She studied his face. Then she leaned into his hand and closed her eyes. When she opened them, he was already closer. In that moment, she allowed herself to believe him. And what could she do? She loved him. And love, she’d learned, didn’t always care about the details. It didn’t always require knowing why. Sometimes it simply asked you to believe and step out on faith.
I was editing a scene from my novel recently and it made me stop and think about something far beyond the story. I was writing about two fictional characters, but the more I read it, the more I realized I was writing about something very real. And that is that love requires a certain amount of faith. Not the kind of faith that makes you ignore reality or overlook obvious warning signs. I mean the kind that asks you to move forward without having every answer.
Because eventually, you have to step out. And when you step out, there is no safety net.
What happens is…
We fall.
We fall in love. And that’s where things get interesting. Because once you fall, there are no guarantees. You don’t know if the relationship will last five years, twenty years, or six months. You don’t know how circumstances will change you. You don’t know how the other person will change. You don’t know whether you’ll grow together or eventually grow apart. You can do everything right and still not know how the story ends.
We tend to measure the success of love by its ending.
Did they stay together? Did they get married? Did they grow old together?
Did they get their happily ever after?
And of course, those things can be beautiful. There is nothing wrong with wanting them. But I’ve started to think that maybe the success of a relationship shouldn’t be measured only by whether it lasted forever. Maybe success can also be measured by what happened while you were there.
Did you love honestly?
Did you allow yourself to be vulnerable?
Did you learn something about yourself?
Did you experience a kind of connection that changed you?
Did you become a better version of yourself because of the person you loved?
And if the relationship eventually ends, can you look back without bitterness and recognize that it still mattered?
That’s a difficult thing to do. When something we deeply wanted doesn’t work out, it’s tempting to rewrite the entire experience. We convince ourselves that because it ended, it must have been a mistake. Because we were hurt, we should never have trusted. Because we didn’t get the ending we wanted, the whole story must have been a failure. I don’t believe that anymore.
Some relationships are chapters. Some are seasons. Some change the trajectory of your life. And some teach you things you couldn’t have learned any other way. That doesn’t make the ending painless. It doesn’t mean every relationship was healthy or meant to continue. And it certainly doesn’t mean we should romanticize relationships that hurt us. It simply means that an ending doesn’t automatically erase the value of what came before it.
Sometimes you can walk away carrying both things at the same time:
The relationship ended. And I’m grateful that I experienced it.
Maybe that’s another form of success. Not getting the happily ever after you imagined, but leaving the experience wiser, more self-aware, more open, and more capable of loving.
Because love was never really a guarantee. It was always a risk. We step out. There is no safety net. We fall. And for a little while, or maybe for a lifetime, we get to experience what it means to love and be loved.
I think that’s worth something, even when we don’t get to keep it forever.
