Unconditional Love Poems

This morning you stood at the mirror and cursed your hair with a creativity I have always admired. You are fifty now, you say, as if I hadn't noticed, as if the years had not been happening to both of us at the same generous speed. I could tell you about beauty— how yours has not diminished but migrated: from the obvious places to the corners of your eyes when you laugh, to the patience in your hands when they unknot the dog's leash or our daughter's worry. But you don't want a poem. You want the coffee made before your feet hit the floor. You want the car warm on January mornings. You want someone to say your hair looks fine and mean it. This is what marriage is: not the saying of extraordinary things but the extraordinary frequency with which we keep saying the ordinary ones— and the ordinary ones keep being enough.

You didn't say the right thing. You didn't say anything. You just showed up with food and sat in my mess like it was your living room. That's friendship: not the greeting card, not the "I'm here if you need me" that everyone says and no one means— but the actual showing up. The ugly showing up. The 2 AM showing up. We met when we were stupid— too young to know what we were promising when we promised everything. And then life happened: the job, the marriage, the baby, the divorce, the silence that stretched like a rubber band that should have snapped but didn't. Because real friends don't keep score. Real friends lose touch and find it like keys you didn't know you had— still there, still fitting, still opening the same door. You are the person I don't have to perform for. The one who has seen me at my worst and stayed at my worst and made my worst feel surprisingly survivable. Thank you for staying.

I didn't marry the man who brought flowers. I married the man who noticed I was crying in the kitchen and didn't ask why— just stood there and washed the dishes until I was ready to talk. Husband is a strange word. It sounds like a job title for something that is actually a daily choice to love someone who leaves their socks on the bathroom floor like small cotton monuments to chaos. You are not the love poem I expected. You are the love poem that showed up— quieter, funnier, with worse hair and better hands. You hold me the way you hold everything: a little too tight, a little too long, like you're afraid I'll figure out you're just a nervous boy in a grown man's shoes. I figured it out years ago. I stayed anyway. That's the poem. That's the whole love story: I saw you clearly and stayed.