What I Learned About Love, I Learned From My Parents

Love is a strange and a beautiful thing. Indeed.
Growing up, I always thought I knew what love really meant. As a little girl, I was fascinated by love — by the meaning of love, by the idea of love, and by the depiction of love. I grew up with quite a few ideals of love in the age of princesses and fairy tales. The love that I had in mind were the kinds of love that I heard about famous people, the ones I read in typical fairy tales and stories, the ones I always see on TV, the ones I seemingly feel on movies – the love which seemed to have the grandest gestures and is eloquently shown.

Yet, throughout those years of growing as a child while forming views of love, little did I know that I have already been witnessing a love that’s ever-evolving, a love that’s continuously growing stronger. A love in its raw form – the love of the very persons who raised me, my parents. I guess I’m fortunate enough to be one of the beholders of love in its truest sense because I have seen and felt it right in front of me.

They say that parents are the first teachers in life and that home is the first school of any child, I guess it’s true. I’ve always thought that the most valuable lessons in life, love, and almost everything were learned within the confinements of our home.

My parents never directly told us what love really is, how we should love, and even how it would feel to be loved, but, somehow, I learned about what love is and what it’s not. They are always leading by example, like they always do. Through the daily patterns of their love, from the biggest gestures to the littlest ones, I have known, seen, and felt love.

While I have always admired the kind of love that my parents have for each other, I have also seen how hard love can be. There will always be hardships and bad times – arguments, disagreements, disappointments, frustrations, regrets, sickness, and even loss. Those are realities of life and love. Those are inevitable realities. But, because my parents believed in each other, being faced with such realities meant living up and staying true to the words they uttered at the altar many years ago. I know they never once tried to look back and second-guess the decision of spending the rest of their lives with each other.

At the end of the day, they know in their hearts that they would always pick each other. They would always find ways to make things work, to make ‘love’ work.

Always.
Again and again.
Over and over.

Because my parents believe that love, no matter how hard and complicated it could get, could still be beautiful and conquering. Because of them, I’ve come to realize that you just got to be a firm believer of both the magnificence of love and the difficulty of it; the beauty and strangeness of it. You know it won’t always go the way you’ve always imagined it to be and won’t always be a bed of roses, but what matters is that you still acknowledge and embrace the imperfections and difficulties. And somehow, believe that with love, through love, and because of love… everything would always work.
No matter what happens.