The concept of love is whole-heartedly the best thing to ever be created, but it has always been limited by humanity and their inability to be open-minded. Love is beautiful and can come in a platonic or romantic form. Love can be expressed towards animals, objects, people, and plants. But humans have stuffed the idea of love into a box, where it can only be present in certain instances. For example, people believe there should only be a certain set of animals that should be loved due to their appearance and behavior. Those same people are seen dismissing ideas of loving uncommon animals such as rats, spiders, or sting rays because of the way they have been negatively represented all over the world. Love can come in any form and should not be limited to what people believe it should be.

A huge problem that can tie in with this topic is the enormous increase of homophobia in the world today. LGBTQ+ people have always dealt with the corrupt ideals of close-minded individuals and how these individuals find their love “incorrect and immoral.” This is very stupid in my opinion, because it does not matter if someone is gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual or identifies with any another sexuality. Love is love and raising children to believe something other than that is or that love is only between a man and a woman is irresponsible and creates more unaccepting adults, who go on to contribute to more discrimination.

This discrimination appears in people not wanting LGBTQ+ representation in media. They believe their children will “turn gay” and limit their children to being open to their own thoughts. That argument is completely invalid because many homosexuals have heterosexual parents and have only had exposure to heterosexual relationships on media. Think about how stressful it can be to have important adults around you say that loving a certain way is wrong and that there is only one “correct” way of love. Many suicides have been a result of people being overwhelmed with not being able to be accepted into society, and being unable to express their true selves. People don’t acknowledge the negative connotation of homosexual relationships, especially within the male gender; they aren’t allowed to be sensitive and open. Males have been raised to be strong and “masculine” but everyone has the presence of masculinity and femininity, and expressing emotions or opening yourself up to being vulnerable isn’t “gay”. Being gay is not bad and certain actions shouldn’t define if you are gay or not.

So, we as a society need to grow and learn not to put love into a box and be understanding of new ideas. Love is supposed to be correlated with happiness, not sadness and distress. We all need to accept people for who they love and let them be happy, because it shouldn’t make you upset to see someone else is happy with themselves. Also, parents need to try their hardest to accept their children if their child comes out to them because it is a really scary thing to do and mustering up the courage is a brave feat. There might be hardships and struggles in trying to understand a person who has come out, but at least take the time to try.