Greetings!

I truly understand your confusion! I have been faced with the same question countless times and have been what felt like being ripped apart by my mind, which was constantly overthinking and over-examining the situation I found myself in.

I realised that there are two ways of looking at love.

One emanating from a quote by Osho -

'If you love a flower, don't pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession.'

The core reason of all pain caused by love is our attachment and desire to possess another person. Love is not at all about that - it is the acceptance and celebration of love - its manifestation in a person we love. To explain further, love is who we are - all of us. It is not what we feel or what we do, it is the essence of our being. To recognise that is-ness that is love in our beloved is to understand love - as much as is humanly possible that is.

The second thing I realised about love is that if we are all love, then you - the person who is suffering because of love - is, too, love. This may seem simple at first, but to truly grasp that everything we need to feel fulfilled and at ease is within us takes time. We have been taught to look outside of ourselves - to search for external love - when all that we truly need to do is recognise the love that we are.

On my search for the answer you are currently looking for, everything I found ultimately led me to these two answers - that was all. Yet I was not satisfied with solely that. I still longed for love in the form of a lover. Because in the end, we are all here on this earth together for a reason, right? Is that reason to love? Who knows!?

What is certain though, is that failure in relationships comes from a misunderstanding of love. The real question thus is 'what is love?'

Love is freedom. Love is the fabric of life as we know it. Love is most definitely real - that I can assure you. The ideas you have been fed about love and what it is meant to be or feel like may lead you to believe it is not, but don't mistaken all of those stories for love.

Love is beyond words and expressions - it cannot be condensed into a philosophy. Well, it can be - we see it all around us - but that is a mere disrespect to love. Love needs to be felt and experienced - not pondered on and thought about.

What you are doing now is simply thinking about love and trying to understand it intellectually, when in reality love needs to be experienced and felt. Drop the idea of trying to understand love and simply let it be. Notice love in the mundane things in your daily life, and watch them grow in numbers - soon, the whole world will be a stage and life will be a play filled with poets and lovers. Yes, a villain and an antagonist is sometimes needed to push the plot forward, but there is no need to mourn over somebody's failure to understand the lack of need to understand love - it is hard to phrase what I mean but I think you will get the point. Do not take anything personally.

Hope I was able to shine some light onto your confusion.

Luka!