What is love between two unrelated people?

I feel the description that most people give when asked “what is love” is so overrated and so cliche. Love to me is something very simple but we humans tend to make things look complex, cos it's just in our nature to question and to be skeptical. Love isn't the feeling of ‘highness’ and ‘floating on cloud no. 9’. Or is it the feeling of wanting to scream at the top of your lungs or giving a 1000 and 1 roses or getting the fattest diamond you can ever imagine.

To me, love comes from being in a Loving Relationship. Loving as one word and Relationship as one word. Loving will generate feelings of love, and Relationship, means its takes two to work. And my take on a loving relationship, has two fundamental factors.

(1) Contrary to ‘love feeling very high', love to me, is actually a very calm and knowing feeling. A feeling that feels very overwhelming at the beginning, thanks to progesterone and testosterone that enrages our human body. Also thanks to endorphins. But as time goes by, if you were really true with that person right from the beginning, your flaws start to show, and the irritating habits of yours start to show. And then it's this time where you ask yourself if you can live with it. Whether you find it more irritating, or whether you find it cute and funny. It's different from the honeymoon period when you nicely ignore all the irritating habits, cos in your eyes you already made up in your mind he/she is perfect, that's what attracted you in the first place, the so called ‘checklist’ you make when you find a potential person. But soon we all realize everyone has flaws. And the first base: Can you accept the flaws? This of cos only applies if u have been true with him all along, if u weren't afraid to show your habits and flaws, provided you weren't so full of him/her so much so that you pretended to be perfect becos you were afraid if you showed your flaws, he might leave you. If you just pretend, at the end of the day, you're only gonna hurt yourself.

(2) The second factor is the comfort level. How comfortable can you be with this person? Can you bare your whole soul and whole self knowing the other party wont laugh at you or make you feel embarrassed? How comfortable can you get, just being yourself entirely and even in situations where u made a complete fool of yourself. Doing things that may seem mundane to others, but to you and him, it's like the world's funniest thing and you don't have a single care in the world. How much can u laugh and cry with this person. And how idiotic can u be with this person, knowing the other party wants to have the same level of fun with you. Not to mention, you find yourself doing things so embarrassing and idiotic which you would kill yourself if anyone finds out. But does he laugh with you, or laugh at you?

Of cos to me this are just the surface of the iceberg. It's just the fundamental baby steps. But I think it's two very important criteria that set the relationship. It's these two things that will make you stay with the person ultimately. The initial attraction will wear off, and when it does, these two factors will come into play. Of cos the other things come in such as trust, communication, honesty, dependency, intimacy, passion and compatibility. But for now, I'm just happy to experience the two factors above.

What comes next is whether I want to proceed further and trust this feeling, or let go now to prevent myself from being hurt if it doesn't work out. But knowing a person, who once told me, “I know how much hurt love can bring, but I'm willing to risk that, if I can experience loving you”.