Love is the biggest risk you can ever take. You literally put your life, your heart, in someone else’s hands and give them the chance to either make or break you.

Your whole world revolves around the one you love. Their pain is your pain. Their joy is your joy. The more your love grows for that person, the more you realise you would do anything for their happiness. Even if it means the end of your own, you’d do anything for them. They become the last thing you think about every night without fail, and the very first thing that crosses your mind before you even open your eyes in the morning.

Your sleep is filled with endless dreams about them, and the only reason you ever leave those dreams is so that you can see their face again in reality. Being in love makes you feel whole because, quite literally, you have found the other half of your heart and soul. Having found that other half, everything feels different.

Pain doesn’t hurt quite as much, because no matter how bad things get you can always go back to the thought that you love someone and someone loves you back. And it’s amazing. Happiness is enhanced tenfold because you have found the greatest concentration of joy that anyone can ever feel.

And then you start realising that the tears you cry aren’t from sadness, but from unimaginable bliss. Love is the craziest act of insanity anyone can ever experience. Being in love is both the most insane and most unbearably amazing feeling that you will ever experience in your life.

Sadly, true love is only for a lucky few. And not the kind of “lucky” people we see in magazines or on television, the ones that can buy any kind of happiness that we can ever imagine. True love can’t be bought. You can’t pay someone to love you unconditionally. The luckiest people in the world can range from the poorest souls on earth to the richest men in the universe. It’s the one thing that absolutely everyone can find, and no one can take away from them.

The one thing that everyone looks for and few find, with no one having a greater advantage of finding it than someone else, is unconditional love. When you love someone, no matter what they do or what they’ve done, you don’t care. You understand them better than anyone else. You know the person they truly are, which makes you the most forgiving person they can ever find. Because they’re not just someone you want, they’re someone you need. They’re not just someone in your life, they are your life. They’re not just someone you like, they’re someone you love.

If I had to choose the best part of being in love, I’d have to say, it’s being home fifteen minutes late because I didn’t want to leave your arms. Or maybe it’s lying beneath the sky watching time pass as the sun disappears and reappears. Or could it be getting lost in your eyes for an eternity where time stops and there’s no one else alive but us?

Everything about being in love is the best part, because love is the best part. It’s the only part that matters. It’s being able to count on one another to never leave, to trust each other with the most intimate of secrets, to be honest with one another, and to be able to share life’s hardest burdens with a smile.

I promise you all of these things. Love is the biggest risk anyone can ever take, and I’m willing to take that risk with you. Forever and always. I love you Thabisile Madlala.

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Tell us: Have you ever been in love? How did it feel?