Love is an odd affliction of the mind. It is one of the most unstable emotions we poses and it can appear in many forms under many varying situations. It can form some of the strongest bonds among mere strangers and can drive people to do the most terrible actions. Love by itself can satisfy the most depressed persons, or it can push the most satisfied people to go as far as to take their life. Anyone who claims they can live without love is either nuts or lying, and love is different for every person. Love changes the world every day, in both positive and negative forms. However, there is a question I asked myself a long time ago. What makes love so powerful? It took me a night without sleep, but I was able to come up with an answer that satisfied my imagination. Love finds its power in relationships, bonds formed between two or more people. You can be sad, afraid, angry, in grief, sympathetic, and even proud all by yourself. No one else is required. But love requires at least one more person. Even self-love. Self-love derives from satisfaction, and satisfaction is dependent upon the environment. But love requires two or more people. Some loves are an open bond between two or more people, like a couple or a family. Some loves derive from a fixation, where one person is loving and the other person is contributing by just being present. Love finds its unique strength in bonds. It takes two to tango and therefore, it becomes more satisfying, requiring a joint effort between two or more people. Psychologically, your mind needs to form relationships with other people, and love is the strongest relationship you can acquire. But we have been talking about love as if it is a single emotion. Love is a complex set of varying emotions, some of which have a name and some that don’t. The uniqueness of each case of love, each individual relationship, is found in the differing mixtures of each of these smaller emotions, like the different recipes for a thanksgiving turkey. We all cook the turkey, and some things, like the turkey, don’t vary. But the size, the spices, the cooking time, and even the sides all vary. This is also what makes love such a hard emotion to understand. Family love is different from couple love, yet we all require both. However, the most powerful love I have ever experienced is the love given to me from God himself. Such a pure and unwavering love, one I don’t deserve and one I will never fully be able give back. He loved us so much, he sacrificed his only son, risking losing him to the devil, just so that we could, once again, be set free of sin. Yet he knew that even two thousand years later, there would still be people, his own creation, who would refuse to accept this love. If that is not love, then I don’t know what is.