Love is a feeling that visits every human soul, no matter their condition, their state, or their perspective. It does not ask who you are before entering your heart. It can bloom for a caring mother whose hands have always shielded you, for a hardworking father whose silent sacrifices built your world, for loyal friends, relatives, siblings, or the best friend who stayed when everyone else left. This love is warm, familiar, almost sacred.
And yet, the love that steals a person's sanity often comes from someone who is not related to him in any way. A boy falls in love with a girl. A girl falls in love with a boy. And suddenly, the world changes its color. For some, love is a feeling so powerful that if they feel it, they believe it must be returned. But love is mystical. It is never guaranteed. It may exist in only one heart. It may fade within a breath, or it may stay until the last heartbeat.
Still, even if it vanishes in a moment, no one can say it was not sincere. And even if it lasts a lifetime, no one can swear it was pure. Because sometimes what we call love is nothing more than obsession wearing a beautiful mask.
In my perspective, love is something you feel for someone who may never be ready for you. It is the purest form of care, loyalty, appreciation, and protection. If I love someone, I cannot stand watching them being insulted, embarrassed, or bullied. Their pain becomes my pain. Their tears feel heavier than my own. I would try my best to give them the best in every possible way. But even love has boundaries. There are lines that must not be crossed. There are hearts that must not be broken.
Perhaps the greatest sin is not realizing when someone we casually use for our comfort has silently fallen in love with us. And when we toss them away, we do not see the shattering we leave behind. A broken heart can sometimes be mended. But sometimes it breaks in such a way that no weight of the world can press it back into shape. It simply remains cracked, forever echoing with what once was.
For some, love turns into obsession. If they cannot be loved back, they decide the other person cannot belong to anyone else either. But if you truly love someone, their happiness should be your happiness. Sometimes you must prioritize yourself, yes—but think for a moment. What if the person you swore to sacrifice everything for begins to cry because of your blindness, because of your obsession? What if your love becomes the reason for their suffering? There are people who could die just imagining that. And there are people who think it does not matter, because their feelings were not understood.
If the one you love marries someone else, loves someone else, perhaps the truest test is to support them. If you cannot be loved by them, at least make sure they are happy. So that one day, you can lift your head and whisper to yourself that you never made them cry.
And still, after all of this, love remains unknown. Put two people in the same room, give them the same circumstances, the same emotions, the same air to breathe—and ask them what love means. Their answers will never be identical. Love is different in every heart.
We often wound our family and friends for the sake of the one we love, forgetting that the people we hurt were the ones who held us when we were born, who stayed when we cried, who listened when we needed to speak. They were there before love arrived. They were there when we were alone.
And sometimes, love grows from friendship. When your lover is also your truest friend, when loyalty and affection become one, that person may be the luckiest alive. A loyal friend would give his life without hesitation. When such a soul becomes your love, there is no greater blessing.
Yet even in the purest love, there are borders that cannot be breached. Words that should not be spoken. Feelings that should not be forced. Hearts that should not be shattered.
We search for the meaning of love, repeating the question endlessly—what does love mean? And even if we understand every explanation, neither you nor I can truly define it. We may believe the feeling we carry is true love. But perhaps, in the final fragile moments of life, when breath becomes thin and memories grow heavy, we will realize that our definition was incomplete.
Some understand love through a feeling. Some through a single scene. We often hear that love is blind. But blindness without control is not love—it is obsession. And obsession never ends well.
Love can be the cruelest pain in existence or the sweetest joy life can offer. It is a height impossible to climb and a depth without measure. It is a road without an end, an ocean without land.
They say the deepest discovery in the universe is the black hole, the endless void. But perhaps there are two depths far greater: the ocean of love and the void of love. The ocean can bless or curse you. But the void… the absence of love… rarely feels like a blessing. It can twist into obsession, into destruction. Rejection alone can shatter a life completely. Maybe only two or three people in a billion can transform that void into something beautiful. Not everyone can survive it.
In my perspective, we can learn this feeling not only through our own thoughts, but also through animes and manhwas that dare to portray love in its most fragile and terrifying forms. But as we know, the teacher is not the same for every person; what teaches one heart may fail to touch another. Stories try to teach us what reality cannot.
But if I have to give an example of a love that shatters the heart, then we can look to the anime with the title Erased, a boy awakens from a coma after fifteen long years, only to discover that the girl he once loved has married someone else and built a life that no longer has a place for him. Time did not wait for his feelings. Life moved forward without asking his permission, without pausing for his broken heart. The dreams he once carried so carefully had already faded into someone else's reality.
Meanwhile, the one who once tried to end his life had visited him every single day, standing beside his silent body, waiting patiently for his eyes to open so that he could kill him. Even with murderous intent buried deep within his heart, he stayed. That twisted loyalty, that dark patience, blurs the line between hatred and attachment. Love and obsession, devotion and darkness—intertwined in ways too painful, too haunting, to ever fully separate.
Then for another example that teaches us about love, we can take the manhwa with the title The Greatest Estate Developer. In it, a queen continues to attend a wedding ceremony every single year, waiting for a man who has disappeared from the world. She waits despite knowing he may never return. She waits even after the world has accepted his absence as permanent.
No one would blame her for moving on. No one would question her if she chose another path, another future, another hand to hold. And yet, she does not. Year after year, she stands there, holding on to a feeling that the world itself has already buried.After all this waiting, when the man finally returned, she did not complain. She did not scold him, nor question his absence. The first words she spoke, as if to right all the years of longing, were: "The man who made me fall in love with him… has always come running whenever I wanted to see him
Perhaps stories come closest to teaching us love. Yet even then, the question refuses to fade.
What does love mean?
Is it sacrifice? Is it prayer? Is it shaping your dreams around someone else? Is it letting go? Is it staying? Is it pain? Is it peace?
We do not know.
And maybe that is the tragedy and the miracle of it—that love is the only emotion we feel so deeply,yet understand so little.
And I do not know what you think, or what others may feel, but somehow I believe that this question should not be answered. Its weight is too heavy to be lifted. Its responsibility is too vast to be imagined. Perhaps it is a question that should remain unanswered. And yet, still, neither yours nor mine curiosity fades—we are drawn, relentlessly, to ask it: What does love mean?