Real Love

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From How Real People Make Shades of Real Love

Don’t buy what anybody else is selling: Everyone always marr[ies] wrong.

Because what’s wrong in the world is always us.

None of us ever know whom we marry. And falling in love never made anyone angels… it’s only made it clear how far we’ve fallen.

And you have been smacked by my flaws, slack-jawed by my flaws, and it ain’t been Hallmark pretty. It’s been holy. You’d think after a lifetime of Sunday sermons I would have known that this is what real love always does—- goes to hell and back for each other. Thank you.

Thank you for never mentioning the burnt soup, the piles of unmatched socks, the ring around the bathtub — thank you for keeping the covenant of the eyes and the vow that rings round us. The real romantics know that stretchmarks are beauty marks, and that different shaped women fit into the different shapes of men souls, and that real romance is really sacrifice.

Real Love truthfully sees the flaws — and still really loves fully.

Love isn’t blind — Love is the only way of really seeing. You have loved me real.

The success of loving is in how we change because we kept on loving –regardless of any thing else changing.

You have lived and bore the weight of it —- I am far worse than I ever dreamed. And yet you have loved me beyond what I could ever dream.