It’s lust and the heat of wanting, wanting, wanting. It’s wanting to hold someone’s hand, even when your hand is hot, a little sweaty. It’s smiling at your person with wide eyes and an open heart and seeing them smile back at you in the same way.
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It’s the electricity when your skin meets. It is butterflies in your stomach when you think about your person, when you see them, when you hold them. Love is recognizing the ways in which, for better and worse, someone has contributed to your life.īeing in love is wild, breathtaking, infuriating. Love is the constant you hold on to when you don’t particularly like the one you love. Sometimes it takes hard work but you are willing to put in that work. Sometimes, love feels like an obligation but it is one you are willing to fulfill. Loving someone is recognizing the role they play or have played in your life and honoring that presence. There are days when I hate love as much as I love it, when I just want to walk away, give up but still, something holds me there, to the center of my gravity. Some people never find the one, or there are several people for whom you have such feelings or you think you have found the one and they change or you change in ways you can no longer tolerate. I am all about the chase, seduction and woo, not just during the shimmering early days of a relationship but also years in when you’re thinking about the maddening ways your person behaves but still, isn’t today a good day to send them some sunflowers or bring them their favorite coffee?
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I must also warn you, I am a passionate, foolish romantic.
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You are overlooking the small joys and sorrows and frustrations of threading all the days that make up a lifetime of loving someone.Īsk 33 people about the difference between loving someone, being in love and soul mates, and you will get 33 different answers, so I will simply tell you what these things are to me. You would like a marriage to last a lifetime, but you are, perhaps, overlooking what it takes to love someone for a lifetime. You have to be in the relationship in the present, from one day to the next, and some of those days will be glorious, but some of them are going to be a complete disaster. It is so very important to know what you want from a relationship but you also have to create space for a relationship to develop without worrying about what the relationship will or won’t become.
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You have hopes, yes, and dreams, but you also have to get from one day to the next, getting to know a person, deciding to deepen the relationship and, sometimes, choosing to formalize a commitment. When you meet someone and start dating, you have no idea where things will lead. You worry about choosing wrong but are not considering that you might choose right for a lifetime or right for a moment. In your letter, you are very much focused on what could be rather than what is. I love the idea of love but I have lived and loved long enough to recognize that there is a difference between the idea of love and the reality of love. I am 44, in a complicated romantic situation, never been married. But when love is true, you embrace all the unknowns, regardless. You may never know if you have made the right choice. The truth about love is that it is often bewildering and unknowable. We are told from an early age that our true love is out there, waiting for us and so we yearn to find them, to know what it feels like to experience true love, to know you have made the right choice. We live in a culture that idealizes the idea of love, and the idea that there is one true person who will complete you, fulfill all your dreams and love you forever. Am I overthinking this totally or being too paranoid? Or do you really never know, because only time will tell? It’s scary to me because I would like my marriage to last a lifetime.
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I see couples that have been married 10, 15, 20 years who get divorced and seem to be completely fine with it. I love the idea of love and would very much like to spend the rest of my life with a man, but find myself having commitment issues because I am afraid of choosing wrong. I’m navigating dating life and need to fully understand the difference between loving someone, being in love and having a soul mate. I am a 43-year-old, single, never-been-married, educated mother of one and would like advice on love.