Choosing Love
When I entered my first serious relationship several years ago, I kept expecting my luck to run out at every bump. Every Valentine’s Day, every New Year’s, every anniversary, worry would sit there at the back of my mind, regardless of how perfect things felt in that moment. Where would we be one year from now? Would this one be our last? Tendrils of doubt would surface with every conversation that faded to silence, every day that I felt like I just needed some space.
No relationship is all ups, and it was during a particularly difficult period of bickering about 20 months in when I found myself facing what I thought was the end. We were both exhausted, had barely had time to see each other, and were still adjusting to the drastic change into university. Yet, despite recognizing the obstacles, neither of us could make the final cut and end things.
Until that moment, I had never thought of love as being a choice. Certainly, falling in love often is not. However, our relationship did not end that night. Instead, we made a promise to not break up unless our feelings for each other changed. It sounded ridiculously self-explanatory, and it was, but it wasn’t always easy to remember those priorities in the midst of busy schedules, short tempers, and personal change.
That night, I realized for the first time that the cards were entirely in our hands. Love would never run out and fail us; it had always come down our choice. Gradually, I began to realize that I no longer felt the same looming worry when I peered a year or two into the future. If we wanted to be together then, we would be. If we didn’t, I would know that it was a deliberate, informed choice.
As Mandy Len Catron — author of the NYT Modern Love piece on 36 Questions to Fall in Love — wrote in one of her blog posts:
You choose. You choose over and over again. Because there is no right choice. There is no right person. There is simply someone you love, someone you have chosen, whom you will have to choose again. But there is no guarantee that you will always choose him, that he will choose you.
That uncertainty has always made love terrifying, but love is never just lost between two people. It is neglected, forgotten, or abandoned. True love, in my experience, has not been something I’ve found. It has been something we’ve made. It has been two very flawed people who are imperfect together, working towards building a perfection to share. I’ve always described my relationship as both very hard and very easy, which I still think is simultaneously true. It has been hard because we have both had to choose, constantly, consciously. It has been easy because all we’ve had to do was choose.