This Is What Deep Love Feels Like

Deep love is silly. It’s about being so incredibly weird with another person that you both would never be that weird in front of anyone else. It’s slow dancing in the kitchen for absolutely no reason. It’s laughing so hard you lose your breath. It’s getting drunk in your own apartment together dressed in Christmas pajamas when it’s June. It’s strange, and it’s funny, and it’s something the both of you don’t even really understand, but would rather not be without. Because one thing you both understand is that your lives are better with each other in them.

Deep love is being heard. It’s about someone having relentless curiosity in discovering who you are, because every time you reveal a new part of yourself they fall harder and harder. It’s about them wanting to listen because they’d rather hear your voice talk about your passions, your dreams, hopes, and inner-most thoughts, than hear themselves talk about anything else.

Deep love is irritating. It’s having meaningless arguments about things you don’t even know why you’re arguing about, and it’s laughing after they’re over, about how juvenile the both of you were acting, and how tiny little arguments like those have no meaning in comparison to what you mean to each other, because you mean the world to each other, and that meaning doesn’t just disappear when you both become frustrated, or tired. What you mean to each other sticks, it stays put, and when other things like life in general try to move it, it remains.

Deep love is attempting to understand the things another person’s mind thinks and your mind doesn’t; it’s being inspired by them. It’s wondering how you found someone whose differences compliment yours. Because differences are normally things that tear people apart, but in deep love your differences bring you closer together. It’s like the things you both find unfamiliar about each other somehow mould together and form this beautiful little mess and that mess somehow fits perfectly between the cracks inside your heart you never knew how to fill. Deep love fills those cracks without making you forget that they exist. Deep love allows you to remember the past and how hard it might’ve been, and then it allows you to feel grateful for what you have now. Deep love makes you feel lucky for finding it.

Deep love is wanting to make someone better when you can’t even begin to guess what’s wrong. It’s just knowing that something is off, that this person who you’d give the world to, who often tries to fool you into thinking that everything’s okay, it’s knowing when it’s not. It’s the sixth sense you feel when they won’t tell you that they need you, but you’re there for them anyway.

Deep love is wanting to help. It’s caring so much for someone that you want to help them sometimes more than they want to help themselves, sometimes it’s loving them more than they love themselves. Because for you loving them is easy, and they’ll love you easily in return, but self-love is something that might take them a little longer to master. Because the kind of love they show you won’t always reflect back at them; it’s not reflexive. But when they do forget how to love themselves just as much as you do, you’re there to remind them that they are indeed lovable, that deep love is more than just something they deserve, it’s something you know they are capable of receiving.

Deep love is healing. Deep love is seeing someone at their most vulnerable, often lowest point, and reaching out your hand to help them get back up. Because deep love is selfless. It’s realizing there’s someone out there that you don’t think twice about caring for. Caring for them is as involuntary as breathing.

Deep love is often unexplainable. You can’t explain why it happens, or how, and you can’t instruct others how to find it, but when you do find it, you’ll be able to decipher deep love from all the rest.