“Words have power” is literally a magnet on my fridge at home. But, love to my grandparents was presented through actions my parents were determined to put the word to use. My parents never had this type of exposure to love, their parents would never utter the word.

Love has surrounded every aspect of my upbringing-from my parents randomly blurting out the word in the middle of the supermarket to attributing a supposedly complex word to irrelevant items like clothes. Simply put: I heard the word love too often. So why do I tell my friends I love them at the end of every call, and why do I convince myself that I am in love with a fluffy-haired 6’0” boy who wants nothing to do with me? The word has become so remedial in my vocabulary that, when asked to describe it, I merely say something along the lines of “Love is just that: Love.” I can try to poetically describe love as a fire of unending passion or a willingness to sacrifice oneself for another, but I have never felt that way for anyone except my immediate family. I am certain that I do not know what love is. Their initiatives, however, have proven to have horrific consequences in our college years. My parents, and many of my friends’ parents, wanted to shield us from a lack of love, so they filled our upbringing with participation trophies. I think that is where the problem of desensitizing love began. There is not one day where he doesn’t say that he loves me. That being said, my father made it his job to make sure I felt his love. My father’s father would never even utter the word “love” to his children, in fear of diminishing the machismo he earned on the mainland. In my father’s prime, saying “I love you” to your friends in Newark, N.J.

In my experience, the word “love” and its significance has become desensitized to the youth of my generation.

I feel as though my father may have had a point in his ill-worded response. “I barely even tell your mother that.”Īlthough what he said was questionable in terms of the stability of his marriage, it made me think about love as a 19-year-old in 2022. “Why do you tell your friends you love them?” he remarked. I once made the mistake of doing this ritual farewell in front of my father, which prompted him to cringe. At the conclusion of any phone call with my closest friends, we proclaim our love for one another.

What is love means to you