All Your Perfect Imperfections

  Musings on the affections that bind us, by Nigel V. Fairflower

 Love is...

• wanting to stay in and do the dishes on a Sunday morning.
• faking an orgasm, and by orgasm I mean the entire relationship.
• remembering what you like in terms of iPhone or Android.
• courting to settle with her, not settling in court with her.
• a growing fear that turns you into a conservative.
• trying to say it better than the words printed inside a Hallmark card. Failing.
• burying your jealousy so deep you get heart cancer.
• a picture of a woman running along a beach, her arm extended backwards, and her hand clasped in that of her boyfriend who is following her romantically.
• slow and patient, like me facing the unlikely frustration of constructing the previous sentence.

Basically this.

• like a hive-mind made of two people.
• like the perfect pair of shoes.
• completing each other's sentences.
• like a Westlife song as it takes it up a key.
• Ross and Rachel before the 'break'.
• amalgamating two awful personalities into one giant, insufferable personality.
• unhealthy dependance on another person.
• drawing other people into weird, psychological sex games.
• Adolf and Eva, the bittersweet moment they pulled the trigger.
• forcing all the people in your life to be complicit in an affirmation of your self-absorbed sense of taste, and calling it your wedding.
• switching from Coca-Cola to Pepsi, to align with her consumer values.
• not thinking about her sister for at least 25% of sexual intercourse.
• taking a picture of her dancing in the rain (and posting it on Instagram).
• counting your blessings everyday that you've found a partner to return to an infantile state with.
• that John Legend song he wrote for all the fat chicks.
• a domestic, bloated obliviousness of the world around you.
• realising that when he calls you a bitch, it's because he's desperately pining over you because it's difficult to wrangle down your thoughts and actions.
• accepting that when he looks at another woman's ass, he's actually admiring your ass through her, in a tender, devoted fashion.
• disregarding the dominant heteronormative, patriarchal conception and expression of your love (until you have to write an academic paper about it, of course).
• decades of marriage, where the only mistress you long for is Death herself.

"All of me loves all of you..."