Love is NOT blind.

It's easy to get carried away in all the romance this time of year, the cute little hearts popping up everywhere promising a little relief from the deathly cold winter going on. But is all the cutesy, hallmark-greeting cheesiness really all that love is?
Is it a magical fairytale evening complete with a candlelit dinner. Is it a sparkly diamond ring and a carriage ride through a park? Is it fuzzy teddy bears and beautiful cards, boxes of chocolates and dozens of roses? Is love really just a series of perfect moments, the perfect moment. Is that what love is?

When I was little I used to think love was very much like the movies, that it really was a series of magical perfect moments that climax with a dramatic engagement and a beautiful wedding day where a bride and groom can't take their eyes off one another as they glide across a gorgeous hardwood dance floor, twinkling lights spread like a canopy above them. They leave and ride off together into their perfect ever after. That is love right? That might be what movies and Disney will tell us as children. 

As I've got older my definition of love keeps evolving. When I was little it was the example of my parents, their unconditional love towards me regardless of how I was, something reserved just for families. Then it became a handful of friends who chose to spend time with me, who liked who I was. This was confusing over time as peers started dating and interest in the opposite gender grew. Love was then defined as kissing in secret and needing to be attached at the hip to your 'significant other' at least for a few weeks until you fell in love with someone else. 
It became defined as something you could fall into and just as easily fall out of. 

As beautiful as those perfect romantic moments can be in life, they are no longer part of my definition of love. Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of date nights, roses, holding hands and enjoying those moments where time stands still. But love now includes more of a sacrificial battle message to me than a fairy tale story. 

Love is now defined by a husband who protects and fights for me, who goes to the grocery store for medicine when I'm too sick to even get up out of bed. It's washing the sheets filled with puke when a family member isn't feel great, coming home after a long day at work to cook, its letting your significant other choose the restaurant for date night or a mom who is up most of the night comforting a crying child and still manages to pull it together to care for her family the next day. It includes this whole dimension that is anything but fairy tale like. 

Love is also defined as putting the needs of another before your own needs, desires or comforts. 
Love can be hard. 

Love is a daily choice made regardless of feelings or atmosphere or how perfect one particular moment in time turned out to be. 

Love sees all there is to see in a person and loves anyway. 
It can see the faults, the flaws, what the face looks like without makeup. It sees the bad moods, the bad hair days, those days when we just aren't feeling our best. 

And it still shows up.

That is love to me.

And that is not blind. No matter how the saying goes. 

Pictures taken by hubby's talented cousin, Fiona. (From a few Winters ago)