I want you to know how important love is. REAL love, not the feeling people so easily mistake as love. Attraction, infatuation; none of that stuff is love. Not true love. True love is how I love him. A kind of love, before I met him, that I didn’t think I would ever find. The kind of love that can make it through anything, as long as you have each other. It’s the kind of love where, no matter if it hurts you, makes you sad, or pisses you off, you do whatever you can to make the other person happy. The kind of love where if they’re upset, so are you. If they’re crying, if they’re hurting, for whatever reason, you hurt too. The kind of love where you can’t stand the other person being in pain. The kind of love where no matter how down you’re feeling, no matter how depressed, no matter what’s wrong in your life, a few simple words from this person can make everything better; they are the only one who knows exactly what to say. Of course problems don’t just fix themselves, or disappear; all of the problems are there, but this person makes them bearable. This person makes it all tolerable; they make you strong enough to deal with it. The strength you have, you gather from them; you draw, from them, the guts you need to face the rest of the world, and anything it can throw at you. This kind of love fills you up so much, with so many different feelings, and emotions, that most of the time you can’t even describe it to someone. I think that’s how that phrase got so popular: “you just know.” I heard that my whole life: “Well, how do you know they’re the only one for you, that you’ll never want anyone else?” “I don’t know… I just know.” Because this kind of love, it’s so hard to explain; the feelings are there, the emotions are there, the memories are there, yet the words; they come, and then go just as quickly. They’re fleeting; they tease you, make you think you’ve almost got it, and then they disappear back into the nothingness from whence they came. THIS is what I want to explain to you, so you know. So that you know what to hold out for; don’t you dare settle for anyone if it isn’t this kind of love. The only kind of love really; the only one that really matters. The only one that can get you through the days when nothing else can. The only thing that can comfort you, the only thing that can give you solace, encouragement, when nothing else in the world even comes close. I came so close to doing just that, settling, before I met him. It’s a tricky thing, sometimes, love; the trickiest thing in the world, I believe, and I know quite a few people would agree. Sometimes, in certain situations, you can even trick yourself into believing you have this love, believing that a person is the one you should be with. But let me tell you, if there are doubts, as I had in every relationship prior to him, it isn’t real. There isn’t a single shade of gray in this area; if there are doubts, it’s not right. There aren’t any doubts in true love; there certainly aren’t any doubts about your soul mate. That one person, out of the entire world, that was made for you, and you for them; there cant be any doubts there. There is nowhere for doubt to exist in that person’s eyes, in their love, in their heart. Nor is there any way doubt can exist in your own heart once you’ve found this person. Doubt cannot survive in this type of love. Insecurities? Jealousy? Your deepest, darkest secrets? All of that can be overcome. Other loves can’t promise that. But real love, true love; that kind of love can overcome absolutely anything. And that’s not an exaggeration. It’s not some Hollywood-born romance that’s always out of reach, as I used to believe. It’s not so far-fetched, not so un-realistic. It’s not as distant as you might believe; as I used to believe. In our relationship, we have overcome things, things that, once upon a time ago, I might have ran from. Now don’t get me wrong; there are always rough patches, no matter where you go. There may be a con of this kind of love; a con to some people, but not to me. This love; it can make you insane. Arguments, even little ones, are intensified to the point of no return at times; it can, and quite easily, for lack of better phrasing, make you crazy. There’s so much passion, so much heat, that fights can be worse than any others you’ve ever had; yelling, screaming, punching walls, throwing things… you can even say some heartbreaking things that will forever be in the other person’s memory, and vice versa. Don’t let that discourage you, no matter how miserable it might feel at times. Don’t let that give you doubts; it’s not worth it. THAT is the kind of passion that comes along with it, that’s the kind of heightened sense of everything, good or bad, that comes with the territory. When it’s good, it’s incredible. When it’s bad, it can be dreadful. But only for a while. It can always be fixed; that’s what this kind of love means. It means you cherishing this person, every part of them, from head to toe; being so impossibly in love that, sometimes, everything feels so out of order, so screwed up, so beyond any type of krazy glue, or duct tape, or band-aids imaginable; it may feel, at times, beyond any sort of fix. But that’s another thing about this kind of love; it doesn’t use krazy glue, or duct tape, or band-aids to fix its wounds. The old wounds fuse into the new skin, the skin that grew from the love itself; they fuse, and they bond, until you can’t even tell where the old wounds used to be. They intertwine, and lock together, so that everything is stronger, better; unbreakable. I’m not saying once you find this, this amazing phenomenon that leaves you breathless, that life will be a fairytale; just that it WILL have a happy ending.