What I Finally Understand About Love

To the man I married,

Today I find myself thinking about you again.

Not with the same desperation that once consumed me.

Just... wondering.

Did you ever love me?

Did you ever truly have feelings for me?

Did you love my soul?

Did you love my presence?

Sometimes I replay the sweetest memories we shared and quietly ask myself, Was that love?

Maybe you felt something.

Maybe, in your own way, you cared about me.

I don't know.

And perhaps I never will.

For a long time, I believed I needed the answer.

Now I think what I needed was a better understanding of love itself.

Because whatever existed between us...

it wasn't the kind of love marriage asks of two people.

Love does not lie.

Love does not betray.

Love does not protect one life while secretly building another.

Love does not ask someone to question their own reality.

Love does not slowly teach another person that they are too much for simply wanting to be loved by their spouse.

I think that's the realization that has quietly changed everything.

For so long, I kept asking,

"Did you love me?"

Now I find myself asking something different.

"Was what I experienced actually love?"

Those are not the same question.

Because someone can feel affection.

Someone can feel attachment.

Someone can feel desire.

Someone can even care in certain ways.

But marriage asks something much deeper than feelings.

It asks for a daily decision.

A faithful decision.

A sacrificial decision.

A truthful decision.

When I look at love through that lens...

I realize why my heart has struggled so much to reconcile your words with your actions.

You told me you loved me.

I wanted so badly to believe you.

Sometimes I still wish I could.

But love is not measured only by what it says.

Love reveals itself by what it consistently chooses to do.

That has become one of the hardest lessons of my life.

And strangely enough...

also one of the most freeing.

Because I no longer need to spend the rest of my life trying to decode every memory.

Perhaps there were moments when you genuinely cared.

Perhaps there were moments when you believed your own words.

Perhaps there were moments when you wanted our marriage to work.

I honestly don't know.

And I think I'm finally learning to live without knowing.

What I do know is this.

I loved you.

And today, after everything that has happened, I understand love a little more than I did when I first stood beside you at the altar.

It is a painful lesson.

But it is one I hope I never forget.

— The woman who married you 💜