She loves love. She doesn't remember when it became so important to her, like an obsession. She does recall never hearing her parents speak those three words to her first. She remembers the hug, but it seems it was always her that spoke them. For that reason, she thinks that is why she lays it on thick with her kids, telling them everyday. Multiple times. But to her, it's never overkill. For the past few years, she's become preoccupied with death, so that may be part of the reason. It could all be over in twenty years, in two weeks, in the next five minutes.
Love is complicated, joyous, devastating, heartbreaking, everything. She believes in love at first sight, because it has happened to her. She believes that you can love someone so intensely, that time and circumstance cannot change the powerful attraction that will never go away. She still grapples with the concept of forever love. She's not sure that that's possible. Life won't allow it. People change. Even though her parents have been together for over half a century, it may be just mutual respect and the sharing of memories that binds them. She thinks people stay together longer than they need to be, neither one happy, but neither one knowing how to leave their comfort zone.

She was a late bloomer when it came to love. She didn't have her first boyfriend until her last year of high school.  But she dumped him because he started getting serious and it scared her. Her virginity was taken one drunken night when she was 19 by someone she didn't know, who forced himself on her. Additionally, with the near molestation at 12, she wonders if this is the reason she feels a need to be sometimes dominated. At other times, she needs to be the aggressor. She feels at times, she can never get close enough, like pulling them into her, will be the only way. She can love with such completeness, that when it ends, it's death to her, and she spins down into depression so dark, it takes years to overcome it. She still has feelings of failure, sadness. Love seems elusive to her. Too many attempts at it, having it go all to shit.

There are people in her life that she would easily die for. Men that have entered her life, loved her, moved on, but remain locked securely in a corner of her heart, where they will always remain. Others that she had to let go to literally survive. These men are forever banished. Her children bring her a love like no other, so profound that looking at them takes her breath away. There's nothing above maternal love, nothing more gratifying., nothing bigger.
She loves love.