The Islands’ Sounder asked readers to tell us what love means to them. Here are some of their answers:

Love is …

• Friendship that caught fire!

• Finding someone who loves you even when they know who you REALLY are.

• Enduring the storms and the sunshine together.

• It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.

• Hard. It’s broken and mended. Patchwork. It’s beat down and picked back up again. It’s forever a desert, … forever the sea. It’s forever. It belongs. It’s alone. It’s everyone and everything together. It’s set apart. Love is cold. Then it’s warm. It’s complete.

• Safety. You can be happy, angry, scared, vulnerable and occasionally unsavory. When you’re with someone who loves you, it’s okay, it’s safe, they will still love you.

• Messy. But wanting to be messy, like a 5-year-old in a mud hole.

• Something that can grow stronger with every beat of your heart, and sometimes it comes and goes so quickly that it changes you forever.

• My baby girl smiling at me.

• In the air, everywhere I look around.

• The promise of time.

• All we ever need.

• Having someone hold your hair back during those not so romantic moments when you’re sick.

• Waking up, wondering, “Who do I want to spend the day with?” and finding that person right next to you.

• It is patience.

• It is everything you never imagined it to be.