The Nature of Love

A young girl recently asked me what love is. She'd never felt it and wanted to know what it felt like so that she would know it when she came across it.

The question then is how do you define love, classify it, describe it? Is it an emotion? If one checks the dictionary they find that there really is no concrete definition, only over two dozen examples.
So I thought for a moment and replied:

Love does not exist.

When we look at happiness we have simple contentment, cheerful, joyous or even exultant. When one is sad one can merely be down or they can be distressed, depressed or even morose. The all cases of emotion, be it jealousy, sadness, happiness, anger, the definition remains the same; only the intensity differs.

Why are there so many different types of love? Familial love, Erotic Love, Platonic Love, the Love of Fellowship, the Love of Country... How is it that love can change over time, not just in intensity but in form?

I tell you, love does not exist. It is a construct. If admiration was a ribbon; if erotic desire was a ribbon; if familiarity and security are ribbons, then the braiding of these ribbons into one whole is love. Love is the bond created by these emotions. Further, bonds of common interest also form strong ribbons. What's more admiration can be upon many levels, one can admire a person's body, their mind, their personality.

In this way love can change over time. If a love is based entirely on erotic desire, a single ribbon, the cutting of this ribbon severs the tie. As a couple gets older they often find erotic desire and raw admiration fades but these "ribbons" though thinner are compensated by the ribbon of familiarity and the bond remains as strong as ever it was.

The more ribbons one has, the stronger they are, the stronger the love between the pair. A love consisting of mutual respect, admiration, erotic desire, familiarity, and common interests is a mighty thing indeed.

Unfortunately, as with all things, there are also equally unhealthy ribbons and it is up to us to cut them and strengthen other ribbons to weave a stronger bond.

Thus, I told her, "love does not exist". It is a name, a word; we apply to already existing bonds we choose to acknowledge as being "love".

--and yet... Though as logical as what I said was I cannot embrace it, cannot fully believe it. Or, if that is love, I have to wonder what it is that I have felt.

I have felt a sensation, one greater then I have ever known. I felt as if I had spent my entire life deaf, listening to music through my skin only to suddenly find my ears opened to its siren song. I've experienced a single kiss so encompassing that my own flesh could not contain my essence and I wandered outside of thought and mind and heard the sound of the cosmos as one hears the ghost sound of the sea in a conch shell.

So then my question, if love is the bond that I described, what was it that I felt then?