Love
ERYN ROUSH

I am Eryn. I am not a scholar, or a philosopher. In fact, I am barely an adult. Yet, there are things that I know to be absolutely true. My eyes are blue, so is the sky. I have ten toes, ten fingers, and a great, big, crazy family.

Love is hard work.
Those are all truths.
I have said before that “life is a vapor.” Well, love is a lifestyle.

I have never believed that love was easy. Back when I was being sent to my room as a child, it was hard for me to express love for the parents who had banished me to that bubble gum pink prison. When I first had my heart broken, I learned that love was dangerous. When I quit college in my senior year to take a full time job in Atlanta, and my family supported me anyway, I found out that love had the ability to be unrestricted.

It’s a scary thing for a girl to give her heart to someone and I have never taken it lightly. Yet, I have given my heart to a man who has taught me more about love and about myself than I ever could have learned alone. He sort of squeezed himself into one of the spaces of my heart. Once there, he took root and slowly expanded. Now, it seems like he has always been there. In May, I am getting married. I’ll be sharing my life, space, food, laundry detergent, and bath soap with a man. I am not naïve. I know that it will be a hard, unpredictable adjustment. And, well, I am a little nervous! Life is so convenient for us. With automatic coffee timers, and cars that parallel park themselves, we barely need to use our brains before noon! But love does not conform to the demands we place upon it, and no timer can program it.

So, love is a lifestyle. Just like I work to lose a few pounds: marking miles on a treadmill and counting calories, I know I will have to work to make my marriage last. Just like I work to sell an ad, or write an article, I will have to work everyday to win the heart of my husband over and over again. And some days, it will just be overwhelming. Those are the days that will test my true character. On those days, I will either live up to everything I write about, or I’ll fail. If there is one thing I want to know is true, more than anything else, I want to know that I can love against all odds, in all circumstances, and for all of my life. If that’s true, I am capable of doing anything. If I can succeed in loving, everything else is just icing on the cake.

I hold these things in my heart, and this is what I know to be absolutely true:

I am not a quitter.
My heart is full.
My life has purpose as long as I am impacting someone else’s.
You can be good at what you do, and still love doing it.
We are all capable of more success, kindness, and
perseverance than we give ourselves credit for.
Love is not easy. It is stretched and bent, distorted and easily influenced.
Love is a choice, a lifestyle, a journey.
Love is also the ultimate reward.