The emotional totality of love.
Love is beautiful, but love isn’t happiness. Love in its full spectrum and depth also comes with heart wrenching loneliness, yearnings, and pain. But in its essence, isn’t that what gives love such power and significance in our lives? — the fact that love embodies and stimulates the full spectrum of human emotions. In reflection, love in isolation is not love, or else it would just be called that individualistic emotion instead of ‘love’.

Love is beautiful, because it isn’t just happiness. The experience of engaging with, understanding, and accepting our own personal methods and forms of loving, especially the painful ones, can help us in returning back to our humanity — because it reminds us that our emotions do not occur in isolation (that we are multifaceted in our experience of the world). I have found that to fall in love means to be full in oneself. I love because I feel pain. I love because I cry. I love because I’m scared, anxious, fearful, but also because I’m happy, grateful, and full. I love because I feel (my humanity). It is both my discomfort and rest.

Maybe that is why I associate love with home; because when I accepted by love, that is when I felt home in myself. The beauty of the love I felt wasn’t them, it was me.