For some reason I feel we’ve told ourselves that when we meet ‘the right’ person, they’ll fall into us so gently, so beautifully. That when we learn who we’re meant to be with everything will fall into place, like puzzle pieces finding their matches, like simplicity.
But I'm starting to wonder if real love is actually complicated. Messy. Having to make decisions, love with action, be transparent with your thoughts and emotions, and continue to learn who someone is...and how that someone can fit into the chaos of our lives.
It isn’t just two hands intertwined, or two bodies coming together in lust. It isn’t all being with someone who makes you laugh, or smiling as you go on dates, or kissing. It isn’t just moments that you remember, spots on a timeline in your life and it isn’t the person whom you feel the most comfortable around. Love isn’t even finding your ‘home.’
It’s pushing, day after day, to keep that ‘home’ feeling over time and through obstacles. It’s conflicting and confusing and a whole lot of change as you both grow, together and separate. It's a HUGE challenge. It’s meeting someone who pushes you to be greater and bigger than you were before. It’s finding someone who you see fighting battles with, and for.
Love is imagining another person’s arm around your shoulders as you grow old. It’s seeing traveling, and parties and weddings and anniversaries with them by your side. It’s family and children, sprinkled around you. It’s the thought of ‘forever,’ as hard as that is to actually visualize. But the challenges that come with these things—the messiness, the confusion, the fear, the failure, the faults you will both carry forward and learn to battle in a relationship with one another. It is a choice, a decision, an action. A movement towards another, despite what stands in your way or tries to break you apart.
I think it means accepting another person in the strongest way possible. It means supporting them in anything and everything, even when you may not agree on the situation. It means not looking for something better or seeing what’s out there.
It means screaming at the top of your lungs sometimes. Caring so damn much about that other person that you can’t help but become furious when your relationship is called into question. It means fighting to get it back.
It means always being your organic self and never shifting to fit another person’s standard. Maybe it means waiting for the stars to align.
Sometimes love means disappointment. Broken hearts and red teary eyes. It means taking a shot on someone and being let down...learning the hard way that you can’t make someone love you.
Love, I believe once it finds you, is worth every fleeting moment of highs and lows. Although it may fade, it never gives up on you. Love that leaves isn't lost; it will find you again someday, perhaps when you least expect it or maybe when you really want it to. Love doesn’t play by anyone else’s rules.
Love means letting yourself go. Giving in.
Love means taking chances. Its taken me a long time to ponder all of this through and wonder if when people ask 'Oh wow, how do you two stay together for so long, whats your secret,' to a couple thats been together 50 years and they answer 'Its a choice we make every day, to stay,' that perhaps this thing called love isn't actually as challenging as some of us may think it is to experience. We just need to start seeing differently and challenging our own selves more... with one that we think is worth it. 💖
