By Alex Greenspoon
Editors: Jessica Liu and Alloe Mak

I want to feel the warmth of someone’s embrace without feeling like I’m in a stranger’s arms. Hold me tight and don’t let go. 

I want to feel the essence of your touch even as I walk away; your energy hovering over my cells as I leave a love-filled embrace. I want a kiss on my forehead and to be taken care of when I am ill. Hand me a bowl of homemade chicken soup with your tongue as the noodles. Physical evidence of an energetic feeling. Become one with my soul. 

I may not be Aristophanes but I can tell you what love means to me. I can tell you what I crave and what I long for; I will dig a never-ending grave of my opinions. With each shovel I dent and break with the intensity of my longing, I shall repeat the same soliloquy that engages with my belonging. I am a citizen of the world’s soul with the desire to express every emotion that comes my way. To bury it is to speak blindly at the cost of my dignity. I want love in every way, but at the end of the day, I am merely someone socialized as a woman with a role in the upliftment of men. I am a feminist though I want to love without it being perceived as an act of expected labour. I am a feminist who loves women for every part of their mind, body, and soul, though the very concept of love as it is described contradicts this. If I want to be legally married, I am engaging in the symbolism that is ownership of my own kind. As a feminist, I am struck by the bounds of my dignity to uphold. I want to be married to someone who will hold my hand until the day I die in their arms, and vice versa, but does that mean that my marriage must be symbolic of a cisheteronormative ideal that was created for no reason other than to oppress me? Must my longing for love be institutionalized? Marriage doesn’t have to mean a legal transaction; it has just been made that way. A marriage should be the embodiment of love as a whole; a union between two. It can be temporary or permanent—it is subjective. Though if I am a woman who longs for a union of stability and passion, if I desire to be taken care of when I am ill and when I am healthier than fresh fruit, does that make me weaker? It may be bleak to think that I am frail with nothing to build towards a peak, but I don’t think that that is what love is. We have been trained to believe that love is a system rather than a feeling. If it is purely a system with built-in roles, then how must I feel a hunger for the entrance of one’s kiss? Thirst for the consistency of a careful hand connected to a shoulder with fat that warms the bones which build up my favourite lover? Love is an option that we run towards for two drastically different reasons; to capitalize off of our feelings and to feel our feelings. It is not mandatory to burn our hands trying to tug the rope tied to potential so that we don’t have to be alone. It is a conscious effort to untangle the subconscious knot that is societal expectation. It is possible to undo this want disguised as a need. We do not need to have a teenage romance where someone drops love notes into our lockers. We do not need a Nickelodeon show retelling of what love means to us. Love is not a transaction but rather a mutual effort and a union. We are taught to view it as something where we need to count points and use a scale to tell who is putting in more effort on which day. This is not love. This is a capital effect. This is an institutionalized subtext rather than your own true feelings. I am a feminist who loves. This does not make me less of a feminist, it makes me rebel against the institution that claims love as a textbook definition. Love is not an insurance policy dictated by common law—love is what you feel. Love is what you make it. My love is different from yours even in areas of commonality. I will love a wife with every breath whether it is against my neck or in simple memory. My love describes the indescribable. Your love describes the indescribable. I like mousse and you hate mousse. I like the arms that make me feel warm while you may find them cold. We have differences no matter what. Your view on love is up to you and you write your own dictionary definition in words or hidden pulses. To love for love is rebellion. To love is feminist. To love for benefits is to assimilate.