When did the words ‘I love you’ start to be so colossally underestimated?
Have you ever loved someone? Guarantee the answer is yes.
But have you ever been in love? A very different thing.
Loving someone just makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. But being in love makes you so vulnerable. It opens up your heart, and that means someone can get inside and really mess you up.
People take an opportunity like that way too lightly.
And after you spend time building up all these defenses, these cold steel walls. You build a whole damn suit of armor so that nothing can get inside and hurt you. So you can just be, just live!

Then.
One single person—who is no different from any other person—wanders into your life.
So you take a risk and give them a piece of you… that they never even asked for. They simply did something silly one day like kiss you or smile at you, and then suddenly your life is not your own anymore.
Love takes hostages.
It gets deep inside you. Love is a genius: while it blinds you, it gets inside your system. Runs itself through your veins.
You can consider yourself lucky if the same thing is happening to the other person.

THEN.
So simple a phrase as ‘maybe we should just be friends’ becomes a glass splinter the size of a fist, and slowly but aggressively works its way through your chest into your heart.
The earth just drops out from under you and you never stop falling.
No matter how strong of a person you are, everytime tears make their way to your eyes.
You get this huge pit in your stomach, like you're going down a hill of a rollercoaster.
But the hill never seems to end.
The first moment is the worst.
It just… hurts.
Stings.
Throbs.
Sometimes, you can literally feel your heart shatter.

You think things can't get any worse. And then you realize after it ends, that you never even stopped to think that maybe you’re not in love with this person, and maybe you’re just in love with the idea of them.
And if you did think about that possibility, you immediately denied it and kept going.
I know, I've been there.

Because if you are really in love with the person that they are, you don't fall out of love with them unless that person changes or you change yourself. Which does often happen. But if neither of you do? If things are steady and unchanging, if the other person generally remains the same and does the same things and acts the same ways? You don't just "fall out of love."
It's simply logical: if you can fall out of love with someone in the time span of say, a week, then you were never in love with them to begin with.

Being in love is clearly the best feeling ever for those who have really and truly experienced it.
But these lovers must admit that, more often than not, the best feeling ever leads to a feeling that is equally strong, but on the other end of the spectrum.

And sometimes
when you're that down,
that broken,
another person comes along who is simply tryin to be a good friend by picking up the pieces of your heart for you. But because you’re so vulnerable, that person looks to you like the only ray of light in a tunnel full of pure darkness.
And then the cycle starts all over again. Which only adds more stress to an already confusing and stressful situation.

Yes, being in love is… wonderful, amazing.
But the aftermath?
It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-tears-you-apart kind of pain.
Not just in the imagination, not just in the mind.
Oh, no. It affects your very existence, and the people existing around you.
It is
by far
the most unbearable thing your emotions can experience.

It makes me wonder if a feeling so amazing is worth a feeling so terrible.

…But we LOVE love.
Why love something that can break you so easily?

Because it’s the closest thing we have to magic.