“You can’t still love me”, she said. I’m not enough. I’m not loveable. I’m no-one. I don’t deserve to be loved. I’m not worth enough. I’m not pretty or clever enough. There are so many others that are so much more than me. Why would you choose me? I don’t understand. After all I’ve said and done. I’m not enough.

But all she wanted was to know there was someone out there who would die for her, someone who would search for her across the corners of the world just to be near her. Someone who would fight for her with everything he had and pursue her with all his strength. That she had been noticed and was precious, a priority. To be loved.

It sounds so ridiculous when it’s written down like that, but it’s a person’s greatest struggle – to accept you’re worthy of being loved.

Contrary to prevailing majority public opinion, I’m not perfect. Far from it. In fact my list of imperfections is really quite frightening. I had to re-learn a lot of what love is very painfully because the view I was given involuntarily (and still hold in a lot of ways) was corrupt. We all suffer similar as the role models we have aren’t perfect either. But some are so dysfunctional and maladjusted they do massive damage to the innocent. The way we treat the people we love helps them to define themselves and what they believe they are worth. If we are treated badly, we automatically believe and agree it is because we somehow deserve it.

Love is a fascinating concept. It seems so easy to define, but when you actually try to define it, it’s absolutely impossible. Psychiatrists spend decades trying to pin it down but they can’t. It’s so simple yet so incredibly complex; something to be felt with the heart rather than looked up In a dictionary.

We learn what love is and what’s its like from the way we’ve been loved by other people. If we have been loved truly by someone, we learn to love truly. If we have been hurt, abused, bullied, starved or neglected by those who were supposed to love us, the idea of love we form in our minds is corrupted. In fact, we become scared of love, intimacy and all it entails. Or more importantly, we become scared of the consequences of loving someone or being intimate with them.

Being besotted is not love; it’s need. Being obsessed with one person isn’t love; it’s need. Love takes time and doesn’t get more or less, bigger or smaller, or shallower and deeper. Love grows naturally and doesn’t disappear at the drop of a hat. It never dies and it lasts forever – it is timeless and unstoppable. It forgives everything and wipes the slate clean against all reason and evidence of blatant complicity. Love is a gentle warmth and a glow that surrounds you and is adsorbed by everyone else around. It is an act and a verb, not a feeling or a beautiful phrase.

Love means it doesn’t matter what you look like or what you are wearing, as what you see is the most beautiful thing in the world – so beautiful you can barely stand to look at it. So beautiful you could die. It is a ravenous insatiable hunger for someone else and never being able to be close enough or inside them deep enough. It is knowing that whatever you are, or have done, what they are or have done, love will only let you see the beauty and light inside. It is the hazy comfort and intuition that you are valued, are not alone in a very big and nasty world, and really matter to someone. It turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, inspires rebirth as a new person and washes away the sins of the past as a guardian that they will not be perpetrated again in the future.

Love is watching a movie together holding hands in the quiet of your space you share. It’s sleeping a tent together and forever checking the weather wherever they are to see if they can see the stars like you did on that night. It’s the frantic rush of crossing oceans at a moment’s notice to be at their bedside if anything happened to them. It s searching and fighting whatever the cost, for however long it takes.

Love challenges you and makes you grow. Its truth and purity can be measured in its motive and its consequences - the will to exend yourself to nurture the spiritual development of another. When you feel loved and safe, everything inside you’ve been holding back bubbles to the surface and Pandora’s box is unleashed. Love is a wrench that opens the heart but the natural and positive healing force that pushes out all the bad things inside, but it can release absolute panic in those who don’t recognise it or suspect it to be something else. We run from it, confuse it and waste it, but it’s more valuable than any precious metal or natural jewel stone. But what’s more miraculous is that although it is more precious than anything else in the world, it’s free.

Love is the gentlest touch but the most overwhelming and tempestuous ocean wave; it makes us kill, turns the weakest men into the most violent warriors and makes the most reasonable people in the world take insanely dangerous risks. Something so pure and gentle carries a greater force than a nuclear bomb, interpersonally speaking. Love breaks and melts the coldest of hearts, and heals the deepest wounds; indeed, it is the only thing that can. It dissolves fear, answers evil with it authority, conquers doubt and cuts directly through darkness . No-one can resist it or fight it, as it infects you automatically with the hypnotic luminescence it paints across everything every day. It knows no reason.

It is the time-stopping daydream of that person when even just the sunshine landing on your face reminds you of their touch and the way their hair falls across their face. When you can’t feel the rain because you’re thinking of them, with them all around you wherever you go because they have an irreplaceable and incomparable home in your heart.

Love changes colours so they are more vital and vibrant; it makes you notice things you didn’t before. Your eyes spark and crystallise as it shines brighter than any enveloping shroud of black that threatens to rake through the path in front of you so it would be impossible to walk on. It is a raging fire that burns with a gentle tide; a whisper in the air that turns into a scream when it’s lost. It makes hours in the moment pass in seconds but can make a minute feel like a lifetime and 10 years feel like yesterday. It is too big to understand, and too wide to know. Unbreakable but vulnerable. Something that keeps us afloat but is easily drowned.

I know very little of love, and I don’t claim to understand it. But I know how it makes me feel and have been lucky enough to feel it in its fullness and most glorious wonder, sometimes to the extremes, and others in its more subtle shades. I’ve got it wrong and missed the mark, misplaced it, abused it and got it completely mixed up with other things. As emotionally violent as I am, I am a love criminal and a love vandal, and although I’m not proud of it, I don’t regret it for a second. Love is an extraordinary and beautiful thing that fascinates and adsorbs me. On my gravestone it will read that I loved as passionately as I lived so I could, simply for the sake of it, because it was the only thing worth living and dying for.

I love you because you are you. Just you. You don’t need to be any more or even be enough, as you already are. I love you for your faults more than I do for the perfections you advertise to hide the things you are ashamed of. You make me feel like a powerful hero and the greatest man alive. Your beauty inspires me, captivates me and floods me with explosive masculine rage. I would fight for you and suffer any pain. I would wage war across continents so I was covered in blood every day for decades if it meant you were there at the end of it to reach out for me and tend my wounds.

So I love you because of how you make me feel, what you do to me, the man you make me, and who you are. That love bonds me to you through my DNA so I become more than one person, but like I’m missing a part of my own body, mind and soul in the empty times because I am not complete without you.

It’s what I feel when you’re not there.