It’s a choice.
It’s a decision.
It’s a verb.
It’s a repetitive action. Every day, you wake up and decide to love the person you chose to spend your life with. When it’s real, love eventually becomes automatic. Loving the same person, after awhile, is instinctive. It fills the cracks.
But like? Liking someone is a completely different beast. Like gives you a completely different perspective of a person.
I want to like my love.
It may not make sense and it may sound a little crazy. (Probably because you haven’t experienced it yet.) But liking someone is way more powerful — more meaningful — than simply loving them. For example, you have to love your family. You have to love your kids. Although, there are periods where you may not like them very much. And because of that, you may deal with them in doses. You may withdraw altogether. When you don’t like someone that you love, your reaction to them and your light around them is just different. I never want to feel different around my love.
I want to be the only one who can make her blush when I call her beautiful. I want to tell her she’s beautiful and it not be code for “let’s f*ck”. I care to remember what makes her tick so that I don’t make her tick all of the time. I want to learn from her. I want to try new things because she inspires me. I want to know that when I’m feeling lost, she can take the wheel and get us back on track. I want to miss her when she’s gone. But I don’t want to feel anxious when she’s not around. I want her to follow her dreams. Even if our paths take us in different directions for a period, I want to always feel like home when it’s just the two of us.
Every time I see her, it’ll be like the first time all over again. I want us to get lost in time and space as often as possible. I want to be able to tell her anything because she doesn’t keep record. I want her to be my teammate. I want to be her version of perfect. “Ride or die” isn’t just a cute phrase to say. We cover each other because we know each others’ needs.
Can you do all of this under the definition of love? Of course you can! Like is the seed upon which love is built. Without that seed, love is easily regarded as fleeting. It has a growth max. That’s why people can go through nasty break-ups and divorces. It’s why people are quick to give up. If you don’t like who you love, it’s easy to think they can be replaced. Somehow, we forgot the root of where the choice to love came from.
I never want to forget how much I like my love. I never want that part of me to get lost in the responsibility of love. I don’t want the routine of loving her to over-shadow how dope of a person she was before she met me. As the love grows, I want my smitten, crush-like feeling on her to grow as well. Because hanging onto that ensures that love will never fade.
