What exactly do students at Community think love is and how do they express it? Love can be a complex and deeply personal emotion, yet often it becomes a central theme in the lives of teenagers. Love can take many forms—ranging from romantic relationships to friendships and familial bonds. In our world today, social media and outside influences shape our perceptions, and the idea of love among people is constantly changing. By exploring individual perspectives, we can better understand how love is viewed by students in our school and the diverse ways they experience, express, connect and define love.
CHS sophomore, Iris Durrie, explains that love for her is really about caring for someone and having a deep connection with them without the feeling of judgement. “I think it’s about feeling safe to be vulnerable without being judged and being able to be your full, ultimate self around them,” Durrie said. “I just like to make people feel comfortable, make people feel happy, not insecure, anything. Just make people feel good about themselves. And that’s the best feeling ever. To just care about someone so much that they’re just super happy too.”
While many associate love with romantic relationships, it is also expressed in closer relationships such as family or friends. CHS freshman, Ripley Huffman, explains love as telling people not what they want to hear, but what they need to hear. “I think love is when you’re very happy or passionate about something, and then you are able to connect that with another person, and it’s just like true happiness,” Huffman says. “Telling people not necessarily what they want to hear, but what they need to hear for their own good. Being able to do that, that’s a big form of love for me.”
The ways students communicate love vary from gift-giving, to grounding loved ones when they need to be set straight. CHS sophomore, Jesse Shtein, says love is something you can feel for anything.
“I think it’s just like life,” Shtein said. “It’s like enjoying someone, like being with someone, enough so it’s just like a higher level of an emotion for someone”
Shtein says that there are a lot of different ways to express love for him, such as physical affection, gift giving, or just words of affirmation.
“There’s different love languages, but I think it’s like more than that,” Shtein said. “If you like something, and someone else likes something, you can even talk about it. I think that’s love, just like connecting with people”
Ultimately, CHS students are still navigating the complexities of love, and exploring what it means to them while learning how to balance their emotions with the challenges of growing up. Each individual has an idea of how they like to express it, which makes it all the more amazing.
