5 Ways You’ll Know You’ve Found A Love That Feels Like Home

Some loves shake you up. You start doubting yourself, lose your footing, and feel yourself slip under the weight of your wanting. Is this what love feels like? You wonder, or is this longing in a lover’s clothes? Suddenly, there will come a love that comes like pulling off your shoes after a long day. It’s love that doesn’t make you shrink or swell. It simply fits. Like home. Here are five tell-tale signs of a love that will make you feel right at home.

You breathe a sigh of relief when you’re around them.

There’s a certain sense of relief that only comes when you’re with the right person. It’s not the incoherent passion that makes you stumble and sway, it’s the stillness that washes over you in the knowledge that you can finally put your guarded walls down. They make you soft. Your body relaxes before your mind does, shoulders slump, breath deepens, the armour you didn’t even realize you’d been carrying melts off you in an instant. You don’t have to act. You don’t have to try. You don’t have to prove yourself. You just are, and that is enough.

Their weirdness is your weirdness.

It’s the little things. How they always misplace their keys even with a Tile, how they roar with laughter at jokes that no one else understands, how they absentmindedly hum to themselves as they stir pasta over the stove. You might have gotten the ick from these things with someone else. With them, these aspects of them don’t annoy you, they attract you to them. They are exactly the same with your quirks and you’ve stopped looking for perfect, because with them, you’ve found something so much better, and that’s an understanding type of love.

The bad stuff seems easier with them around.

Home is not a shelter from the storm that is life. When real love is involved, why yes, life will still hit you. Yet, you’ll have a place to weather it. Life will have its loss and fear and hardship, but with them, it is bearable. When you face these things alongside one another, the intolerable becomes easier to tolerate. The edges dull. You find yourself muttering as long as you have each other, I can take this. And you can. Real love isn’t just someone to hold in the calm, it is the silent reassurance that you won’t have to face it alone.

You’re equally invested in your happiness.

There is reciprocity. There’s no uni-lateral putting in of effort. There’s no tiresome running-on-repeat of the weight of the world all being on your shoulders. Real love is mutual. It’s in the day to day. It’s in the replied to texts. The plans that aren’t broken. The equal measure of care that you give and receive. You never have to question where you stand or how you’re valued. You know because you can see it in the work put in by both parties. When this commitment is in equal measure, you arrive at a place of contentment that allows you to grow closer.

You can imagine your forever with them, and it doesn’t terrify you.

Eternity suddenly doesn’t feel like a cage, it feels like a celebration. You don’t imagine yourself settling down because you have to, but because you want to. When you imagine the unfolding of an entire lifetime, the mediocre Tuesdays, the unexpected heartbreaks, the seasons of change and regeneration, it all feels soft around the edges with them beside you. Home isn’t always a place. Sometimes, it’s a person. Sometimes, it’s the hand you’ll still want to hold 20, 30 years down the line, the familiar face you’ll still look for in a crowded room, the person who makes you feel like “always” isn’t something to fear, but something to yearn for.