To Love is To Learn

To love me is to be clairvoyant.

It’s tracing the lines on my palms and telling me what awaits. It’s resting a hand on my stomach and knowing what I’m hungry for. It’s lying on my chest and feeling the thud of my heart reverberate against the flesh of your cheek. It’s the lingering notes of creamy vanilla that trace your trail after we part. It’s written in the margins of the novels that inspired me to begin writing. It’s spoken in the dialogue of the films that informed my perception of love, loss, and the inbetween.

Loving is discovered in the willingness to learn. It’s inscribed in the textbooks each of us carry within. It’s to be studied, memorized, and mastered. I’ve encountered sleepless nights—hand sore and stiff from scribbling down instructions on how to best love them, eyes heavy as if sleep herself is closing them, thoughts scrambled from the countless chapters read—exhausted from my studies.

I want to impress, to please, to earn the validation that I’m unlike the girls who came before. In countless attempts to prove that I can earn love, I discover the one I’ve studied for didn’t yet crack open the book of me. For no other reason beyond the fact that they didn’t care to. I’ve prayed half-heartedly to a God that I don’t believe exists, granting him one last opportunity to prove that miracles are real. I’ve entered the cloudiest skies, blankets of grey adorned by charcoal cotton candy, and believed my faith in love alone could change it to sun.

I’ve written numerous essays on love, as if that’ll manifest the One who will want to learn me because they can’t imagine a life where they don’t. I coax myself to sleep by dreaming of ivory lace, the fragrance of sugary florals, and clumsily stepping on each other’s feet during the first dance. I think about holidays in a house—which is the home that always hosts—full of love and children and cats, wine flowing and music humming.

Love is discovered in the equivalent zeal to learn one another. An application of the lessons learned, knowing the road continues forevermore. It’s a symphony with endless encore, to be played again and again and again. It’s carrying grace for inevitable mistakes. It’s the dusting of pink in the erasure of faulty responses. When you meet someone, you don’t instantly learn how they best feel loved, but you do instantly know if you care to learn them.

I’ve had qualms with those who preach that “relationships are a lot of work.” Mostly because these are the very people who will use every Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to write something on social media about how they’ve had many highs and many lows, all at the whopping age of twenty. They’ll write something about how “it hasn’t always been easy” or compare their relationship to a “bumpy road” with a collage of their faces pressed together, toothy grins and crinkled eyes. Maybe my dilemma lies in the fact that I don’t believe effort inherently equates to work.

All of this to say, I’ve thought about the person who wholly wants to enter that experience with you, agreeing to face every learning curve by your side. Love isn’t rain-drenched clothes and mascara streams, declaring that you’ve loved each other since the first moment you met. It’s threaded in the I understands and the unbroken promise to be better and forever evolve with one another. It’s in the silence, the rhythm of your breath becoming synced to the same tune. It’s learning until death do you part, lessons from each other borrowed and hands blue from the myriad of annotations written about one another.

Dear Reader, find the person who doesn’t view loving you as an unsolvable equation but as a lesson they have the privilege to master.

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