I’m sure most of you who are reading this column are completely aware of that.

It’s a time when you’re on the journey to finding and discovering who you are personally and professionally.

Some of us choose to take part in this journey with a significant other.

While we are going through this crazy time, we are sharing a part of ourselves with someone else in the very same position.

So, what is love?

Not the fairy tale kind of love, more like modern love; college love.

What is it becoming?

Is it lust?

Is it romance and passion? Like an episode of “Sex and the City,” my girlfriends and I try to answer this rhetorical question and what we have come to find is that the world may never know.

In the current cyber age we are all living in, the relationship game has become one with no rules. Hookups are a Facebook click away, and friendship can morph into a sexual encounter and then back to friendship in a single day.

We also have access to communication 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Epic poetry and love letters might no longer be the case. Casual is sexy. Caring too much is unsettling.

Maybe you don’t want to open yourself up too much, and you certainly don’t want anything casual to be serious. At least until you become a grown up and get married.

But, maybe that’s what it is all about.

You’re single and free.

You don’t want anything to hold you back.

We are part of a generation of go-getters, which I think is amazing and wonderful.

Despite our generation’s appreciation for love and affection, are we waiting for it to one day take over once we are “grown ups” and have our life in order?

We might thoroughly enjoy stilted flirty text messages and overnight friendships, but deep down, we crave the warm embrace of all-consuming love.

Or, at least the hopeless romantic in me does.

Now, I’ve had my own fair share of break-ups and make-ups.

I’ve been head over heels in love, lost in lust and numbed by indifference.

For me personally, I don’t think this new modern type of love rests entirely on society’s shoulders.

I think it also has a lot to do with growing from our own personal experiences.

During my freshman year, I was madly in lust and in a long-distance relationship.

After flying across the country to visit this boy, I ended the trip single and stuck at the airport with nothing but a dead cellphone and some curly fries from Arby’s.

As traumatic as this experience was, I honestly can look back on it and be grateful.

I know it sounds odd, and a little bit crazy, to be grateful but I honestly am.

After a few trips to Dairy Queen and a box of tissues later, I made the decision to not feel sorry for myself.

As much as I really wanted to, I had decided that I absolutely couldn’t and wouldn’t. Throughout the experience, I really discovered who I was.

I grew mentally and emotionally, and for that, I am forever grateful for the heartbreak that came with it.

I won’t lie, although I was over the anguish of my previous relationship, it took me a while to completely open my heart again.

For a while, I thought I was going to fall victim to the “college love” so many I knew took part in.

Not because that was a bad thing at all, but deep inside I still wanted an unconditional love, whether it showed up on my doorstep the next day or 10 years down the road.

Life and love gets crazy sometimes.

Although we might live in a stage of life where love might be scorned as an illusion, I still have hope. Every experience, even the bad ones, can allow for growth from within.