A post shared by Elephant Journal (@elephantjournal) on Jan 19, 2019 at 3:15pm PST 

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I dab on perfume, slowing anointing my wrists with what smells like hope and cinnamon and the passion of melting candles and hot, delicious kisses, where our mouths meet and our souls soar.

Alive.

That’s how I feel about what we’re doing, my dear—the thing the world calls commitment.

Lately, we’ve been talking about marriage, creating a family, braiding our two separate lives into one. It gets scary sometimes, exciting as hell sometimes, and often, it evokes varying shades of the two.

But I want you to know something.

I’d like to call what we’re doing an adventure instead. What do you think of that?

Because we are growing closer, exploring the fleshy tips of something we have not yet known. And it is an exploration, a voyage, a cross-country road trip.

There is music blasting and fresh, cool air that streams into our ears and messes up our hair.

And there are such big, goofy grins on both of our faces.

It’s like biting into a luscious, red fruit—an exotic flavor we’ve not tasted yet. We try it together. Our chins drip, happily, as we feed each other thick nectar slices with our warm, bare hands. Goose bumps cascade up and down the entirety of my spine as my breath mists, hot and hungry, with yours.

My love, it’s in the way our skin feels together.

The way we write together, learn together, pray together, get inspired together, dive deep together, grow together—all of this, revealed in the foundation for something wide and flowing and great.

We are on an adventure.

And an adventure needs a few main ingredients.

First, we need bravery, the balls to do it—to take the risk to love hard in the first place.

Then, we need heaps of curiosity—the childlike wonder that is so powerful and pulsates within us with bright radiance, like confetti sparkling in the winter sunlight. This keeps us going.

And so, we do this—together.

Oh, sh*t—and as we get ready, as we bend our knees to jump, I forgot to mention the most important ingredient of all:

Faith.

I’ve never been good at trusting, but you are. Your faith sparkles and shines like a proud pearl you keep in your pocket at all times.

So I hope to learn from you about that quiet breath of surrender, and I hope to teach you things, too, my love. I hope to teach you about fire and femininity and feeling. I like the way we complement each other—similar, but different—bringing our own unique sets of strengths and weaknesses, wounds and wonders to the table.

But we are both adventurers. And we don’t know what we’re doing.

See, it’s not that we’re reckless. It’s that, together, our laughter fills the sky. It’s that we would die for one another.

But this love is not about death—it’s about life.

Alive.

The taste crystallizes in my mouth, forming and blossoming into that which has no name. I struggle for it and then give up, surrendering into the bones of this experience instead.

Finally, an adventure companion!

That’s what I really wanted all along.

So, our commitment widens and deepens—it’s real. We will cover vast terrain. We will celebrate, show up for each other in beauty, in pain, when we are sick and sad, when we are joyous and ripe with inspiration, when it feels like nothing can go right. And every damn shade in between.

Yes, it’s real.

But it’s not heavy. It’s nourishing. It ignites us both.

And there will be hard days, sure—but going into it expecting an adventure rather than a fairy tale changes everything.

To expect the gloriousness of mud under my fingernails rather than Cinderella’s glass slippers…

Oh, yes.

I like the mud, the sweat, the challenge, the laughter, the joy, the exploration, the real.

And that’s what this love is—real.

And I love the heart-balls it takes to make this leap together. I adore how right it feels. It smells like the radiance that comes when there is no more second-guessing, the gush of wisdom that rushes into our guts.

We can’t tell the future. But the sun is warm on our cheeks, and we trust ourselves and each other.

We will take the leap together.

In the dazzling uncertainty of life, we will do this—and isn’t that in itself astonishing?

For we are not weaving a fantasy that is glossy but essentially empty. We are two tender humans creating a reality that is imperfect and full, rich with meaning.

With chasing sunsets, talks of religion and philosophy, encouragement, arguments, compromises, fears, dancing around in the kitchen in our underwear, strenuous hikes up the side of jagged mountains, and the sheer and utter gratitude that we found each other in the first place.

Our love is not a fairy tale.

It’s something so much better—it’s an adventure.

So let’s go on this adventure for the rest of our lives, fueled by the sheer and utter gratitude that we found each other in the first place.