Love is a funny thing. You expect it to be easy. You expect it to be a world of roses and laughs and perfect moments that you only find in movies. You expect her to always say the right thing, and to always know exactly how you feel, or exactly how to react to it. You expect her to calm you down when you’re yelling or to chase you when you run away.

You expect so much that you feel entirely, and utterly defeated when something doesn’t exactly match up to all your plans. But that’s the thing. Love isn’t a plan. It doesn’t have a certain beginning and it certainly has no end, or a visible finish line to those deeply in it.

Love happens; it is so incredibly messy. People around you can’t comprehend why you do the things you do, or why you fight so hard for something that seems to cause you so much pain. Because simply, they can’t see. They can’t see the invisible ring of insanity that surrounds you when you’re in love. It’s inconvenient and painful and devastating at times, but we can’t live without it.

What you don’t learn is how hard love is. How much work it takes. How much of ourselves we have to put into it. How it isn’t worth it until we are complete and utter idiots about it.

Love isn’t her calming you down when you yell. It’s her yelling, just as loud, just as hard, right back at you, right in your face to wake you up and to keep you grounded. It isn’t her or him bringing you roses everyday or cute things that make your relationship appear more presentable. It’s right after a long fight, that drains the life and bones right out of both of you, and yet her or him showing up at your door the next morning anyway. It’s not her saying all the right things or knowing exactly how to handle you. So no, it’s not her caressing your hair and telling you everything is going to be okay. It’s her standing there, admitting she’s just as scared as you are.

You have to remember that with love, you’re not the only one involved. You’ve unknowingly put your life, your heart into the palm of another’s hands and saying, here. Do what you will. Mash it into a million pieces, mash it into meat. Or forget I ever handed it to you in the first place. Just as long as you have it.

It makes reality invisible and it erases all the lines that we shouldn’t cross. Because love isn’t about fencing ourselves in; feeling safe, feeling sure about the future. It’s about scaring the shit out of every nerve in our body, but pushing forward anyway. Because all the fighting and all the tears and all the uncertainty is worth it. And it’s a hell of a lot better, than being 100% happy without someone to show us that there is a world of a difference between feeling ‘happy’ and feeling whole.

by: christinamariehollis.tumblr.com