“Do you believe in love?”
“Love? Oh, yes. Above all things, I believe in love.”

This conversation between Toulouse-Lautrec and Christian in Moulin Rouge says it all. You can believe in any number of gods (or whatever you wish to call them), you can believe in Santa, you can believe your favourite item at Crabtree & Evelyn will one day go on sale. But underneath it all, do you believe in love?
I truly believe that even if I were a crack-addicted prostitute who wore garbage bags and had no teeth, I would still have love. I believe that in the most desperate of situations, someone teetering on the edge of survival could be saved by love. I believe that if I was asked to move to the most despicable corner on the other side of the world, but for love, then that should be a reasonable enough cause to explain myself.
I believe that love should always be given a fighting chance. Don’t know if you should agree to go on the date? Well, I’ve told my single girlfriends, if your heart says yes, you should always go for it. Should you give up on a relationship before it starts because you’ve been hurt before? As the old adage goes, “It is better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all.”
I write this today as a response to some people (unmentioned) who think that being a thirtysomething allows them the right to tell me, a self-proclaimed twentysomething that I am naïve, I don’t really know what it’s like. I told someone that a man who said such wonderfully nice things and who surprised her with his honesty was a lead worth following up on. I was excited for her. Then it was, “A difference of 20something and 30something... just because a man says complimentary things, it does not make him automatically nice. Even Ted Bundy was described as "charming". Maybe you have a decade on me, but age ain’t nothing but a number: I believe in love, and it’ll take a catastrophic, universal force to shake me, not some cynical thirtysomething scorned by lovers past.
To naysayers and cynics, to those bitten by former loves and those who never risked it to love, I say this: We aren’t here to live by a “One hurt, twice shy” regime. I believe in love. Ya, I’ve seen guys hurt friends of mine. I’ve seen my girls invest their hearts and souls in what turned out to be a lost cause. But I would much rather be a “naïve twentysomething” who believes in love, who sometimes gets hurt in the process (“Love is a battlefield”, yeah I quoted 80s pop), than a cynical thirtysomething who could pass up a Prince Charming for safety’s sake.