What Is Love?

It was the summer of 1985, I was a rising junior at Towson State University, and I was rebounding from a break up with my high school sweetheart. My friend Bryan decided that a road trip to Kings Dominion Theme Park in Richmond would be a good way to get my mind off of “the love of my life” and see the world in a different perspective. He was a roller coaster kind of friend, so he thought a couple of scream-filled drops from the then-named “Rebel Yell” would cure me of my heartbreak blues.

The problem was that I was afraid of heights and had a habit of passing out on roller coasters. So any kind of seeing life in a different way from Bryan’s perspective was not going to happen for me. 

That didn’t deter Bryan from encouraging me to take the road trip. He had just bought a beat-up CJ5 Jeep, and we headed south with the top down and the world screaming by us on 95. On the ride down, and throughout the day wandering through the park, we talked about everything but the nasty break up, and I was having a fantastic time. We decided to check out the live concert happening that night in the pavilion. For just $5 a ticket, what could possibly go wrong?

Little did we know it was superstar Howard Jones, who in the last two years had released two blockbuster albums with pop-synthy vibes that were pushing us deep into the post-disco era. 

At first, I was excited. I had my new camera, a Minolta X-570 that I bought to soothe the wounds of lost love, and I was caught up in the art of photographing a rock star and dodging Security who was trying to rip the camera from my grasp. 

But music has a way of pushing through our temporary amnesia of heartbreak, and when Howard started with his hit song, “What Is Love?” from the Human’s Lib album, I lowered the camera and leaned into the lyrics, pondering what my life would be like post-love. 

For years, we had that kind of relationship that was cute in high school and more serious in college. And as much as we had wished our love would evolve with our individual growth, just the opposite happened; by that summer, we both found ourselves wondering the meaning of love when everything we had believed in had dissolved into a bunch of what-ifs and what-nexts. 

Luckily, Howard was sensing that I needed a little pick up (obviously), and so he moved into a run of the first three tracks from his latest album, Dream Into Action: “Things Can Only Get Better,” “Life in One Day,” and “No One Is to Blame.”

I smiled, raised the camera, and continued to capture the life on the stage and all around me, holding on to the joy I was seeing through my own eyes.

Despite the heartache, the what-ifs and what-nexts, things will get better; I can focus on the beauty held in this day, and I can release the blame I held for myself and for her.

The late-night ride home was quite different from the early-morning drive to the park. Bryan could sense some healing within me, but we didn’t need to talk about it. There was no need. Love had been re-found, and that was all that mattered. 

As we head into a weekend where the focus is on love and the valentines in our lives, I go back to this moment in Richmond and hold on to the lessons I learned on that sweaty, summer night. 

Our lives are a roller coaster of breathtaking loves and losses. We find ourselves, at times, wrapped in the warmth of good friends, family, and those we love deeply; other times, we wonder if the rains will ever stop, if the pain will ever cease, if the warm embrace of the sun will ever return. 

Believe me, it will. 

It wasn’t something I could believe so many years ago, and there are moments even now when I wonder what love really is, and where it has gone. It’s so hard in that moment to believe anything but what surrounds you. 

This is why self-love matters so much. To have the understanding and the courage to reach deep within ourselves to do what is best for us in any particular moment or situation. 

And it’s not anything that anybody ever needs to know. We don’t need to go on to social media and announce to the world that we binge-watched 17 Hallmark movies for self-care, or that we made a brand new 90-minute playlist, turned off all phone notifications, and took a rambling drive along back roads with the windows down, screaming lyrics at the top of our lungs and banging out air drums like we were Phil Collins. 

We don’t need to tell the world anything. We just need to love and take care of ourselves when we know we need it the most. 

And when you feel that inner joy, that sense of self-love, allow yourself a beautiful smile that is between you and you. The world does not need to know that you took care of the most important person in your life today. It’s enough that you did it for yourself. 

So this Friday, on my way home from school, I’ll be blaring my Howard Jones, smiling, reminding myself not to live my life in one day, not to take life so seriously, but to play my flute, dance, and sing my song. I will take my newest camera, my Nikon D610, out for a photo shoot along the shores of Loch Raven. I will hum a tune from the 80s, and I will smile. The world may never know, but I will. 

For you, I wish you joy this weekend and that you find love within, and among, those near and far. Know that it isn’t so much asking, “What Is Love?” as much as it is knowing, simply, that “Love Is.”

All photos of Howard Jones taken by Rus VanWestervelt, circa ~1985.