Falling in love is the easy part.
Well... relatively speaking.
It is the butterflies.
The excitement when their name appears on your phone.
The ridiculously long conversations about absolutely nothing.
The first kiss.
The first I love you.
The feeling that somehow, amongst billions of people wandering around this enormous planet, you have found your person.
Falling in love can feel almost effortless.
Staying in love?
That's where the real story begins.
Because eventually the butterflies settle.
Real life arrives.
There are bills to pay, houses to clean, jobs to go to, children to raise, families to worry about and a seemingly endless pile of washing that I am fairly certain reproduces when nobody is looking.
There are illnesses. Money worries. Grief. Stress. Exhaustion. Arguments. Disappointments.
There are times when one person is struggling and the other has to carry a little more.
There are days when you adore each other.
And probably days when you could cheerfully throttle each other.
That is real love.
Not the perfectly filtered version.
The messy, complicated, occasionally bloody difficult version.
And I sometimes wonder whether we have forgotten that.

Love Isn't Always a Feeling.
Perhaps I am old-fashioned. Actually, I probably am. But I don't believe a lasting relationship is built entirely upon how you feel on any particular day.
Feelings change. They have to.
Nobody can maintain the intensity of those first few months forever.
If we did, nothing would ever get done.
We would all be wandering around staring dreamily at one another while the electricity was disconnected because nobody remembered to pay the bill.
Love grows up.
The butterflies become something quieter.
Something deeper.
It becomes knowing how somebody takes their tea.
Recognising something is wrong before they say a word.
Knowing which story they are about to tell before they have even started telling it.
Sitting beside somebody in a hospital waiting room.
Holding their hand at a funeral.
Celebrating their victories.
Standing beside them through their failures.
Forgiving. Apologising. Compromising. Laughing. Arguing. Learning. Changing.
And waking up, again and again, and choosing the same person.
There is something incredibly romantic about that to me.

The Vows Were Never Just for the Easy Days.
When people marry, they make some pretty enormous promises.
For better, for worse.
For richer, for poorer.
In sickness and in health.
Those aren't promises about the wedding day.
They're promises about all the days that come afterwards.
Anyone can promise forever while dressed beautifully, surrounded by flowers, family and champagne.
Forever gets tested on an ordinary Tuesday when you're both exhausted, money is tight, something has gone wrong, neither of you feels particularly appreciated and you've just had an argument over something completely ridiculous.
That's when love becomes more than words.
Marriage isn't one enormous romantic gesture.
It is thousands upon thousands of tiny choices.
Sometimes it is saying sorry when your pride desperately wants to win.
Sometimes it is recognising that being right isn't nearly as important as being kind.
Sometimes it is having the difficult conversation instead of avoiding it.
Sometimes it is giving someone space.
Sometimes it is pulling them closer.
And sometimes it is looking at the person you love during a particularly difficult chapter and remembering:
We are on the same side.

Our Ancestors Knew Something About Endurance.
As someone who spends so much time wandering around in the lives of my ancestors, I often think about their marriages and relationships.
They certainly weren't living some romantic fairy tale.
Life could be brutally hard.
Families endured poverty, disease, wars, dangerous work, infant mortality, cramped homes and grief that is almost impossible for us to comprehend today.
And still, so many couples built lives together.
Year after year.
Child after child.
Loss after loss.
They kept putting one foot in front of the other.
There is something about that endurance that I admire enormously.
But I also think we need to be careful not to romanticise the past too much.
Our ancestors didn't always stay married purely because they had discovered the secret to everlasting love.
Particularly for women, leaving could be extraordinarily difficult.
Divorce was inaccessible for much of history, women had fewer financial opportunities, and society could be deeply unforgiving towards somebody who left a marriage.
Some people undoubtedly remained in relationships that today we would recognise as desperately unhappy or even abusive.
I don't want that version of "staying."
Nobody should remain somewhere they are frightened, controlled, abused or repeatedly destroyed.
Walking away can sometimes be the bravest and healthiest decision a person makes.
But there is another kind of relationship.
One where two fundamentally good people still love one another but life has become difficult.
And I worry sometimes that we have become too quick to confuse difficult with finished.

Not Everything Broken Needs Throwing Away.
We live in a world where almost everything is replaceable.
Phone broken? Replace it.
Television outdated? Upgrade it.
Something stops working? Buy another.
And sometimes I wonder whether a little of that thinking has crept into our relationships.
Things become difficult and we wonder whether we'd be happier somewhere else.
The excitement fades and we assume the love has gone with it.
Someone disappoints us and we begin imagining somebody who wouldn't.
But every long relationship eventually involves disappointment.
Because it contains two human beings.
And human beings are spectacularly imperfect.
We get things wrong.
We say things badly.
We become distracted.
We take people for granted.
We change.
Sometimes we hurt people we love without intending to.
The answer cannot always be to throw the entire relationship away.
Sometimes things need repairing.
Sometimes we need to remember why we chose one another before life became so bloody noisy.
Sometimes we need to stop keeping score.
Sometimes we need to put down our phones, sit opposite one another and actually talk.
Sometimes we need help.
And there should be absolutely no shame in asking for it.
Fighting for a relationship doesn't mean pretending nothing is wrong.
Quite the opposite.
It means caring enough to face what is wrong.

You Cannot Fight Alone.
There is an important difference, though.
You can fight for someone.
But you shouldn't have to fight against them to make them love you.
A relationship cannot survive indefinitely on the effort of one person.
You cannot communicate for two.
Compromise for two.
Apologise for two.
Change for two.
Forgive endlessly while the other person continues doing the same damage.
"Never give up" sounds wonderfully romantic until one person is carrying the entire relationship on their back.
For love to survive the test of time, both people have to keep choosing it.
Maybe not equally every single day.
There will be times when one person only has twenty percent to give and the other carries the remaining eighty.
That's partnership.
But over a lifetime, the weight has to move backwards and forwards.
Sometimes I carry you.
Sometimes you carry me.
And sometimes we walk side by side.

Friendship Needs Looking After Too.
And actually, I don't think any of this belongs exclusively to romantic relationships.
Friendships need tending too.
We often talk about finding good friends as though once we have found them, that's the job done.
It isn't.
Friendships can drift apart quietly.
Life gets busy. People marry.
Children arrive. Jobs change. Someone moves away. Weeks become months.
Nobody has fallen out. Nobody has done anything terrible. Life simply got in the way.
Friendship also requires choosing.
Sending the message. Making the call. Remembering the birthday. Asking Are you actually okay? and caring about the answer.
Forgiving someone when they get something wrong.
Understanding that sometimes your friend is going through something that means they cannot be the friend they normally are.
And trusting that when your turn comes, they'll understand too.
Some friendships last decades not because nothing ever goes wrong, but because both people decided the friendship was worth repairing when it did.
I think there is something beautiful about that.

Love Changes Shape.
Maybe this is the part we don't talk about enough.
Love doesn't remain the same.
The love you feel after six months cannot possibly be identical to the love you feel after twenty or forty years.
It has lived too much.
The young love that once wondered what your future might look like eventually becomes the love that looks backwards and says:
Look at everything we've survived.
Look at the photographs.
Look at the children we raised.
Look at the homes we've lived in.
Look at the stupid arguments.
The holidays.
The funerals.
The Christmases.
The illnesses.
The mistakes.
The laughter.
The ordinary mornings.
Look at all those versions of ourselves we have loved along the way.
Because staying with someone for decades doesn't mean loving exactly the same person all that time.
People change.
You change.
Your partner changes.
A lasting relationship means meeting those new versions of one another and learning to love them too.

Perhaps I Am Old-Fashioned.
I still believe promises matter.
I believe loyalty matters.
I believe friendship matters.
I believe saying I love you should mean something.
And I believe that when two people have built something good together, it deserves more than being abandoned the moment life becomes difficult.
Love needs feeding.
Friendship needs tending.
Marriage needs protecting.
Not because leaving is always wrong.
Sometimes leaving is absolutely necessary.
But staying shouldn't be considered weakness either.
There is enormous strength in two people looking at something that has become cracked and saying:
We're going to try to fix this.
There is romance in growing old together.
Not the polished romance of films.
Something better.
The romance of history.
Two people who once nervously held hands becoming two people whose hands have changed with age but still automatically reach for one another.
That doesn't happen through luck alone.
It takes time.
Energy.
Patience.
Forgiveness.
Compromise.
Communication.
Humour.
Friendship.
And a ridiculous amount of heart.
Falling in love may happen in a moment.
Building a life together takes years.
And perhaps that's why I find lasting love so beautiful.
Because after the butterflies have settled, after youth has disappeared, after life has thrown everything it has at you, there is something incredibly powerful about being able to look at the person beside you and know:
Of all the people I could have walked through this life with...
I chose you.
And through all the different versions of us, all the storms, all the ordinary days and all the years...
we kept choosing each other.
Until next time,
Toodle pip,
Lainey.

Intwined — 
Because every life has a story worth telling.

❤️❤️❤️