We grow up fed on stories of romance—epic declarations, serendipitous meetings, dramatic reunions. Love, we are taught, is supposed to be grand. Loud. Cinematic. Something that sweeps us off our feet, that fills the frame, that sings in perfect harmony with violins swelling in the background.
But that’s only one face of love.
A beautiful one, yes—but not the only one.
And certainly not the most sustaining.
Because the older I get, the more I notice love showing up in quieter ways. Softer places. In the kind of moments that wouldn’t make it to a movie screen but settle deeply into your soul.
Love is the friend who remembers your favorite kind of tea and brings it when you’re too tired to ask.
It’s the parent who sits on the edge of your bed, wordless, when they know you just need their presence.
It’s the coworker who notices your silence and asks if you’re really okay—not to fix, but to witness.
It’s the sibling who teases you back into laughter when grief has swallowed your voice.
Love is the neighbor who checks in because your porch light hasn’t been on.
It’s the dog who curls next to you on the hardest day of your life.
It’s the stranger who holds the door when you’re carrying too much—emotionally and otherwise.
Love doesn’t always declare itself. Sometimes it just stays.
And when it does speak, it’s rarely in perfect lines. Sometimes love sounds like:
“Text me when you get home.”
“I made extra.”
“You don’t have to explain—I’m just here.”
“Take my scarf. It’s colder than it looks.”
That’s love, too.
We miss it, sometimes, because we’ve been trained to look for fireworks. But the real love? The lasting kind? It’s often found in embers. In small, unremarkable acts repeated consistently over time.
It’s not always romantic. It doesn’t always come with titles.
Sometimes it doesn’t look like love at all—until you feel the safety of it. The steadiness. The way it wraps around you in ordinary moments and says, “I see you. I’m with you. I care.”
These are the loves I treasure most now.
The quiet ones.
The unassuming ones.
The ones that ask for nothing in return except permission to care for you in whatever way they know how.
Because love, at its core, is not a performance.
It’s presence.
It’s resonance.
It’s choosing, again and again, in a thousand small ways, to stay connected to someone else’s world.
And once you begin to see love this way, you realize:
You are more held than you ever knew.