Defining love from people to people is never an easy task because everyone sees it differently, and everyone has had different experiences. I have had my own fair shares of the feeling, but it’s different with every person I’ve felt it with. From the love I have for my family, the love I have for my friends, and the completely different feeling of actually being in love with someone.

The curiosity of this term got the better of me and I asked two of my close friends their opinion on it. Both had a different take on it, and while that’s not surprising, their reasoning’s on such were. Being freshmen in college, I know we don’t know nearly enough about the feeling, or life in general. But we are old enough to recognize something so intense like love, because the second you realize you love someone or something, it hits you like a ton of bricks.

I’ll start with my own. I believe in love wholeheartedly, I’ve seen it in the way my parents look at each other and the way I’ve looked at someone else. It’s real to me and it’s there. It’s a beautiful feeling but also the scariest one I’ve ever had. I wouldn’t say it’s ever healthy to base your happiness on the love you’re receiving from another person, but on the same hand, it’s so amazing to know that someone can make you that happy and excited about life. There have been times post-breakup that I have completely doubted the existence of it, but later, I remember that at a point in time, I was most definitely in love.

The first friend I’d asked said that he didn’t believe in it, and that love is entirely a social construct. This was interesting to me because I had never thought of it that way, but could definitely see where he was coming from. Somewhere along the line of time we decided that we needed to act on some biological feeling of attraction, and we called it love. But when did it not become okay to love more than one person at once, and when did we consider that infidelity? Who defined the rules of love? And how in the world can someone feel something so deeply for another, and then one day realize they don’t love the other person anymore? It was an interesting take on it that I had never thought about.

The second friend I asked said she believed in love, but has never felt it. Again, very interesting take. For someone who has never felt the emotion, she was absolutely sure of its existence. That’s seriously bold, because normally if something has never happened to you and has so many stories of bad history, is it possible to believe in it? Yes, because all negative connotations associated with love aside, there is so much positivity. There is proof in this through the couples and relationships that share such deep connection, they completely uplift their entire life to be with the other person. The ache in your chest you feel when the significant other is absent is proof that there has to be something real behind it.

The realization that some people don’t believe in love, or some have never felt it, or those who believe with every ounce of their being that love is real and it’s alive. For something so globally present you would expect there to be an overall opinion. But that’s simply not the case, and I think that’s the beauty of humanity. With so much doubt in the world, people can find someone to take on the world with, or those who think they can take it on entirely alone and that’s completely okay.