Love does not mean never having to say you’re sorry. Quite the opposite. Love is apologizing when you’ve hurt your partner. Because everyone will hurt their partner.
Love is the best thing in the world, and the worst. Because you have encased a part of yourself in someone else. Someone with a fragile human body and imperfect human emotions.
Love is every part of speech, but especially a verb.
The feeling of love is not always a choice but the action of love is.
Love is knowing the other person is always on your team, even when you’re playing like shit.
Love is laughing at the same jokes over and over because it makes them feel good and strokes their ego a little.
Love is unspoken but it also must be spoken.
Love is asking for what you want even if you think the other person is supposed to know.
Love is sharing every high and low with them. They’re the first person you want to tell when you have great news and the first person you want to hug when it’s just been the worst day.
Love requires intimacy. Intimacy isn’t sex. Intimacy is trust, and vulnerability, and feeling safe with the other person. Not just trust that they will do what they say or won’t share your secrets, but trust that you can tell them the most secret parts of yourself and they will accept it, accept you.
Love is knowing what the other person is thinking because of a brief twitch of the eye or lip, imperceptible to most, but speaking volumes to you.
Love is taking care of your person when they’re sick, even if being in close proximity might also make you sick.
Love is taking off work to meet your person at a vet visit because you know they will be anxious. The cat is a furry asshole, but he’s your furry asshole.
Love is putting lotion on your person’s legs and wrapping them in compression garments before you go to bed, even though you’re tired and you’ve had a long day.
Love is going to a 16-week religion class every Monday night for 3 hours because it’s important to your person and your future in-laws.
Love is planning a getaway because you know it will never get done if you don’t just make the reservations already.
Love is reassuring your anxious person every day, a thousand times, how much you love them, that you are never tired of them, that you find them attractive and smart and funny, and that you are a team.
Love is bragging about them because you’re genuinely proud of their large and small accomplishments.
Love is staying with your husband as he takes his last breath because you don’t want him to be alone, even though you know it means being haunted by that image for the rest of your life.
Love is not easy and it is not painless. Love will hurt you. It may nearly destroy you. And it’s worth it because nothing else matters.
Now that I am part of the grief and widow community on social media, I frequently see the sentiment that grief is love with nowhere to go. I’d suggest that death transforms love from air to water. Grief is struggling to stay afloat in an ocean of love. What once sustained your life is now slowly killing you unless you can find a way to live in the sea. The ocean will never go away, and neither will your love, so you can either drown, build a raft, or become a mermaid.
This is the best description of grief that I have ever read. I'm glad you're smart enough to understand, talented enough to articulate it, artistic enough to sharpen it into an arrow that pierces our hearts, brave enough to bother, and wise enough to need these: (drops a pile of symbolic logs and fish-tail moisturizing lotion, new and improved formula).