Love

In the beginning, love feels effortless.

You don’t have to try it just flows. You talk for hours, laugh without thinking, hold hands like the world is quieter when you do.

But the real work of love begins after that.

When life gets busy.

When comfort becomes routine.

When the parts of you that long for safety start showing up right beside the parts that fear being seen.

Keeping love isn’t about holding on tightly.

It’s about staying awake inside it.

It’s about noticing the small moments, the shifting moods, the quiet ways you and your partner change over time.

Because love isn’t static.

You don’t just love the person you met, you keep learning to love who they’re becoming.

And sometimes that also means learning to love who you’re becoming in the process.

There will be days when love feels like warmth, easy, familiar, grounding.

And there will be days when love feels like work like you’re both trying to understand languages that once came naturally.

That’s not failure.

That’s growth.

Love matures in the way you handle the quiet disappointments, the small misunderstandings, the pauses where you could choose distance but instead choose to lean in.

Keeping love doesn’t mean losing yourself to it.

Curiosity helps here - not the kind that makes you overextend, but the kind that keeps you present.

Curiosity that sounds like,

“What’s happening for me right now?”

“What might they be feeling beneath what they’re saying?”

“What does this moment really need space, softness, or honesty?”

That’s the kind of curiosity that keeps love alive.

It doesn’t mean tolerating hurt or walking over your boundaries it means staying in connection with yourself while being in connection with another.

Love, in the long run, isn’t made of fireworks.

It’s made of small daily choices

to listen instead of react,

to repair instead of withdraw,

to see instead of assume.

You keep love not by holding on, but by returning to it over and over again.

Even when it’s messy. Even when it’s quiet.

Because love doesn’t need to be perfect to last.

It just needs two people who are willing to keep showing up honestly, curiously, and consciously.

And maybe that’s what keeping love really means.

Not keeping it frozen in the way it began,

but allowing it to keep becoming just like you are.