I haven’t always been the best boyfriend. Hell, most of the time I’m not the best boyfriend. I’m too pragmatic to frivolously spend money on buying a girl things like flowers and shoes, and I’ve been hurt too many times to just fully give myself over to someone. When I do really fall into someone, I become insecure and I can’t help but let my mind wander around to what it’ll be like to lose the person, what it’d be like to watch them fall away from me into the arms of someone else. Even if I have no reason to distrust, I do anyway, and if a couple hours go by without contact there’s a vague feeling that wells in my chest without any thoughts attached to it, there’s no “I bet she’s fucking someone else” or “She’s having more fun without me right now than she could ever have with me” going on in my head, but some weird need that feels like it’s going to pop my ribs open from the inside out.

It’s unfortunate but this is how I know I’m in love. When I’m inclined to distrust and doubt, when I feel sick to my stomach whenever the girl is out of sight because I worry she’ll never be back in my sight again, then I know that I love someone. How did I end up this way? What circumstance caused me to only be truly aware of my love when I feel this way?

I’ve spent the last year and a half with a girl who I spent a lot of time wondering why I didn’t feel that way about her. I assumed I didn’t really love her, and that I wasn’t supposed to be with her. Even though she made me completely happy I never felt like I was worried she was going to run away from me, and that made me worried that the things I, we, felt wasn’t real at all. I spent a lot of time thinking that if I didn’t feel this certain horrible insecure feeling then I wasn’t really in love.

Is that really love? Is love just being scared that you’re going to be sad when the person is gone? Is love just not wanting anyone else to have her? There are other aspects, like, being around her makes you feel like your chest is going to burst open and flowers are going to pour out of it (kind of like The Fountain), and sometimes I look at her and I feel like Thank god I found this woman, finally, so I can finally stop hunting for a decent one and I’m relieved that no matter how hard I tried to get her to go away about eight months ago she still came back to me…

And when I listen to a song like this my eyes fill up with tears because I know how it feels to be completely at home wherever I am because she’s standing next to me, and that it doesn’t really matter where we eventually end up as long as there’s a flat spot I can lay next to her in, and I wish that love to me was purely this feeling and not the other feeling, and then I wonder if this is why people get married and move in together, because they can’t handle being apart without crumpling under waves of insecurity, because no one talks about these things, not the truth anyway, no parent sits down with their kid and goes, “Son, you’ll know you’re in love because you’ll feel like dying every time you think about her being all runn’oft with another man,” or “Son, you’ll know you’re in love ’cause when you lie in bed with her you feel like you wanna hug her so tight for so long that the sheer probabilities of the electrons in your skins merging become so tiny that she just falls into you and you can never be apart.”

No one tells you this when you’re young, and maybe they should, maybe someone should have told me years ago that this is what it’s supposed to be like, this, without the hurt and the pain, without the uncertainty that’s proven again and again. “Love is feeling like you’re at home no matter where you are just ’cause you got your girlie next to you, kid.”