What is love, anyway?

Elizabeth Carter

I had just finished watching the new movie Materialists. I found it stylish, clever, and surprisingly layered. It left me thinking about the ways we love, how we show up for it, how we chase it. Later that night, while talking with a friend about the movie, about what I liked, how it made me feel, and so on. Somewhere in our conversation, we slipped into a different kind of dialogue.

Not about the movie anymore.
But about love, what was real love?  It’s a meaningful question we all define uniquely. And a question that might lead you to more. Love is a topic like an iceberg, or a rabbit hole, there is always more to discover.

Can you have love for someone without being in love with them?
Do we want to be loved? Or do we want to be understood?
Is love something we find, or something we recognize?

Is love a choice?

And then the question that always floats to the surface, the one that doesn’t ever really go away:

What is love, anyway?

I couldn’t help but wonder… is love a feeling, a decision, or a beautifully delusional force we all silently agree to believe in?

It’s the question that lingers in our candlelit dinners, it comes through in our apologies, and late-night phone calls. It hides in our “good morning” texts and haunts us in the silence between two people who used to know everything about each other. Love is everywhere, and yet no one seems to know exactly what it is.

For centuries, we’ve written songs about it, declared wars over it, we cried in our cars because of it, and shaped our entire lives in search of it. But if you ask ten people to define love, you’ll get ten entirely different answers, some poetic, some jaded, some drenched in fairy tale hope, and others edged with bitterness.

Some say love is chemistry. Others say it’s commitment. I personally think it’s somewhere between a runner’s high and a lightning bolt… It’s surprising, euphoric, untouchable. It lifts you, consumes you, and for a moment, makes you believe in something bigger than yourself.

It feels like someone reaching for your hand in a crowded room. Laughter in a late-night car ride. Like the softness in someone’s voice when they say your name like it’s something sacred. It’s the warmth of being seen. The safety of being chosen.

This is great and all, but this is all what love feels like, and not what love is.

Taking it one step deeper, where do we find love?

We spend so much of our lives searching for it in other people. Waiting for a spark, a text, a sign, a grand confession. We say things like “I’m just waiting to be loved the right way” or my current favorite “if he wanted to, he would”, as if love is something out there, held by someone else, waiting to be delivered to us in some pretty little box.

But what if our whole lives we’ve been looking for love in the wrong place?

Perhaps love lives within all of us.
Maybe it’s not found but remembered. Not earned but revealed.

Love is a light within you. A warmth, a knowing, a frequency that’s always been there. You just need to learn to tune into.  To love someone is to let them bring that part of you forward, to mirror it, to hold it, to dance with it. And if love is already within us, then maybe to be loved is simply to let that love flow. To let it move through us.

Maybe being loved isn’t about receiving, it’s about releasing.

Letting yourself feel love, not just from someone, but toward something. Toward everything.

Yes, most people think they find love in other people. But what if you let yourself find love in the tiniest details in life?

The way the sun comes through the window.
The comfort of holding a warm drink.
A favorite song at the perfect moment.
The smile of a stranger.
The feeling of coming home to yourself.

Maybe love isn’t something you wait for. Maybe it’s something you practice every day, in small ways, until your whole life begins to grow with it. You must choose to see love in your life.

And then… there are the people who made us question if love is even worth it, or if it’s even real. The ones who broke us open and left us convinced that maybe love just isn’t for us. We get a bad taste of it, manipulation disguised as romance, chaos sold as passion, crumbs passed off as connection, and suddenly we think: “I’m done. I don’t want this”.

But the truth is: You haven’t had love. You’ve merely had the idea of it.
You’ve had the counterfeit version, the one sold on Tumu… an echo of what it could be.

Because to experience real love, that is soft, steady, and soul deep, is to feel safe in someone’s presence and brave in your own skin. It’s to be held without having to shrink. It’s to feel seen in the ways you don’t have words for. An exhale you didn’t know you were holding in.

Love doesn’t make you question your worth. It reminds you of it. And when you finally feel it, it won’t be chaos. It’ll feel like coming home.

It’s more than the words “I love you”.
It’s the way you come alive in its presence.
It’s the way you soften or the way you glow. The way you become you, more fully than ever before.

We like to think of love as something we find out there, across rooms, in dating apps, through fate. But the most powerful kind of love isn’t found at all, it’s awakened. Pulled from within. The right person doesn’t give you love; they help you remember that it was already inside of you.

No one can give you love.
They can only help you unlock it.

And maybe, if you’ve been practicing the consciousness of finding love in everything…
If you’ve been softening when you look at yourself in the mirror, smiling at dogs or your neighbors, sipping your morning coffee like it’s your first ever cup; Then maybe when the right person comes along, it won’t feel like falling.

It’ll feel like recognition.
Like something already familiar.
Like your heart simply saying, “Oh. There you are.”

So…
what is love, anyway?

Maybe it’s not everything.

But if you let it, it’s the best part of everything.