When you’re trying to sleep and your mind is clogged up with mathematical formulas and complicated physics concepts, the best thing to do is to have a profound philosophical debate with yourself. The topic I have decided on is the existence of love, a very fascinating topic with no real answers. After several minutes of mental quarreling, my cynical side is victorious (as always). I have concluded that love is simply another label that we, human beings have created. It’s our nasty habit to categorize everything, to create order in anarchy, and know the unknown. It’s out of fear of the unknown and the unfamiliar, that we ritualize things, and give definitions to subjective things that cannot be defined. Love is a word we use to describe a feeling. From what I’ve gathered, it’s basically a feeling that is more intense than “like”. But to what extent? We can’t measure degrees of “like”, it is all relative and variable.

Affection, care, attachment, closeness - these are words I associate with love. I believe that these words can develop between anybody, given the right circumstances and amount of interaction. The romantic idea of “true love” or “soul mate” is something I have discarded somewhere along the way of growing up. These concepts were invented by us out of fear of being alone. The love that leads to marriage all comes down to compatibility in the end. Everyone has their differences. It’s the person who has the most tolerable differences from you that you form strong bonds with, and these bonds are labeled love. Through Hollywood rom-coms, literature and whatnot, the idea of true love is something that we all desire to believe in, and to experience. We grab any opportunity we have to label relationships and feelings love. Once labeled, we believe in it with all of our heart. We try to shape and mould our own relationships on the basis of a Disney fairytale, or