i think the thing about love for me, and this post is a bare bones of all the words i could pour into explaining how i feel about love, is that as a rigid concept grounded in romance with a 80/20 split to every other 'love,' it holds no value to me at all because i am aro. i do not experience love romantically, nor do i really experience it non-romantically for that matter, not in a normative way at the very least. and yet i am full of so much care, and affection, and adoration, and glee whenever i am presented with certain people or topics of things that really, the only shorthand way to explain such an emotion is love. a version of love thats more like love* without any extra explanation in the footer for the asterisk, its love because what else could i call it that conveys how strongly i feel? i love the smell of fresh food and i love my fwb and i love my mutuals and i love my pet cat and all of things i love in equal amounts because i dont really love, not the way a normal person would love, i just use love as a convenient shorthand for how i feel. and thats what words are, aren't they? convenient shorthands, or the opposite, they're easy to warp and easy to bend. love is a frail concept anyway, i deny its connotations and i use the term so freely it makes people seethe. i dont know man. its love. its a word in a dictionary. use it and twist it and bend it to your will. no one can stop you.