“Making you happy makes me happy.”
He says it while holding my hand, and it is such a wonderful thing to hear. Not simply because someone said it, but because for once, I know he means it. I feel it in the way he holds my hand, in the way he looks at me, and in all the little things he does without ever needing to be asked. Being with him feels like being in his haven, like I’m somewhere I am wanted, cared for, and adored, and it is so unimaginably wonderful.
Because I had never met a man who treated me like this. And after a while, I had started to believe perhaps I never would. Maybe the kind of love I had spent my life dreaming about asked for too much. Maybe the bar I had set existed only in my imagination, and eventually I would have to accept that real life simply didn’t work that way.
And then I met him.
And somehow, he has undone so much of what life had taught me until then. Things I thought I had to accept, things I thought I had to settle for, things I had convinced myself simply did not exist. He heals parts of me without even knowing they needed healing, simply by loving me in ways I never imagined I would get to experience.
I could write endlessly about how good and wonderful a man he is, about all the little ways he makes me feel loved, and I still don’t think I could quite capture what it feels like to be on the receiving end of it.
Sometimes I look at my life with him in it and think, I’m living a dream.
She Was Sea 