What is love? 
There are many forms of it. 

 I love my grand-children because they're cute and funny, and smell nice, and they've wormed their way into my heart and taken a piece of it with them. 

I love my children, and I used to love them the same way as my grand-children because
they were much the same when they were little.  But the love I have for them has changed over the years.  I'm still protective about them but it's a quantified protection now, given that they don't want me to be so protective or to worry at all, most of the time.  Though I can't help myself really doing that - I just don't tell them how much it still happens.  Now, my love for my children is a bit more detached.  I enjoy their company.  I admire their personalities, (some parts), and their achievements.  I like to watch them continue to evolve.  But I realise our separateness now. 

I still love my mother, on some level.  I admire what she has achieved with her life.  I remember how I felt about her when I was little.  But we are more acquaintances these days than relatives. 

I love my husband but, again, that feeling has changed over the years.  It's rare for me to feel the old 'heart sing' type of love for him.  There's just too much between us a lot of the time, too many niggling problems to deal with and not enough idealism to overcome them left.  It's more the love you have for a pair of comfortable old shoes.  He fits me and molds to me, and is warm and cosy.  But, I suppose, that's normal so many decades together. 

I love my friends - old ones I've known for years, whose children I brought my children up with, who I once worked with or went to school with, or did theatre with.  They know who I am and where I came from.  They accept all my facets equally and don't judge me for them.  I feel free to be human around them.  Then again, they don't actually see me that often, nor on a day to day basis, so they can afford to be so liberal. 

I love my new friends, made recently, for the sweet excitement and new possibilities  they've brought into my life, for refreshing my view of myself, and of my talents and capabilities, so that part of me feels reborn.  And I look forward to those friendships
continuing to develop and grow, taking me into a new arena of life and experience, and showing me parts of myself I never knew existed. 

I love my animals - my little dogs and cat - for their steadfast loyalty and endless affection,  for the way they follow me like little shadows protecting me and seeking my protection, for the way they share my bed and body warmth and give me cuddles and snuggles, for their joyful faces and wagging tails, and for the brief moments of fun playing games with them or taking them for walks. 

I love my home, a place I always dreamed of and now live in and, even though it takes much more from me in upkeep both physically and fiscally than I realised it would, I want to stay here and watch my garden grow and my dreams come true in it. 

I love my country - a wonderful, diverse place which has not yet been touched by the anarchy and division that has tainted countries overseas.  Where racism and other ugly traits have not yet developed to extremes, though I admit the potentials are there.  Where, though the ugly sides of life are present, they have not come anywhere near overwhelming the positives.  Where immigrants, though retaining a sense of history of the country they came from, are most likely to develop an affection for this new country they have adopted and to become true citizens of it. 

I love this planet where, by a quirk, one of the usual twin suns that centre most solar systems never lit itself up (Jupiter), so that this planet was able to develop life on its volatile mass - a life so beautiful and varied yet so fragile,  existing by a thread on a mote of time. 

I love life, that even with its ups and downs, and ins and outs, and ifs and maybes, and beginnings and endings, remains a fascinating place to be in any time or as any thing. 

So, what is love? Is it romance?  Yes, as much as romance is enjoying the essence of life or what it is, apart from yet encapsulating the peripherals.  Romance is idealism, adventure, excitement, sentimentalism, mystery, chivalry...and anything that takes you out of ordinary life, if only for a moment.  Isn't that love?  Something in the ordinary or the usual, that enables it to rise above the mundane and become beautiful; and, when we recognise that something, we discover love. 

Perhaps, then, it is when we discover in someone else an essence which continually rises out of them and confronts us with a transcendence of their character and circumstances that we learn the true nature of human love.  We are mesmerised by it
and willing to make great sacrifices to nourish it, or to keep it with us, and even to let it go 
rather than see it perish when our possessive desire might smother it.  

So, through love then, we transcend ourselves, and our own nature. 

Oh, I would not live my life without love.  I love to love.  And yes, for me, love is life.