This Is Why I Love You (And Always Will)

We’ve been together for one year now. That’s 1/25th of our lives spent together. A tiny fraction in a whole that I hope will continue to grow until we’ve been together longer than we’ve been apart, and that tiny fraction comes to one day define these crazy lives and the joy we’ve shared from spending them together.

We’ve been together for one year now and I love you so much.

I love you because you’re as beautiful as you are modest, as independent as you are kind, and as stern as you are hilarious. You’re as responsible as you are reckless and as brilliant as you are insane. You are all the ecstatic extremes of life’s pleasure bound safely within balance and moderation, a benevolent aura of magnetic tranquility.

I love you because you are a creature of the earth, rooted firmly in the soil, unsheltered from sunshine and the elements.

I love the luminescence of your cashmere skin glowing with health and energy, your tiny hands and your curvy hips, and the torrent of hair that shoots wildly from your little head.

I love you because you are calm and in your presence I feel calm too, reminded by the slow rise of your chest that to be living and breathing is all that we need.

I love that you wear a little makeup and a big smile.

I love you because you are weird – shamelessly, excessively weird.

I love your skeptical face when you scrunch your forehead and pout your lips, and how you turn into a teapot when you shriek with delight.

I love you because you listen with empathy and question without judgment.

I love those great big, spectacular eyes – like a cartoon animal – too cute to be cruel, too vivid to ignore, too flooded with intrigue to see clearly the world around you so that you must squint at the open air to make out blurs on the horizon.

I love you because you make me feel big when I hold you and you make me feel small when I treat you poorly.

I love your curiosity and thirst for experience, the way that your retinas flash emerald as you gaze uninhibited into the world before you.

I love you because my family and friends love you, and your family and friends love you.

I love that you love animals and wilderness, the oceans and the sky.

I love you because you make me a better person, not because I feel forced to but because it happens naturally when the best person I know is the person I spend time with the most.

The world is lucky to have you and so am I.

Happy anniversary, please don’t ever change.

This post originated on SelfActual.