Find someone who makes you feel happy and excited, even when everything is boring. Someone who brings you a sense of pure joy, contentment, and peace when you’re around them, long after the addictive infatuation stage of your relationship is over.

Find someone you can’t wait to come home to at night, or to meet up with for dinner, or to willingly hop in a car with for a twelve-hour road trip. Find someone you feel you could talk endlessly with, even though you feel just as comfortable together in a trusted, peaceful, happy silence.

Find someone who can make you laugh and who also knows when you need to be serious. Find someone who will push you to do the things that scare you, even if the thing that scares you is as seemingly simple as opening up to another human being. Find the person who challenges you not because they’re trying to change you, but because they know you’re not going after what you truly want. Find the person who loves you as you are and yet makes you want to be so much better than the person you are today.

Find the person who introduces you to parts of the world you wouldn’t otherwise have discovered. It can be as literal as hopping on a plane and journeying to a country you would never have dared to explore. But it can also mean being with someone who shows you how different the world can be just ten minutes away from where you live. Find someone who reminds you that there is so much that exists outside of you and your bubble, that there are so many people with stories that have yet to be heard, that there are so many ways you can find meaning in your life outside of the things that have brought you no luck thus far.

Find someone who makes you want to choose to love them. Sometimes we’re conditioned to think that it should be easy, that our hearts will do all the work, that loving them will be simple because aren’t we just so lucky to have found it?! But really, love is hard. Love is really, really hard. It is frustrating, it is a leap into the unknown, it comes with the chance that you will leave with your heartbroken. It takes work, it takes difficult choices, it takes the knowledge that sometimes you’re going to have to be unselfish. Our guts can clue us in, certainly, to whether or not a person is right for us. But at the end of the day, love is not something that happens to us. It is something we choose. You fall in love with someone because they catch your eye, they fascinate you, they lighten your world, they show you new ways to live. But you stay in love with someone because you choose to – you choose to make the difficult choice, you choose to put the happiness of you as a partnership above the happiness of you as an individual, you choose to give up your pride. Your heart can feel it, can ignite it. But it is up to you to choose it, to make it last.

Find the person you want to be unselfish for. Find the person you want to write a life with. Find the person you want to continue to choose, long after your heart has let you take the reins.