Love as a Verb

While we were making dinner together on our first date, I confessed that I was nervous, in part because I knew that your ability to see me so clearly meant that you were capable of devastating me. Later on, we told each other that it was okay if we broke each other's hearts.

Have you ever given and received permission to ruin and be ruined? Maybe that's another way of asking if you have ever been in love, if you've ever handed over and been given the codes for mutually assured destruction. You told me that you'd write me a beautiful blog post if the worst happened, and then added that no, you'd write me one before that. I'm writing this because I want to beat you to it.

A few days after our first date, lying together in my bed and telling each other truths, I complimented your ability to notice, appreciate, and affirm me. You paused, said you were going to share something vulnerable, and then told me that you had a story that I hadn’t been loved thoroughly, and that you were going to get the new high score in loving me well.

There are few people that would have been able to notice that the way that I was complimenting them indicated that they were something new to me. There are even fewer people that would have been able to notice that and then have the guts to say it out loud to someone that they had only been seeing for three days. I wonder how much courage it took for you, and if you knew on some level that saying those words would only ever result in my being even more in awe of you.

I considered whether I'd ever been loved properly by those who I've dated in the past. I've certainly received heaps of sunshine and deep connection and love from partners, and enjoyed wonderful relationships that I still cherish. But there has always been something missing. I've never been with a person that has understood me sufficiently to love me as I'd like to be loved. There's always been a significant mismatch somewhere, whether it's been values, the places that made us feel the most at home, the ways that we most wanted to spend our days, or the communication styles that came most easily to us. That's not a critique of my previous partners; when you are different people that spend a lot of time existing in different worlds, it's hard to create an amazing one together.

But you and I seem to live in pretty similar ones. We like to help other people. We're intrigued by new things, and deeply okay enough to try them without being too held back. We're intensely emotional people that feel at home in many places, and we flirt with the boundary between weird as fuck and sufficiently good at emulating normality to exist happily in the regular world. We love easily and openly, and are comfortable in our skin. We're good at communicating with each other, and the world at large. We have lived different lives in foreign places very unlike the one we find ourselves in now. Barely two weeks after meeting each other, we're both comfortable saying things that seem way more intimate than "I love you".

After you told me that you were going to love me better than anyone has, I told you that I believed you, because I do, and that I think I will also love you more than you’ve ever been loved before. This is a small part of that. This is love as a verb.