Love is, coming home

I have seen your dark nights & your brightest days and I will be here forever, waiting on your dusk - Atticus
Photo by Rudy & Marta

I wanted to write something small on our universal day of love. Some might argue that we don't need a day - that it's a commercial, Hallmark holiday (okay cynics, you got me there but hear me out).

In times like these, sometimes it's important to have a reason to bring us back. To remind us of a universal force greater than us. I think if anything the last year has taught us, is the concept of coming home, and finding comfort in our own versions of home. Which to me is the very feeling that I have found love to be.

You know what coming home means - that sigh of relief when you pull up after a long day of work, or a long Zoom meeting, a heavy family gathering or an hour in traffic. That ease of throwing your bags down, kicking off your shoes and turning the kettle on. That, is what love feels like to me. Especially after a lifetime of getting it so, so wrong.

For a long time, I thought that love was supposed to mean, romance 24/7, being with your partner or spouse 24/7, wanting the same things, and staring lovingly into each other's eyes in blissful romanticism reading each other poetry. You could say I am the quintessential, hopeless romantic.

Until, I came home. And now I see that love is giving each other space to grow, but growing together. It is listening to each other and not judging. It is saying how you feel without expecting the other person to mind read because they should just "know". It is not comparing. It is keeping your private moments it for you both. It is being okay with you both being silent sometimes. It is not taking someone else's difficult day personally. Love is putting the phone down. Love is recognizing when the other needs a few minutes to breathe. It is feeling safe to be vulnerable. It is knowing each other's love language (after a long while of taking the time to figure out what it is).

Love is accepting each other's quirks, like my penchant for playing jenga with the dishes or his.. ( okay real talk I actually had to stop right here as I literally could not think of ONE flaw in my husband -_- but maybe, I have accepted all that he is and I genuinely wouldn't change a damn thing)

Love evolves with each season of life. When it was just my husband and I, sure we did the dancing and the love eyes and the poetry. But after we got married, had a child and a dog, love became less champagne dinners and more making sure Eggsy and Nathaniel have eaten, rushing home to the other because we just heard a juicy piece of gossip about the neighbors we literally have never met, putting aside differences with in laws for the sake of family togetherness, giving up our bed so that us and the child and the dog can fit, and dropping off our son to his first day of school and both having to take the day off so we can cry together.

Marriage can be messy, and uncertain. Especially when you really don't want to get it wrong a second time. You want to keep trying, you want to keep romance alive, you want to be so flirty and just suddenly starting waltzing in the kitchen or go out on romantic dates. But also sometimes, you're just so..so tired. Love lives within the mundane tasks during our day to day. The perfect cup of tea made, or letting them sleep a few minutes more in the morning by taking the dog out instead.

(Love is also lamenting how easy life was before the child and the dog but knowing you'd never trade it for the world.)

The beautiful thing about true love, is you don't have to try. Love isn't only what we think romance is supposed to be. It has many forms, languages and gestures from someone we hold dear - maybe not necessarily a partner or spouse but at the end of the day, you should still have that same universal feeling. Just like coming home after a long day, you can leave all of your weight at the door, and collapse.

It's nice to be home.