Here Is How I’m Not Going To Love You

I’m not going to love you strategically. I won’t wait three hours to text you back or drop subtle hints for your affection. I’m not going to leave your greatest questions unanswered or say “maybe” when I really mean “no.” I won’t love you with deception, deceit or deliberation. I won’t ask you to play for my attention or force you to guess at my desires.

I’m not going to love you with consistency. I get lost in a world of my own sometimes; passions and projects and new adventures sucking me in. There will be times when you are not my top priority. There will be days when I need to be alone. I will not be the lover who devotes myself to you unabashedly and makes caring for you their whole world. I will get lost in a world of my own making sometimes but I will always end up coming back to you. I will always want to know where you’ve been, too.

I’m not going to love you with reluctance. I won’t stay if I really want to go and I won’t hold on just because I’m too afraid to let go. I won’t love you because it seems right even though it feels wrong, because you deserve so much more than that and so do I. I will love you not just out of necessity or duty, but out of a genuine sense of commitment. Out of a real appreciation for all that you are and all that I could become beside you.

I’m not going to love you dishonestly. I won’t preach you affections that aren’t straight from the heart, I won’t fill up our world with words I’m using solely to win you over. I won’t claim that I don’t have a history; that you are the first person I’ve loved or that I’m certain in ways that I’m not. I’ll love you honestly and fully and completely but not always in a way that will be easy for either of us. Not always in a way that will be simple to swallow.

I’m not going to love you with a weak will. I won’t back down from the bridges that we’re both afraid to cross or from the issues that need to be hashed out. I won’t bail at the first sign of trouble, I won’t swerve at every bump in the road. I will love you through the worst of times the longest of hours, the darkest of days when neither of us can find a way to see the light. I will love you even when I do not like you, on the days when the world is tumbling around us. I will hold on with a strength and conviction that is mustered from the bottom of my soul.

Because the thing about learning to love you is that I have no intention of doing it halfway. I will not falter or fail you or give up when it’s time to go hard. I am going to love you fully and completely; fiercely and non apologetically; wholly and yet absolutely simply.

Because the truth about genuine affection is that it does not need to verse all that it is and all it’s not.

It roars when the world riles up against it. It murmurs when it’s time to go home. And when it comes to you and I, I’m always going to trust that we will understand the difference.

I am not going to love you in a way that is defined by anyone’s standards but our own.

Because I don’t need to. Because I don’t want to.

Because the love we have is already a force to be reckoned with.