Find Your Winter Love

Find someone you can get under the blankets with, someone who likes the same hot drink you do so you can make it in big batches on the stove. You have matching mugs to cuddle up with, and you can cheers to your marshmallow-filled cocoa, to the movie you both love, to the fact that neither of you have anywhere to go. They’re the person you never feel weird having an extra slice or slurping your soup with, because they know that the best thing about winter is surrounding yourself with everything warm and comforting. Their presence feels like a blanket, always reminding you that things are going to be okay.

Find someone you can watch the weather channel with, someone who gets just as excited as you as the prospect of snow. They text you when the forecast is saying a possible two feet this weekend, and that they’ll meet you at the grocery store to stock up on all the essentials so you won’t have to run out in a blizzard. But you want to go out for a walk in the snow, no matter how hard it’s coming down, as long as you don’t have anywhere particular to go. Both of you love seeing the snow as it falls, and knowing that there is something warm waiting for you in the oven at home.

Find someone you can stay in pajamas with for days on end. They love your messy hair and bare face and rosy cheeks because someone turned up the heat a little too high last night. The two of you are capable of spending the whole winter in one big sleepover, never worrying about how you look because the most attractive possible thing in that moment is someone wearing flannel and offering to share their blanket. Spend the season being yourself, the way you were as a kid, because it’s much too cold outside to worry about getting dressed up.

Find someone who warms you from within, someone who feels like twinkling Christmas lights, whose kiss is like apple cider stirred with a cinnamon stick. Stay in together and spike your drinks, get a little drunk in front of your favorite movies and move to the bedroom. Sleep naked together under dozens of blankets, Princess and the Pea-style, letting days go by before either of you finally pry yourself away. They always feel this way, suddenly transformed into a magnet when they’re in bed, something you can’t get bear to get away from because everything is perfect within the confines of the bedframe.

Find someone who makes you call out sick from work.

Find someone who loves you deepest when things are coldest, when you need it more than ever, when the summer and its long nights and chance encounters are half a year away. Find someone who reminds you that there is something wonderful about the season where we all draw closer and stay inside. Find someone who makes the spring thaw seem like a burden, because it will mean having to leave the nest you created together. Find someone who always lets you borrow their sweater, and who never makes their own morning coffee without making yours along with it. Find your person, before it gets too cold to go out and meet them.