The following entry was written for Mommybloggers.com by Mamacita of Scheiss Weekly

What is love. Golly, there’s nothing like an easy question to begin with.

Love is all around. All you need is love. Wouldn’t you agree, baby you and me, we’ve got a groovy kind of love. When it’s love you give, then in love you live. I give her all my love, that’s all I do. Can you feel the love tonight. I can’t help falling in love with you. This crazy little thing called love. Have I told you lately that I love you. How sweet it is to be loved by you.

Emotions are more easily summed up in a song. However, true love doesn’t always have to be complicated. It can be a very simple thing. In fact, it usually is.

True love is when someone reaches out and touches your wrist with one finger, and when you look up, he smiles.

True love is when someone brings you a mixing bowl of cereal and four doughnuts, each with a large bite out of them, in bed. Only someone who truly loved you would have checked each of those doughnuts to make sure they were good enough for you.

True love is when all the wastebaskets are overflowing and someone bags it all up, sets it outside, and replaces the trash bags.

True love is when someone offers you the last slice of Kraft cheese, and you say ‘no thank you, YOU can have it,’ and they smile because they wanted it badly all the time, yet they offered it to you first.

True love is when someone feeds the cat before you even get up. This makes even the cat love someone.

True love is saying you’re sorry when you mess up, Ryan O’Neal notwithstanding.

True love is laughing together over a fiasco instead of screaming.

True love is leaving the big umbrella for someone else, even though you’re leaving first and it’s POURING.

True love is making sure the car’s gas tank is full when you know someone has to go somewhere the next day.

True love is being willing to hug and kiss someone even when they’re covered with sand and mud and dead bird feathers and suspicious smelly brown stains and orange popsicle.

True love is scooping someone’s vomit off the floor with your hands.

True love is getting up to pack lunches even on your one morning to sleep in.

True love is offering someone the last banana.

True love is keeping your temper, even when nobody in the world would blame you for tearing up the turf.

Songs say it well, I’ve tried to say it, too. But this is the best.

1 Corinthians 13
1) If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2) If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3) If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

4) Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5) It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6) Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7) It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

8) Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9) For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10) but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. 11) When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. 12) Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13) And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

I think sometimes that it is in trying to make love complicated, that we lose its essence. Really, what love is, is putting the other person first, and being happy to do it.

This should, of course, be reciprocal. One-sided sacrifice isn’t true love, it’s dependency.

True love? I give to you and you give to me, love, forevermore.

Try to remember the hillbilly version of this: “S’long as I’ve got a biscuit, you’ve got half.”

And these apply to all of our true loves, old and young, large and small, smelly and cologned, offspring and spouse and mother and father and sister and brother and grandmother and grandfather and aunt and uncle and cousin and niece and nephew and so on and so on, world without end, amen.