Jack Averty: You wanna know what love is? Well let me tell you all about it...

Their search has spanned arenas across the globe, and despite hundreds of million people having heard the group's pleas to finally know what love is, the band remain unfulfilled. I mean they must still be searching right? Why else would they still belt those words out at every concert they can drag themselves to? Why else is radio station Heart blasting it out every day? I'm certain money plays absolutely no part in it and Foreigner are still aching to know what love is.

Thankfully they can ache no more as I'm on hand, just like I was last time to tell you all to get on with being adults (something that is going really well for me as my strop in Tesco over a lack of spinach will prove).

Firstly, I would like to apologise to Mr Gramm and the rest of Foreigner; I'm not showing them what love is as the song requests. Hopefully, my words penned at the last minute as I most definitely did not forget about this column will suffice. If not, I'd be more than happy to be flown to LA.

So here goes – love is an emotion that brings strong feelings of passion and a sense of protection to a loved one, for example, a family member, partner or close friend.

It's that feeling when your heart is bursting with pride, feeling you cannot live without them and always putting them before yourself. That feeling of elation when you see them happy and that feeling deep in the pit of your stomach when you see them sad.

Rubbish description, isn't it? All of us, except Foreigner, know what love is but we can't find the words to describe it.

Even when we can find the words, people continue to argue as they hold differing opinions on what love is.

However, what I'm sure we can all agree on is that the word is banded about far too often.

Now I don't mean that in the sense of telling a loved one how you feel.

If anything, I'm sure we'd all admit we don't tell those special people closest to us how much we love them often enough.

I mean it in the sense of how often the word is used when actually love is not the emotion being felt at all.

A quick search of social media will bring up thousands of examples.

'Loved Trainspotting 2', 'love my new recipe for lasagne', 'love that new Stormzy song'.

Now I've got no doubt these people really did enjoy the new Trainspotting film, or that their lasagne was on point, or that they thought the new Stormzy song about how we're all too big for our boots is 'the best song of 2017'.

The point is they enjoyed them, or really enjoyed them, or thought they were brilliant or whatever. It's irrelevant what adjective is used, the fact is, these things didn't evoke the feeling of love.

Our lasagne friend is not sat at their dinner table tucking in with their heart bursting out of their chest thinking they would do anything to make the pasta dish happy. I reckon they didn't even feel a sense of numbness and emptiness when it was finished, and I'm willing to wager my annual salary (it's not a lot so don't get excited) that the meal was long forgotten about as the lid of the Ben & Jerry's (other ice creams are available but they're just not as nice) was flipped open.

With Valentine's Day coming up I expect to see the lasagne being treated like royalty. I'm talking roses, chocolates, seafood dinner, special card featuring a funny selfie of food on a plate and every other Valentine's Day cliché you want to throw in.

No? Well then perhaps, believe it or not, our anonymous Twitter lasagne lover did not actually 'love' it after all.

Sorry to get all serious in this next bit and I promise I'll revert back to jokes involving a certain 80s rock band shortly, but we all saw Steve Morgan's tears after Rachael Heyhoe Flint's funeral. That's love right there. There stood a man who was overcome with grief mourning the loss of 'one of the most special people to ever walk this planet', mourning the loss of someone he loved.

You didn't feel that way about Trainspotting 2, about Stormzy or about lasagne. It's insulting to say you did.

There aren't different forms of love, you can't say 'well I did love it but obviously not as much as that', love is love.

As I said earlier, deep down all of us, with the exception of Foreigner God bless them, know what the feeling is. We know when we're actually feeling it and when we're not.

Given that we've all broken our New Year's resolutions by now let's set a new one – to stop using the word love when we're not feeling it. No more loving food, films, clothes or anything like that.

If you save your love for those that really are special to you then maybe Foreigner's 32-year wait for an answer can come to an end. Until then, the band's search will go on and the royalties will keep rolling in.

Hopefully however, when Lou and the lads gather round to read the Star this weekend, as has become their ritual, they will have learnt what love isn't.