The Beautiful Truth About How Real Love Evolves
At the age of 21, I thought I was in love with him.
This love was juvenile and filled with doubt and uneasiness. It was a lustful love, a physical attraction and inner desire to be wanted by one person only. This love was filled with nativity, I knew it was wrong but it was the first and I thought, it had to be the real deal.
A few years later, those gut feelings I ignored over and over again proved me right and helped me fall out of love with the idea of him. That is what it was, simply an idea of the man I knew he could be one day, or so I had hoped.
At the age of 23, I thought I was in love with him.
He was five years my senior, and loved me fiercely. He was willing to do anything to make me happy from miles away, but I was still too selfish. I didn’t want to compromise on my plans to help our relationship survive. He wanted a family, and I did not. He wanted to move countries to be with me and I did not want to be ‘burdened’ with assimilating him into my lifestyle, my friend group and a new city.
It was a short, whirlwind romance, but soon the candle burned out and the seriousness became unattractive and scary. I fell out of love with how much he loved me.
At the age of 26, I fell in love with him.
It started off as two friends joking about their inability to commit, to feel any inkling of love and validating one another’s selfish life decisions that had been keeping us single.
In my efforts to completely avoid any kind of love, it fell right into my lap. It evolved organically and unknowingly at first. Casual, fun and effortless conversation turned into
Our first date was when he picked me up at the airport to start a six week tour of Australia in a tiny home on wheels.
It was confusing. I didn’t feel butterflies, there was no sappy soundtrack in my head, our first kiss didn’t happen one of the fifty ways I had imagined it. It was slightly awkward, it was raw, it was real.
Love has evolved over the past years for me into something I never could’ve imagined.
Love is ultimate adoration.
It isn’t sappy.
It’s low-key.
It’s sitting on a couch side-by-side in track pants.
It’s finding comfort in silence.
It’s being 100% yourself, no matter how weird it may be and knowing the other person is doing the same.
It’s going out of your way to do something that may be inconvenient for you, so that the other person won’t be inconvenienced.
It’s hearing your laugh for the first time, that guttural laugh that takes you by surprise when you hear it. From then on, you hear this sound often because laughing (and I mean genuinely laughing) has become a daily occurrence.
It’s being vulnerable. Your smallest insecurities become irrelevant because they don’t care about your imperfections. Doesn’t mean that they don’t see them, they just don’t care.
It’s deciding the future together. Making plans and supporting each other in every endeavor.
It’s saying what’s on your mind because if it’s important to you, it’s important to them.
It’s acknowledging the things about them that could drive you nuts and choosing to focus on all of the things they do right.
Love isn’t butterflies and rainbows. It’s comfort, it’s safety and it’s security.
It’s different for everyone, at every stage of life. I chose not to settle for a love that was mediocre, and in turn, I found something so special.
I found a best friend whom I adore.