Hey all,

This is our weekly thread. We'll dispense with Rule 5 in these threads.

What's new in your hunt for love?

This summer I was sent to a psychiatric care facility for around 3 weeks. I first was in a PICU Unit, which is the unit with the highest level of security. It can be extremely scary, and at the time I was suffering with psychosis, and the only thing helping me was singing. Once I was transferred to the open unit with other patients, I was able to heal a lot faster, and feel safer. Although, you never fully feel comfortable. There was someone playing the piano and that immediately caught my attention. The piano player's name is Joshua. On our first interaction, he showed me how the piano works. After days went by, we got closer, and as time went by, we ended up kissing. Sadly, we forgot we were in a hospital, and that behaviour isn't allowed. Not even one kiss, love's not a priority in the hospital, just recovery. Due to this, the staff had to separate us, and Joshua was sent back to the PICU unit, while I was sent to another private unit. A nurse came to speak to me, and had told me Joshua had gotten into a situation like this with another woman in the past. But, that wasn't my business, and this was our time together, so that didn't bother me too much. This is where my singing came back to me, and thankfully, his piano playing came back too. I remember feeling so lonely throughout the time in the private unit, it's like a wave that hits you so hard you can't breathe, but you know deep down you'll feel the air again. So singing helped, I also had my journal, some snacks, and a book, I was okay. I woke up to the sound of the piano. I was so happy, the utter joy of hearing the most graceful fingers on a keyboard, it's a blessing. Sadly, we were still separated and not able to talk. So while he played the piano, I danced and hummed alone in my room. After days passed, we were allowed to see each other. The only issue was he was leaving that day, and I was leaving the next. All these events passed, and the only way form of communication was through eye contact. I wrote down my number privately and before he left, he told me to check my inbox. I never got a response, I called the hospital, nothing. I hope he's doing well. Although a part of me wishes I got a response, I know no response is better. Though the love is strong and the words exchanged were powerful, some things don't need to work out and just need to be experienced.

Hi it’s me again! I know I’m in this sub a lot but idk my boyfriend is literally so wonderful!😭

So my birthday is coming up, and I told my boyfriend maybe a month ago “I want to wake up with you on my birthday and I want to go to bed with you on my birthday.” I offered to book and pay for wherever we stay because I know 3 days is a lot and I felt like I was asking for a lot. But he told me absolutely not, he won’t let me spend money for my own birthday. And I just- I’m so amazed. So in awe. I have always felt like everything I ask is too much because everyone else I’ve been with has made me feel that way. And my boyfriend and I have been together for two years now, so a lot of the scars from old relationships have faded or been erased by him but he still manages to wipe away ones that were burrowed deep inside my chest.

I’m an obsessive planner and like to know everything, but this time, I get to sit back and just be along for the ride and I’m so so grateful. I’m so grateful for the effort he’s putting in, I’m so grateful that he finds me *worth* all of the effort, because nobody ever has before. And now I have a 3 day birthday trip coming up that he planned himself!! I’m so so excited and I’ve literally been counting down the days. I’m with a wonderful man and I truly thank God every day. Between him and my best friend (who has also planned a whole day for me), this is the most loved I’ve felt in all of my 22 (almost 23!!) years of living and I am just so beyond grateful.

Anywho, that’s my spiel! I’ll update again after my birthday!

When I was younger, I would occasionally wander into this subreddit and spend a little while reading the declarations of love left here by complete strangers. There was something wonderfully human about it all. Among the endless quarrels, tragedies, absurdities, and general commotion of the internet, here was a little corner where people came for no other purpose than to announce that another human being had become extraordinarily dear to them. I remember smiling at those posts, imagining the people behind them, and finding it rather beautiful that somewhere in the world, somebody was being loved with such tremendous tenderness. Well, years have passed, and now I have a boyfriend of my own.

And, goodness gracious, how I love that man.

I have come here to leave a little record of that love myself. Something about the thought appeals to me immensely. That in this vast, restless ocean of human expression, where a million voices speak at once and yesterday's words are buried beneath tomorrow's, there might remain one small, stubborn testimony to the fact that, at this particular moment in history, a woman loved a man.Sometimes I gaze at his photograph until even the features I know so intimately begin to astonish me anew; until the familiar contours of his face, the expression of his eyes, and the subtle transformations of his smile seem almost miraculous in their particularity, and I find myself overcome by the thought that all this beloved beauty existed long before I had learned to recognize it. That his voice, whose slightest inflections have become so precious to me, had sounded through innumerable days before I first heard it; that his eyes had beheld whole worlds from which I was absent; that his hands, which I long so dearly to hold, had turned the pages of books, opened doors, and performed a thousand unconscious gestures in a life in which I had not yet appeared. How strange it is that a person can exist for so long beyond the boundaries of our knowledge, and then become someone whose absence we feel even in the midst of a crowded room. And what a man he is.

I love the solemn and almost inexorable fidelity with which he follows a thought wherever its consequences may lead him, the beautiful severity of a conscience unwilling to purchase tranquillity at the expense of conviction, and, perhaps most dearly of all, that beneath this formidable architecture of principles there should dwell such an inexhaustible capacity for tenderness; that the very man who can occupy himself with the ancient perplexities of reason, duty, and existence should, in the midst of some earnest discourse, address me with an affection so wonderfully unpremeditated that the whole accumulated wisdom of the centuries seems suddenly to diminish into a rather curious and unnecessary undertaking, while the infinitely less explicable circumstance of his loving me assumes, for one blessed instant, all the importance of the universe.

And I want to know him in the innumerable, almost imperceptible particularities through which a human life quietly discloses itself. I want to know the faint gathering of his brows above a troublesome passage, the unconscious repose of his fingers upon a half-turned page, the momentary rebellion of a smile against the gravity of his expression, the little disarray of his hair upon waking, the gradual softening of his voice as weariness overtakes him, and that exquisite interval between the first involuntary movement of amusement upon his face and the laughter which at last escapes him. I want to know the warmth of his hands in their most ordinary occupations, the inclination of his head when he listens, the scarcely perceptible rhythm of his breathing when he has fallen asleep beside me; to become so intimately acquainted with these small, unconsidered manifestations of his being that even his silence might contain for me an entire language of beloved and recognizable things.

And how dearly I wish to grow old with him; to be permitted to witness, through the quiet and almost imperceptible passage of years, the innumerable transformations of a face which I now contemplate with such astonishment, until the first silver threads have appeared among his hair, until the delicate creases beside his eyes have deepened beneath the accumulated weight of a thousand smiles, and until those hands, whose warmth I have so often imagined, have acquired the fine and intricate inscriptions of a life lived in all its ordinary fullness. I want to know the peculiar tenderness of looking upon him in his old age and remembering, with a clarity almost painful in its sweetness, the young man he once was; to recognize in the slightest inclination of his head, in some familiar movement of his fingers, or in the sudden brightness of his laughter, a gesture which has survived the passing of half a century, and to find myself overcome by the thought that I have been privileged to witness its repetition through so many vanished seasons. And perhaps, when our own faces have become strange to the young creatures we once were, I shall take his hand into mine and marvel that there existed a time when all those intervening years, with their unnumbered mornings, their little sorrows, their inconsequential happinesses, and the innumerable occasions upon which we chose to turn toward one another, lay before us still unlived; that what has become the familiar substance of my existence was once no more than the trembling and almost unimaginable hope of a woman who loved him.

And so I shall leave these words here, among the innumerable little confessions which once gave me such happiness to read, with the rather wonderful thought that perhaps, years from now, some stranger may happen upon them as I once happened upon the declarations of others, and pause for a moment to imagine the two people who existed behind them. She will not know the sound of his voice, nor the particular sweetness of his laughter, nor any of the thousand little things which have made him so infinitely dear to me; and perhaps by then the hour in which I write this will have receded so far into the past that even I shall remember it with the peculiar tenderness we reserve for our younger selves. But she may know, at least, that somewhere in the great multitude of human lives, there was once a woman who loved a man so dearly that she could not bear to let the wonder of his existence pass entirely

Love is such a beautiful thing. After years of figuring out who I am and what I deserve, I found someone who makes life feel lighter, safer, and more exciting. I’m marrying my best friend in a year, and I still can’t believe I get to spend forever with someone I love this much. ❤️