What is Love? By DC Juris Guest Author

What is Love? By DC Juris

Hi folks! DC Juris here. I'll be your guest host for today. For those of you who don't know me, I'm a transgender fella who writes GLBTQ and heterosexual romance, but mostly m/m.

It's February, and of course, that means Valentine's Day. I know it's a few days way still, but I thought we could talk about love.

Artists have tried for centuries to capture the meaning and feel of love - waxing philosophical and romantically in poems, stories, and songs. Jewelry stores make millions every year as people try to buy physical, long lasting representations of their inner most feelings. But for me, love is a matter more nebulous.

What is love?

Love is waiting until the commercial of your partner's favorite show before you yell for more toilet paper.

Love is putting up with your partner's annoying relatives in your home for far longer than anyone should be made to.

Love is dumpster diving in your neighbor's recycle bin for a perfectly good radio as a present for your partner because you have no money.

Love is going down on your knees in a hospital chapel, even though you're an atheist, and begging God to spare your partner's life, even though you know in your heart you have nothing to offer which is as precious as what you're asking for.

Love is driving to no less than twelve different stores in three different counties to find a figurine of a bear dressed in a ghost costume.

Love is listening to your partner howl songs at the top of their very untalented lungs on long car drives.

Love is settling for the cold shower because your partner used all the hot water.

Love is holding your tongue around your partner's closed-minded mother, not because you want to, but because he has asked you to.

Love is putting up with the puppy your partner brought home, even though you'd both agreed to no more dogs, and even though the damned thing is stubborn as sin and dumber than a rock.

Love is sitting through the Twilight movies, even though all you can think is how you'll never get those two hours of your life back, and you could've gotten a root canal instead.

Love is knowing your partner's faults - admitting them - and loving him because of them, not in spite of them.

Love is buying him that shiny white violin he wants for Christmas. Even though he can't play it. Even though he already has a violin. He doesn’t have a white one - and that logic alone is enough for you.

Love is doing what's right, not what's easy or convenient. Love is doing things, at times, that you'd rather not do. Love is compromise and adjustment. It's neither hot nor cold, nor white nor black - it's that lukewarm grey space in between.

That's what I think, anyway. But don't take my word for it.

 I'll leave you with a my favorite quote about love, by William Shakespeare.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds


Admit impediments. Love is not love


Which alters when it alteration finds,


Or bends with the remover to remove:


O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 


That looks on tempests and is never shaken;


It is the star to every wandering bark,


Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.


Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 


Within his bending sickle's compass come: 


Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 


But bears it out even to the edge of doom.


If this be error and upon me proved,


I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

"Love" image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=659

"Hearts" image courtesy of Graur Codrin http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=982