I have always believed that real relationships are built not only on love, respect, or admiration, but also on affinities, commonalities, those threads that are woven daily, those traits or attitudes you see in the other person that resemble your own. In that sense, I relate to people who are very much like me, who largely share my values and beliefs, my way of seeing life. I doubt I could have a close relationship with someone who acts in a way contrary to how I believe a person should behave.
For example, my boyfriend is perhaps more minimalist than I am. He is a sober, quiet person, attentive to small details and punctual routines. His most noticeable attributes are neither effusiveness nor grandiloquence: his displays of love are reduced to imperceptible, simple, straightforward gestures that go unnoticed by others.
He and I share the vision of two individual worlds that accept meeting without invading each other, without attachments, without desires of possession, without wanting to absorb the other, but that daily share the architecture of a feeling that is cultivated, nourished, and strengthened with gestures, words, details, and selfless attention.
I believe that more than the explosion of lightning in the middle of a storm, which leaves the body trembling and the skin goosebumps, I believe that love, especially in adulthood, has to do with the calm of rowing toward the same point. Talking and finding that we want the same things, that we share beliefs and ideas, that we value people, that we marvel not at the depth of the abyss but at the ripples left by the stone in the water, gives us the certainty that we are united by a higher and beautiful feeling.
Our relationship doesn't need dates to take a trip, eat an ice cream, watch a movie, or have a beer. Nor is it a stage where we have to show the size of our feelings for outsiders to applaud and approve. Individually, we decide to build our relationship without an audience: like someone walking beside the other on a journey, hurrying or slowing down the steps just to align with each other.
Gabriel García Márquez already said that one does not fall in love with the perfect person, but rather one falls in love and sees perfections in the imperfect person. Those traits may not be unique or exclusive to that person, millions may have them, but it is that person who manages to surprise you with them.
And the thing is that humans can coincide in this universe, but it takes much more to be able to walk together. There is a kind of detachment from who we are when we love. And the thing is that to love is to give: little or much. Because the better love is not the one that gives a lot, but the one that gives what it has, even if it is little.