This Is What Love Feels Like When It’s With The Right Person

It’s not all rose petals and kisses that make your foot pop. It’s not all hallelujah choruses and adoring gazes that never end. It’s not at all like society has told us what real love looks like.

It’s so much better than that.

Because the ‘fairytale’ of love is not real. It’s just a fantasy. A storybook. A daydream. A hollywood concept. A commercialized version of what love is. It’s not the real deal.

When you fall in love with the right person, it’s not going to be cheesy. A soundtrack isn’t going to play when you have your first kiss. There’s not going to be ending credits that read ‘and then they lived happily ever after’.

Because you see, real love is not a fairytale.

It’s a mountain climb. It’s surviving through a blizzard. It’s growing apart and together and finding your way back to one another. It’s an uphill battle that tests your strength and tests your love. It’s a thunderstorm that floods again and again. It’s arguments that make you doubt yourself and him or her. It’s needing space and needing time spent alone. It’s tears and lightening strikes and rain that never stops. It’s fucking hard. It’s fucking painful. It’s fucking difficult.

And it if it’s not difficult for you, than it’s not real love.

Because when you find your ‘forever’ person, it will still take work and compromise and time. It does’t matter how compatible you are. It doesn’t matter how strong your bond is with one another. 

It’s still going to be an uphill climb.

But the thing about love is that while you are hiking up that mountain together and struggling through the hard and bad times, there will also be laughs along the way. There’s going to be flowers that sprout from the floods that you have swam in. You are going to look at that person even through the battlefields, and you’re going to stay.

Because real love is fighting through the bad stuff. It’s fighting through the ugly and the blackouts. It’s battling the toughest monsters and demons. Together.

When you find the right person, no matter how terrible the arguments get or how stressful your lives, you will always find your way back to them. It might take days or weeks for you to face them. It may take months to get back to being able to smile and laugh with them. But when it’s the right person, you will always always tough it out. You will always know that the arguments and the storms are worth it.

Because you know what it’s like to fight the battles and win them side by side.

When you fall in love with the right person, you will grow together and apart and you will strengthen individually and with one another as a couple. You will be able to be your own person as they will too. You will be able to get through the dark nights, and wake up the next day stronger. Stronger in your love and in your bond and in your hearts.

When you’re finally with the right person, no battle will ever be too much. No fight will ever too hard. Because when you’re finally falling in love with the right person, you two will do whatever it takes to fall in love over and over again with one another.

And you will always win the fights. Together. And you will always know that the dark times, will make the good times that much more powerful and beautiful. And you will know that you would never want to fight with anyone else. For the rest of your life.  

Get your copy of Lauren Jarvis-Gibson’s debut poetry collection Paper Hearts here.