I remember the night I met him. That first night, I could almost see the sparks flying around us like little invisible stars floating imperceptibly through the loose strands of our flyaway hair. We talked for hours and hours. I looked in his eyes and I knew it would be love.

I was shit scared.

Real love eclipses all other relationships. Some have described it as seeing in colour for the first time, when everything else before it had been black and white.

It baffles me when my friends tell me that they are feeling “OK” about a guy or when they are hopelessly in love but the guy is unsure about the state of the relationship.

Maybe they’re just scared, like I was. Maybe they had been hurt before.

Or maybe it wasn’t love.

Love shouldn’t be “OK,” or “kinda,” or “I think so,” or “good enough for now,” and if it is, we should ask ourselves if that’s the kind of love we deserve. True love should grip you by the heart and threaten never to let you go. It should be all-consuming and forever (at least for now).

Why on Earth should love be a grey area in your heart and in your mind? Why should we bolster someone else’s ego by staying with them when they don’t love us and it seems as if they never will? For me, the grey areas in my love life always faded out to black.

I remember having relationships that were “OK,” and I stayed for months and months, well after its expiry date. I remember conjuring love from imagined glances and whispered half-truths. I was seeing the best in someone who would never truly love me the way I wanted. But wishing something was real didn’t make it real, and inevitably my heart always got hurt because the other person didn’t know how they felt, or they knew, but didn’t have the balls to come out and tell me.

There will always be stories of unrequited love; that is the nature of love. But I wished that I had known to throw away those “ok” loves a little earlier and save myself the heartache.

On the flip side, why would we want to be with someone that we are feeling lukewarm about? Life is short. Why do we want to spend time in a relationship that is only a half-love?

I remember the first time I took an overnight bag to his house. I was only going to stay the night. I don’t pack light, so, there I was, looking like I was about ready to move in. I was so scared that I almost turned around and went right back home. Because I knew what it meant. I knew that for months or years after that, our souls would be hopelessly intertwined, and my heart would be pulled into a sparkling, all-consuming ocean, from which it would probably never emerge.

Nevertheless, I took the plunge and never looked back. And I’ve never once regretted it.