I have spent enough time thinking about what love should not be. It seems far more useful, and considerably more enjoyable, to describe what loving me well might actually look like.y
I am not someone who loves halfway. If I care about you, I will pay attention. I will remember the story you told me months ago, the meeting you were nervous about and the song you played once in the car. I will notice when your voice changes and ask what happened. I will celebrate your successes with unreasonable enthusiasm and probably become invested in ambitions that were none of my business before I met you.
My love tends to appear in ordinary places. It is in remembering, checking in, making time, finding something that will make you laugh and knowing when encouragement is required and when coffee will do. I am not very interested in calculating the minimum amount of affection necessary to maintain a relationship. If I choose you, you will know. This seems both kinder and much less administratively demanding than keeping someone guessing.
I am independent, but independence is not an allergy to tenderness. I do not need rescuing, completing or managing. I have a life, a mind and a fairly reliable ability to solve my own problems. I would still enjoy having someone beside me who occasionally takes something off my plate without behaving as though the Nobel committee should be informed.
I want a partner with a life of his own. Someone I can admire. Someone curious, capable and secure enough to disagree with me without turning dinner into a constitutional crisis. I do not need constant agreement. That would become boring very quickly. I want interesting conversation, intelligent challenge and the ability to laugh when one of us has become far too pleased with our own argument.
I want to feel proud to love you, and I want you to feel proud to love me. Not pride as performance, but the quiet confidence of two people who are pleased to have found one another. I have no interest in pretending not to care in order to appear mysterious. Mystery has its charms, but clarity is much easier to make plans with.
Honesty matters to me for the same reason. I do not want to spend a relationship examining inconsistencies or conducting unpaid detective work. Tell me what you mean. Let your actions bear some recognisable relationship to your words. If something changes, say so. The truth may occasionally be inconvenient, but confusion is exhausting and takes up far too much of the evening.
I do not expect perfection. I certainly will not be offering it. I can be stubborn, impatient and occasionally convinced that my preferred solution is not merely preferable but objectively correct. I will get things wrong. So will you. A good relationship must have room for mistakes, apologies and the discovery that neither person was quite as reasonable as they initially believed.
What I want is the sense that we are on the same side. I want generosity without accounting, affection without strategy and closeness with enough air around it for both of us to remain interesting. I want us to support one another without turning either person into a project. Love should enlarge two lives, not reduce them to a permanent discussion about the relationship.
There should also be pleasure. Music, food, travel, private jokes, long conversations and ordinary evenings that become memorable for no obvious reason. Serious love does not need to be solemn. I want somebody with whom I can discuss the meaning of life and then spend twenty minutes laughing at something completely idiotic.
Most of all, I want reciprocity. Not a perfect division of every gesture, but the natural movement of care in both directions. I will bring loyalty, attention, tenderness, encouragement, curiosity and a great deal of feeling. I want to meet someone who does not merely receive those things beautifully, but possesses his own generous way of giving them.
This is not a list of requirements for an imaginary man. It is simply what I now understand about myself. I love deeply, think seriously and live independently. I want a relationship that can contain all three without treating any of them as a problem to be solved.
I want a relationship in which love is visible in ordinary life: in attention, honesty, laughter, reliability and the quiet certainty that we are on the same side. That is how I will love you. It is also how I hope to be loved.
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