Love. . .

Song to this post: "Love Remains the same" Gavin Rossdale

I know how majority of people wonder what love is. That there is no one term or definition to define love, that it's just something you feel and know straight away. In the movie "Dan in Real Life" the boyfriend says that "Love isn't a feeling, it's an ability". If that's true then do you need to be super talented to love? And then if so there are the people who say that everyone has someone out there who loves them, so then everyone is talented in love? I understand that I'm young and that my perception of love is different than that of someone who is 80 years old, but does age change your interpretation and knowledge of love? When you're young are you not really experiencing love but just a very strong, intense, infatuation? Do we as children or people of a younger age desire "love" so much just because we have seen it in movies and heard of its wonders; leading us to, in our minds, create love for another person? Do we simply mistake infatuation and lust for love just because we want love? If that is not the case and we are capable of feeling love at any age, then why does love rarely work out when we are younger; was that then not love? You can be so involved with a person emotionally and physically and mentally that you imagine this euphoria of love. That even years after their departure from your relationship aspect of life, when you see them and talk to them, you fall for them all over again. If someone treats you horribly emotionally and not how you deserve, yet you still want to be with them and am still convinced its love, then is it? I suppose the ultimate question is what is love? Some say that "love is the souls recognition of its counterpart in another", others say that love is loss; such as Goncourt, "Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence." With each definition and quote, with every book and movie, with each relationship and heartbreak, does love change? Is love to forever be just a word used to describe a situation amongst two people and that love is not a thing, but an ever changing, never ending, list of possibilities? Love is different to everyone, it can be the smell of an old book, the sound of rain, the wind in your hair or even mums spaghetti, but I suppose the real definition to love is this: "Love is not feeling, it's an experience."