To the love of my life

I don’t care about forever. I want you for as long as I’m meant to have you. I will love you every moment I’m able to because I’ll never pretend I have forever to do so.

You won’t always come first, but that doesn’t mean you’re not the most important person in my life. Real love isn’t about dropping everything in pursuit of one another, it’s about wanting to pay the bills and keep food on the table and save for the future and maintain your sanity so you can be wholly yourself. You don’t deserve less than that.

I want us to make the conscious choice to love each other. You teach me how to love you and I will teach you how to love me. That’s not a one-conversation-and-done kind of thing. That’s a conscious, daily effort. It’s tiny and it’s huge. It’s talking and showing and teaching through even the simplest daily tasks. The choice, of course, is being aware enough to allow yourself to be told and shown and taught.

I will not always look the way I look now. I will not always be taut and young and soft and pretty – and neither will you. I want to have kids and eat good food. I want someone who won’t look at me after my third delivery when I’m plump and swollen and say, “You’re so skinny, what are you talking about?” I want someone who will say, “You’re plump and swollen and who gives a shit? Your body does more than just look good. It holds the person I love.”

Communication is sexy. Talking things out isn’t just what it takes to be healthy, it’s how you fall in love with someone completely. It’s how you keep growing parallel to one another through the years. It’s verbal and it’s not. It’s sexual and physical and hinted and directly stated. Everything in life is one grand communicative gesture, and the goal is to get to the point of responding to the things that go unsaid.

I really hope we can do dumb stuff like lay in bed for an entire Sunday and order in and ignore everybody else.

We don’t go to bed, walk out, leave for a trip or go home angry. You don’t know when someone won’t wake up or be able to walk back in or come back from a trip or return to make amends over something stupid. Do not forget the impermanence of all this. It keeps you present and centered and just a little more rational. (It places what matters into a very different context.)

You can tell whether or not somebody loves you by two things: the way they glance at you when you’re talking and they think you’re distracted by your own thoughts and the way they touch you in a non-sexual way. Never underestimate the tiny gestures. Never over-estimate your ability to convince somebody that you love them when you don’t. Never rely solely on stating that you love me, it’s meaningless until you wouldn’t need to say it for me to still know.