“This is What Love Is”

By: Lizzie Joy (Loveland) Nunemaker

It took me over a decade of adulthood to learn that love

Real love

Isn’t polished/perfect hair extending down your back

Where you always have the right smart thing to say

Where everyone knows you and admires you

Where you always look your best and talk like you’re on a sitcom

You first think you know what  love is when they take your breath away: everything they say and think and do is a miracle, a triumph of Creation

But that’s not what love really is

Love is usually too coy for the fanfare of first loves

Love begins to emerge after you have your first feral fight 

The one where you say to yourself, “OH that’s why they were at the pound in the first place… ” and you have almost every intention of putting your marriage license in the shredder and taking them straight back to their parents’ house

Love isn’t shimmery bliss, not at first, and not for a long while

Love is trench warfare

There are machine gun bullets whizzing past and love is when the man you’re shooting at stays in place

Love is in hair loss; stretch marks, weight gain and loss, incontinence, torn ligaments, flatulence, snoring like you live next to the train tracks, and partners that don’t wake up to any of their alarms while you can hear a maple leaf wilting across the street

Love is realizing your spouse is fundamentally and irreversibly messed up— realizing they have REAL problems that long predate you that you don’t know how to fix. And then the problems get worse, as problems usually do

And you don’t leave. You stay. Because Love is in the staying. 

Love isn’t this desperate grasping and hoping across time zones and media landscapes

The guy that “gets you” 

Isn’t who you thought he would be

Because the man that “gets you” is willing to take on you- all of your beauty and your trauma and your liability and your brilliance and your hormonal mood swings and your fire and your ice 

The man that gets you most is the man that is willing to forgive you, the one that holds your hand through labor or on an operating table, the one that will still pick you when everyone else thinks you look like too risky an investment. 

The woman that gets you will lose her body to bear you children, will lose her name, zip code, and heritage to take on yours, will love and give of herself to you and those babies until she’s down to three neurons that aren’t communicating, reeks of unwashed body odor, is having to pray to have the energy to leap out of bed when someone cries in the middle of the night and be able to break out of the trance of sleep deprivation in time to make you coffee in the morning. The woman that gets you will reach her roots deep into the ground and find a secret well of God’s energy to continue to show up and love when she’s exhausted all her own resources. Real love comes from desperate pleas to God, real love comes from God. Because God is love.

Love is a study of your partner. Sometimes you are massaging out the knots of their overused coping mechanisms, or cracking the bones back into place so that they stand up straighter and remember that they’re actually pretty capable and lovable- made in the image of God. 

Love is fierce: love will protect the marriage over those naysayers of your partner, surgically removing their biased hateful nonsense like an infection if need be before their poison for your partner turns septic and kills your one-flesh union 

Even if your circle initially shrinks, it will grow back, stronger and healthier – with other adults that love you- a two person into one package deal. The people that belong in your circle will always point you back to Christ, and your covenant union.

Love is whoever you married. Study them. Find them. Help them. Heal them. 

Love is choosing them over and over and over again. 

Love is loving them through all the various illnesses and awkward phases and growing pains.

Then one day, when you’re eighty-five and a lot heavier and hang-doggier, and the hair is really gone for good except in all the wrong places, 

Love is finally starting to look like shimmery bliss

Because your heels are calloused from following Christ and your knees are arthritic from praying too much and your cheeks are old shoe leather from tanning in your youth and also from turning the other cheek time and again 

Love is starting to shimmer in the glow of eternity 

Because true love, 

Never gives up

Never loses faith 

Is always hopeful

And endures in every circumstance.

Love, real love, never fails.