A few nights ago, I was mindlessly scrolling through Twitter, like I often do after a hard day, when I came across something that was so striking I was forced out of my trance and thrown into a perplexed state. It was a quote, and it read: “love is a feeling, not a decision.” It was in this very instant that my head was sent spinning- whirling through all the ideas, of love and relationships I had gathered over my twenty years- and it was then that I realized something was not right.

Today’s culture, this here now but gone tomorrow lifestyle, has remodeled the way recent generations view life, and more specifically, love. The unrealistically high expectations we hold for our relationships have been shaping inside of us since we were little.

Fairytales, at least in my house, were a crucial part of my childhood. For some, perhaps it was the pretty dresses, or the exciting heroic tests the prince, but for me, it was the idea of love that was portrayed. The idea that in a second of meeting “the one” your whole life will change indefinitely. While this idea is not necessarily wrong, life and experience have taught me that these fairytales only scrape the surface of what love truly is, and without making a conscious decision every day to go on loving “the one” you may never understand love to its fullest.

Much like the fairytales we were told as children, Hollywood continues to feed us this gloss-coated idea of what love is in the films we watch. While capturing perfectly the beauty of romance, it is rare that the hard times are brought in front of the camera.

But how did it get this far? Of course, it’s not entirely because of these stories that the idea of love has mutated into what it is today. Somewhere along the way, the true meaning of love- the good, bad and the ugly, became lost in translation.

This mentality that “love is a feeling, not a decision” is a testament to society’s selfish mentality when it comes to relationships. Approaching this quote logically, do you think a seventy-year marriage was sustained on a feeling? No. Ask any long-lived, loving couple and they will assure you that it was a conscious decision every day to love the one they are with.

Initially, the feeling is what brings a couple together- this is the part of love we see in fairytales and movies- the kind of love that makes your heart flutter and head spin. However, like an iceberg, what we see is only a fraction of the whole. It is the decision to love every day that keeps the relationship alive, thriving, and able to endure.

However, too many people today have it all twisted. This delusional idea that love isn’t something you should have to work at every day has left the world in shambles. The divorce rate is at an all-time high because relationships are being torn apart due to people’s selfish desires and lack of effort. Self-centeredness is attacking my generation like a plague, crippling relationships with its laziness and smothering most’s will to be faithful.

Another misconception is that love “shouldn’t be this hard.” This is a line I’ve often heard in movies, and even been told a few times myself. What does that even mean really- “it shouldn’t be this hard.” How has our society gone from heroic tales of love like Romeo and Juliet, who literally were star-crossed lovers, to people expecting everything to just fall into place without any work at all?

I may have only lived for twenty years thus far, but in these twenty years I have loved many people- friends, family and significant others- but it’s only been recently I have come to find out what true love really is. And I can say, with absolute certainty, that love is a decision. Love is a choice you make- and it won’t always be an easy one.

Some days it will be as easy as breathing, but other times it will feel damn near impossible. Then again, aren’t all of life’s greatest gifts the ones we have to work the hardest for- the ones we really, truly, earned? Why would love be any different? So, go ahead, make the decision to love, but work at it every day. Have the love generations from now people will write movies about, just make sure your love doesn’t get lost in translation.