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Melyssa's avatar

I love the way you answered this. I really resonated with the part about love being the choosing over and over to keep going with the other person, to keep doing the work of maintaining the relationship, as easy as it is to establish it with the right person. I've always felt that....bear with me....a relationship is like a houseplant, or a garden. You can buy a plant from a nursery or aquire a cutting that's aesthetically beautiful and is a perfect fit for the life you live....but it's a living breathing thing. You cannot put it on a shelf and expect it to thrive. It needs attention... regular water, being turned to face the light for even growth, and sometimes a loving pruning to encourage new growth. A repotting if it's outgrown the container it's living in. The relationship is symbiotic. It beautifies your life, but it requires much of you to keep making your life better. And it has its own life in your absence. At the end of the day, it's a commitment to foster the growth of another, while they enrich your life with their presence....and while being in or around your home, their roots are their own. I don't know if the analogy makes sense to anyone else, but I've often found trees and plans and the way they're interdependent on resources and share struggles like weather, but are also independent growing beings to feel a lot like raising a family. It's my job to nurture and cultivate the love with my husband and my boys....and my house plants and my gardens.... it's ALL an act of love. And love is a state of being....but much more a doing and a giving, a choosing, a deciding, an investing. And when the reciprocity exists, that they also invest and decide and choose and give and do in return....no one runs out. The needs are met and the growth is mutual. I used to think love was most synonymous with trust....and it's a pretty important part.....but I believe more and more that it's specifically trusting the other person to mutually cultivate growth within relationship....that we're all each other's gardens.

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Scott Smith's avatar

it's the quest of a lifetime and then once you find it, then the quest is to take care of it

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