Only Love.

Today I want to talk about love. All kinds of love is important to me in all it's manifestations and I find myself falling in love every day with something or something about someone. The constants are the romantic and deep love I have for the man I choose to spend my life with, the unconditional and ever-present love I feel for my daughters and the fickle yet comforting love I have for my surroundings and home comforts. I am very lucky to have the kind of love that I possess but I don't understand it.

When The Beatles sang "All you need is love" I thought it was a fantastic sentiment that love can conquer all and that love is somehow the only thing you really need to live a fulfilled and content life but I've come to realise so far in my life that isn't true. While love is beautiful, often messy and intertwined with some tremendous feelings - not all of which are pleasant - it is not the sole need in life. Money (as materialistic as it sounds) is important as is all that it can buy from food to bills to housing. Stability is important. Sanity is important. Sometimes love and these things of such importance do not go hand in hand.

I believe in love. I believe that one person can have many loves and love them equally yet differently. I believe that a person can love as easily romantically as they can aesthetically. I believe the word love is thrown around and that isn't a bad thing. I believe that love can conquer a lot but sometimes love just isn't enough but I believe in love. I do.

I am fortunate enough to have a man I am committed to through all of the up's and down's that not only have been thrown at us but that we have created ourselves. Love is present but it's our like of each other - that inherent compatibility, of being each other's confidantes and best friends, lovers and partners and the commitment we make each day to stand by each other - that is what holds us together. I can't say if this will last forever but I do know it has lasted a very tough ride that a lot of couples don't survive or ever have to tackle. I'm sure there will be more. I'm sure there will be times when we get the easy ride but love is not what keeps us together in total. It's the mutual understanding, the personal connection we share, the common ground and the similar life plan and that's what makes us both sure that when we stand up in front of a small crowd to reaffirm the commitment to each other it is definite. We are endgame not because it's written in the stars but because we want it to be.

I find the most romantic of loves the ones that don't scream and shout about it. I find weddings incredibly beautiful but less and less meaningful as a guest. At my own wedding I find it symbolic and a chance to make everything legal but to me the most romantic part of my relationship is knowing that there are no assets or obstructions in the way of us both walking out of the door. We wouldn't have a problem with the children as we'd both still be equal parents and have access. We have no joint assets. Yet we choose to be together rather than through fear of divorce or a lack of self-belief that we can survive alone. We survived alone before we met but when we met it changed everything.

I had this idealism about love. I thought I would be treated like a princess (which I am a lot of the time). I thought I would be swept off my feet and that I'd never come back down. I thought I'd love until my dying breath and that the phrase Happily Ever After would apply to me. The love I have is not this way. It is passionate and fiery, divine and understated, unprecedented and destructive at times but it's all so merged like a watercolour. Everything bleeds, everyone hurts, we hurt each other with unkind words only to bring each other back as a whole. When I say whole I don't mean as a whole together. We are not two halves of one whole. We are individuals and we are two separate people who just happen to enjoy each other in ways that we want to continue to enjoy during our lives. Our love pulls us together but makes us nothing more than a 'we'.

So don't hold on to every fantasy. Don't look for perfect or serendipity. Don't believe the wretched that say it doesn't happen. It does. It will. When it does hold on to it but remember that perfect is simply about the way you feel in various moments throughout your life (not always in succession) and that is not defined by a relationship, a knight in shining armour and most of all not the word 'love'.