Today's guest post comes from someone I greatly admire and am inspired by here in the Twin Cities. Brittany Chaffee uses words in such a beautiful, romantic and poetic way that I figured she'd be the perfect person to create a story for what self-love means and how love can come into your life when you least expect it. Please read on and enjoy her melodic musings on romance.

typography by cannedsorbet

We envision love, in the beginning, to be a striking and complicated muscle. But when we fall in love, the movement feels a lot like slipping. The looseness, expansive. Right before I found my now husband, when I was angry and twenty-three years old and tired of dating bad men, my mom told me: “Brittany, love is effortless. You’ll be surprised by it.” 

But something else happens when we fall in love. When we come to know people; slip under the looseness of their open hearts, we come to know them as intimately as ourselves. That part is scary. It takes vulnerability. Because, in turn, we have to reach deeper into the pockets of ourselves. If the love is right, we wade deeper into self.

My favorite line in the entire book, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, is this: 

“We don’t need other people’s love in order to love ourselves; we don’t need a romantic partner to be ‘complete.’ But we need other people to teach us how to love ourselves best.”

A month before I fell in love with my husband, I finally found peace with being alone. I thought: you are beautiful and twenty-four. Your world has only recently spread open. The minute I felt myself slipping, falling in love, I thought: oh, shit. There’s more. Because loving is the damn truth. Loving him reminded me that I did, in fact, love myself.

Love is beyond dual coverage and picking up takeout because you’re hungry and being an emergency contact and meeting family and Thanksgiving. Love is finding new ways to love ourselves because there’s another human involved. They become our mirror; our reminder that we get what we give. Loving is, at its root, selfless. But, the act of it says so much about what we’re capable of offering. We offer what we need, what we desire. For the first time, we realize our hearts are available for big moments, big affirmations. And realize we deserve all of them. That is self-love.

Love is showing someone else why you care about them because you care about yourself. Love is self-love flipped on its head, the equal give and take of human-defining togetherness. It is beyond what we ever imagined and above what either of us originally believed.

"Love is effortless because it helps define who we are. It’s as beautiful and simple as that."