thoughts about love

Valentine’s Day is coming up, and the shops are all filled with red and pink, hearts and roses, and entreaties to please to show your love by buying your sweetie something expensive and/or fattening. Valentine’s Day gifts are great (and I admit that I’ve been on the receiving end of some amazing ones), but it’s not really what love is all about.

Love is knowing that someone always has your back. Whatever life might throw at you, it’s bearable because you don’t have to shoulder it alone. Love is knowing that you both are willing to give whatever the other needs, whether it is as simple as a hug, or as huge as donating an organ, or giving up a lifelong dream.

Love is knowing that the one you care about will never ask you to give up a lifelong dream…no matter how disastrous the consequences.

Love is knowing that you can wake up from a nightmare in which your husband cheated on you, poke him awake at 3:00am, give him an earful for being such a bastard in your dream, and still be able to spoon with him and fall back asleep again. Yep, true story. :/

Love is not lashing out at each other. When the social networking startup that you both worked for loses funding and folds, and you spend the next five or six months in a total panic that you will lose the house and become destitute and homelesse, and yet you still don’t take it out on each other, that is love…or deep friendship, which is sometimes very much the same thing. I couldn’t have stayed sane during that period without his strength and balance to my craziness.

Love is staying in and watching testosterone-laced action flicks. Or chick flicks, either way. Yeah, action films aren’t my favourite…but sitting cuddled on the couch and eating popcorn is pretty damned sweet.

Love is being totally familiar with his body and everything that he does…and a decade on, still wanting him. And he’s kind enough to want me too.

Forget the hearts and roses…waking up next to the one you love every morning is the best thing in the world.