My friend once told me that love doesn’t exist at our age. We are too young and naïve to understand what love is, hence we can never say we are in love or feel love towards another outside our family. But then I question, if we aren’t capable of feeling love in the first place, why do I have this inescapable, passionate, heart wrenching yearning for the connection we call love?

I want to feel inside myself the truth behind the words “I love you”; I want to know he believes in me, himself, and us for all eternity; I need to feel my love for him burning inside my very being, in every inch of my body, mind and soul, leaking out so that he can sense the love I have for him and the love for him forevermore. I have to feel the same love from him, and know he will always be by my side when I need him. I must know love.

Yet I don’t know how to find it; where to look for it, what to do to have it, or who to find it with. I have read countless books on lust, romance, adoration, yearning, love… but none of them tell me how to go about searching for it. In all the novels I have scrutinized, all of the people had love cross them, happened upon the feeling, hadn’t intentionally fallen in love. So what do I do?

I want to believe we can feel love now. I want to know that I can fall in love with him, and then as we grow, possibly fall out of love, or have this feeling intensify. I want to believe that this thirst for connection, mental and physical contact between two people can be quenched. But who knows; maybe my friend was right in saying we don’t feel love at our age, for from what I have experienced, love is only fictional.