What Love Isn’t

As a boy I thought love was an over-sweet combination of adoration and lust, something fueled by grand displays of a heart moved into action by the purest of all human emotion. I thought love was television romance; a perpetual, unwavering infatuation that consumed every waking minute. I thought love was defining and engrossing and debilitating and irresistible.

But I’ve grown up (or like to think I have) and realized that love of the manufactured sort – the kind boxed and wrapped and sold at $19.99 – is impossible to maintain. It’s not that you can’t show a part of your love with gifts and romantic gestures. It’s that love isn’t artificial. It can’t be built and shipped and cleverly displayed on store shelves.

Love isn’t a bouquet of long stemmed roses.

Love is a concerned wife sitting for hours in a hospital waiting room, doing her best to put on a brave face while her husband lies behind several sets of double doors marked, “Medical Staff Only.”

Love isn’t generic Jared® cushion cut diamond ring #349512.

Love is a woman who tolerates large buckets of bubbling brew in various corners of her otherwise impeccably decorated house because she knows that it makes you happy.

Love isn’t a hastily scribbled love note inside a hastily picked out greeting card.

Love is a woman who goes out of her way to share a commute, just so you have an extra half hour together in a life of increasing responsibility and decreasing free time.

Love isn’t one fated day in the middle of February.

Love is waking up every morning to beautiful brown eyes that remind you that the sickness and the stress and the depression and the pain are all temporary. Love is those extra few seconds after a normal hug would have ended; the time where she holds you to just reassure you that she’s there and will always be. Love is being with a person who inspires and motivates you, who transforms you into the person you have always wanted to be. Love is reciprocation.

Love isn’t being forced to prove something, or anything.

Love is knowing it’s already there.

I love you Tiffany. Thanks for putting up with my insanity, and actually believing there’s something behind it.