Jenny, I appreciated your write here. Love, I think, is informed by your experience with it. When a parent says they love you and treat you a certain way you form association. If they treated your poorly you develop a dissonance between what you know rationally and what you feel. You have no real framework for a love of any kind so it becomes nebulous at best. Maybe even meaningless. That’s really what I meant in that piece.

Love feels like a far off nebulous concoction. Had no meaning to me. Loyalty has meaning. Commitment. Respect. Love does not. For me. And that is not to say it is not real or that it’s not important. Just to say that I have no language for interpreting its meaning.