What is love?

Love is a funny thing. You expect it to be easy. You expect it to be a world of roses and laughs and perfect moments that you find in movies. You expect him to always say the right thing, and always know exactly how you feel or exactly how to react to it. You expect him to calm you down when you’re yelling or to chase you when you run away. You expect so much that you feel entirely and utterly defeated when something doesn’t exactly match up with all your plans. But that’s the thing. Love isn’t a plan, it doesn’t have a certain beginning and it certainly has no end or visible finish line to those deeply in it.

Love happens; it is so incredibly messy. People around you cant comprehend why you do the things you do, or why you fight so hard for something that seems to cause so much pain, because simply, the cant see. They cants see the invisible ring of insanity that surrounds you when you’re in love. Its inconvenient and painful and devastating at times, but we cant live without it. What you don’t learn is how hard love is. How much work it takes. How much of ourselves we have to put into it. How it isn’t worth it until we are complete and utter idiots about it.

Love isn’t him calming you down when you yell. It’s him yelling, just as loud, just as hard, right back at you, right in your face to wake you up and to keep you grounded. It isn’t him bringing you roses everyday or cute things that make your relationship appear more presentable.

Its after a long fight, that drains the life and bones right out of you both, and yet him showing up at your door the next morning anyway. Its not him saying all the right things or knowing exactly how to handle you. So no, it’s not him caressing your hair and telling you everything is going to be alright. Its him standing there, admitting he’s just as scared as you are. You have to remember that with love, you’re not the only one involved. You’ve unknowingly put your life, your heart into the palms of another persons hands and said, “here. Do what you will. Mash it into mince meat. Or forget I ever handed it to you. As long as you have it.”

It makes us crazy. It makes reality invisible and it erases all the lines that we shouldn’t cross. Because love isn’t about fencing ourselves in; feeling safe, feeling sure about the future. It’s about scaring the shit out of every nerve in our body, but pushing forward anyway. Because ll the fighting and all the tears and all the uncertainty is worth it. And it’s a hell of a lot better, than being 100% happy without someone to show us that there is a world of a difference between feeling “happy” and feeling whole.

In sum, it’s one word: HIM