Earlier this week, I was sitting in a lecture hall shamelessly counting down the minutes until class ended. By the 45-minute mark, the discussion of our assigned reading for the week had devolved into a string of muffled sounds. My awareness suddenly pulled itself together when another student said, “We like because, we love despite.”

The context of why he said that is a bit hazy in my mind, but as an immediate reaction, I pulled out my notebook and wrote it down. For the next 35 minutes, I could not stop thinking about it. 

Or rather, I could not stop thinking about love itself.  

Wondering about love is a common human thought. As we grow up, we crave to experience the flowers, the perfectly planned date at the restaurant we have been hinting at wanting to try and the dramatic love confessions we watched on “Notting Hill” or “27 Dresses.” You want someone to love everything about you and do everything for you, and when you get that warm feeling of being secure and seen, the waterfall stops running and is suddenly still, as in your mind, you achieved the ultimate goal in life: romance. 

You run and tell your therapist you are going to cut down on the sessions because, for once, you are actually happy. You now don’t carry all the weight alone — you have a partner to hold your hand and go through life with. You feel kind of proud of yourself because after years of hearing things your parents screamed from the rooftops, such as “You are too young to know what love is,” or “ Just wait, and you’ll know it,” finally it quieted down, because you did it, you feel it and you know it.

But is that true? Is there such a thing as being too young to know what love is? Or is the truth that we forget what love is? 

When I was little, I lived on a farm, so my childhood was spent running around shoeless in the mud with my dogs more often than watching television or playing with blocks on my living room floor. This resulted, however, in a lot of injuries — I have the scars to prove it. 

Every time, I would run back to my house, hiccuping while trying to explain what happened to my mom. After cleaning my wound and placing a bandaid on it, she would then lean over and kiss it, and I swear for a split second the burning, painful sensation would stop. In those moments, I felt something. I felt secure. 

At the end of my freshman year of high school, my cat died. I was devastated. I cried to the point of not being able to breathe. When I went to school the next day, my friend walked up to me holding a bag. When I opened it, it was my favorite candy and a handwritten card telling me she was sorry for my loss and how good of a cat mom I was. I will admit that I started crying in the middle of the hallway, but at that moment, I felt something. I felt seen. 

My grandma and I share the same birthday. Every year, we gather as a family and sing happy birthday in front of a Carvel ice cream cake, and of course, we have the tradition of giving the first piece of the cake to someone special. 

So every year, she and I hold our pieces pretending to give them to someone else, just to turn around and give them to each other. Our other family members all laugh and say, “We knew this would happen, you guys do this every year.” My grandma and I don’t care, though — in fact, I think we laugh louder the older we get. In that moment, through all of us laughing, celebrating, singing, I feel something. I feel love. 

The truth is, I really doubt we have to wait to say we experienced love until we are a certain age or have lived through a real-life romantic movie plot. At some point in the course of humanity, love stopped being ordinary. It stopped being simple, and instead became about expensive chocolates and kissing on the lips. 

It became a competition about who found it faster, whose lasted longer and whose was more apparent and intoxicating. It became about stories that are loud and dramatic, forcing us to ignore the love around us because it’s quieter than the gestures we deem to be the dream. Humans have felt this since before we ever got into romantic relationships, because in reality we experience love from the second we leave our mother’s womb — we are raised with love. We feel the feeling, no matter how young we are or the status of a relationship. It just comes quickly, like a breath we are trained not to notice. 

We know what love is. Love is your mother ordering takeout on a Wednesday, even though it’s a strictly Friday activity, because she knows her daughter is going through something. Love is your cat running up to you first thing in the morning. Love is your friends begging you to go out with them because they want you there. Love is getting out of bed and showering even though you feel like you don’t want to be alive anymore. Love is quiet. Love is simple. We just forget it.