Love is something that too many people say too freely and others not freely enough.
You don't have to enter into a relationship believing that the only way to naturally progress forward is by falling in love with somebody. That doesn't mean that isn't the next step, but if you look for something that isn't there hard enough- you will undoubtedly find it. You will find melodramatic love, confessions of feelings that deep down you don't have. Being in a relationship does not automatically equal happiness or love. It can mean incredible sadness too.
Everybody knows that saying these three words has become a duty, and to hear them; your right. So to say you love someone out of courtesy is completely acceptable. Even to believe that you do, because it's time that you did.
That's not how that should be. Love should be something amazing. Something you can't doubt or falter over. Something unsaid that has been there from the first time you felt that jolt of something different. When you can say that you truly have never said or done things that way before.
That feeling can only grow and develop, but there's no doubting that it's love from the beginning. It's when the cliches of "someone literally meaning everything to you, and suddenly it feels like life wont go on without them" become true, in a way that Hollywood can't portray.
Too many people say these cliches without feeling the power behind them, and the cliches make the relationship feel safe and the people in them comfortable. But the truth is, love is anything but comfortable. It makes something safe become something fragile and breakable and a person vunerable and scared. It makes something easy difficult and the most insignificant things the most important.
Love is not something you hype up into a moment or something that should be saved for the occassion. It's messy and unpredictable and it hurts. But it's also what makes something real.
So Hollywood can wait for that moment, and show the perfect way that "love" should be. But the truth is, love is powerful. Powerful enough not to be something that should be controlled and moulded into the way the stereotype wants it.
Most importantly, you can grow to love someone. You can grow to care about someone. But you will never grow to be in love with someone. That heart-pounding, time stopping love that so many people seem to have forgotten or imitated, but which remains very, very real.
So if you're lucky enough to know that you would happily lay down everything for someone then tell them. Because things change everyday and love is the purest thing this world has left.
