Why do you love the people you love?

I think that everyone thinks about this question, whether it be with their friends, family, or their significant other.

Love, to me, is a very unexplainable feeling. It either comes to you with the knowledge of all the reasons, feelings, and the answers as to why, or you cannot explain it; all you can do is feel it. Both are very okay, in my opinion.

Love is wanting to deal with a person even after you just got in a fight over the last donut. Love is letting the dog out even when it isn’t your turn. Love is going to your girlfriend's house for Easter because you know it makes her happy. Love is staying when things are hard and not giving up.

I think love is different for everyone, so I decided to ask a handful of friends and their significant others why they love their significant others. The answers are very truthful and honest. They are as follows:

“I don’t know how to love anyone else. I love her for innumerable reasons: because she changed the way I eat Oreos. [She asks for a cup, crushes the cookies up, pours milk over them, and enjoys with a spoon.] She leaves out the BS and calls me out on my doings. Because every time I see a bridge, I think of the several structures above water in the city she grew up in—and everywhere else in the world. She taught me honest love, the organic, natural, raw type of emotion that depends on nothing but ourselves. She carved her name into the alps with the very stone I keep in my car. She is everywhere with me. I am in love--there is no doubt about it. Love fits perfectly; there is no other word for us, and I am so lucky for it.”

“I love her because I know that I can be my real self 100 percent of the time, and even though we have our differences and arguments, at the end of the day she still loves me just as much as I love her.”

“Because she makes everything else in my life make sense. And I can feel it when I look at her, when I hear her voice, when I think about it. There's never been a doubt. I love her. I adore her, and I will do everything and anything to make sure she is happy.”

“She’s awesome, but, okay, I love her because she is funny and she gives great advice. She is loving, and she cares for others more than she cares for herself. She is beautiful, she is smart and she is inspiring among anything else. She is everything I could ever ask for.”

“Well, I love the way she thinks and how she treats me. I like that she doesn’t try to change me in any way. She helps remind me of how beautiful this world can be, and that there are amazing people out there like herself. I like that I am a very complicated person and have a nasty past, but she doesn’t care and doesn’t judge me. She loves me for me, and I feel the same about her. Faults and all, we are a team, and she is my best friend. She makes me whole.”

“Oh ma! I love her for so many reasons. She has the biggest heart and the most genuine laugh. She makes me want to be my best self, and I really think she finds the best in people. She doesn’t have a mean bone in her body, whether she believes that or not. I have never met somebody who can make my whole heart jump, and I still get butterflies when I see her--and I see her almost every day. She’s so incredibly beautiful and creative. There really is no reason why I shouldn’t love her.”

“I don’t. Loving someone and being in love with someone are very different things.”

"She saw me, grabbed her bottle of glue, picked up my broken pieces and mended me back together. She pushed me in front of the mirror and said look and i finally saw myself as a person and not the names I called myself for so long I was able to find my soul and my physical self worth, not only is she an amazing beautiful confident strong woman herself, she exerted it into me as well."
"Shes silly, and I'm 100 percent goofball. I can be unapologetically myself with her, and shes my best friend, she is patient and were patient for each other. We somehow make it through every obstacle, it's like we are in this battle with life and we'll never lose it together. She is my partner in all things' even when we disagree, or fight, we both have this awareness that we're always on each others team. She is many things to me and i love all of it."

I decided to do this article because I was wondering why people actually love each other. I think that every couple has their moments, their arguments, or days during which they are in no mood to do anything around each other. But I think that is the point: you wouldn’t do “nothing” around anyone else but the person you love. I think it is also very powerful to understand that being in love with someone and loving them as a person is a real thing, and people might get up in it. You can love someone, but actually falling in love with someone is a very very different ball game; at that point, you become all in. Loving someone is when you still want to kiss them despite their early morning bed head and drunk breath from the night before.

Personally, I am a hopeless romantic, so I believe in the fairy tale type of love: the love that will sweep you off your feet and allow you to be happy at the end of the day. I believe that if you feel a spark or a click, then that love can go for miles. I won't jump at anyone or anything unless I feel that I am in it for the long run, because why do something 50 percent when you can do it 100 percent? I don’t come from the perfect family. I have divorced parents—and that’s not ideal for a type of love you want—but if you have something to believe in with love, then you have it all.

Loving someone is a privilege. You get to love that human with all they have to offer—their bad moments and their amazing triumphant moments. You are getting all of them and all they have, with no shield on them protecting them. You are getting them whole. People go through lots of moments that they think might affect them and they might not make it through, but people need to remember that at the end of the day, the only person guaranteed to go to bed with is yourself, but falling asleep next to the person you love is a gift. That is something that doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it lasts.