When I was younger, I always found it so strange that so many songs were about love, and so little else. Only later did I learn it was more shallow than it seemed, and so much deeper than just songs. Almost everyone has experienced or longed for the idea of love. Rarer, later, quieter, just not talked about, is the love that hurts, or the love that makes whole. We haven't the words for how to mourn the loss of someone who never even was. We have no clean way of expressing the joy of a bursting pride for someone else who defied all odds; we haven't even the expression for the sense relief when it's our own accomplishment. We call it validation, we scorn validation. And yet we long for the feeling, the arousal. We sing songs that call for love, when what we really need is to be heard in everything else, to be understood as we simply are."