'Love' is not a word to toss about; all too often I hear people saying it so casually that the word loses all meaning. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sethe (a character) says something along the lines of "Thin love ain't love at all." You can't love someone in degrees; either you

A. Love them

or

B. You don't

There's no room for "I love you more than..." or "You don't love me enough..." or "I don't love you enough to do that." It's either A or B, end of story.

You're right, love is not a word to toss about, except maybe in cases like, 'I love cajun cooking' or 'Don't you just love watching Simpsons reruns? I love the way they use the whole news with Kent Brockman thing as a vehicle for satire.'

When you're talking about people who aren't family members, the word somehow becomes much more heavy and we really do have to be careful with it.

You either love someone or you don't. But assuming you do, there can be different ways of doing it. As an intense thing as love is, it is also not an easily defined and contained word. Isn't it possible to feel genuine love for, say, someone you haven't seen in nine years, an ex-boyfriend you still hold dear, a close intimate friend and your one true soulmate and still feel entirely different towards each one of them?

Even when your heart wholeheartedly belongs to one, somehow its possible to dedicate a piece of it to other dear people, and still not love any of them with 'half a heart'. It kind of defies physics when you think about it. Its kind of crazy how the heart can work that way.

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