Am I magically going to meet my future husband in the wonderfully romantic grocery aisles of Target? Maybe if it's Alex from Target.
     If there's any advice in this big old spiel of me just stating my feelings, it's what the image above says: love as much as you can. Don't spend a day not loving. If you live a bitter life and never open yourself to the idea of it, then I'm sorry to say, you will end up alone. Don't keep a wall up; let someone knock it down. Or maybe, knock it down yourself. The first step to being able to love, is loving yourself. If you don't love yourself how can you be capable of loving another person? Just something to think about.

Iloveyou<3