You Need Help: What Is Love?

Here at Autostraddle, we love to help. In fact as you may know, we have an entire column titled YOU NEED HELP that runs every Tuesday, where you write us questions and we answer them! We answer lots of questions about lots of different subjects: family, gender, work, friendship, sex, life… but the questions we get more frequently than any other are about love. We get questions from people after breakups wondering if they were ever in love, people who wonder if they’re in love with their BFF or just having regular friend emotions, people who are perpetually single and wonder what love even is and if they never date will they be doomed to not find it, people starting relationships wondering when to say “I love you” and how to know if it’s a true feeling, and people who are just confused and lost and overwhelmed and wondering: what is love?

Recently we received one version of this question in our YOU NEED HELP submission box that spurred a lot of internal conversation, and as editor of the column I decided that it would be useful to run a roundtable sharing multiple perspectives on our most popular query: what is love? So I present to you, the day after Valentine’s Day, some of our thoughts about love. Thank you, as always, for trusting us with your hearts when you write in to YOU NEED HELP. We love you. — Vanessa, Community Editor

PS: You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.