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...it's got me feeling some kind of way...

Sometimes I think I am a bit of a romantic. I love happy endings and the roads that lead to them. I think the stumbles and tumbles that two people take just to be together are precious and beautiful. I read of love, and watch it in movies, and ever since I was a little girl dreamed about what my love would look like. I played with my Barbie dolls and planned out their lives, always a successful Barbie coming home to her successful husband in their beautiful home, with their beautiful cars but even as a little girl I recognized all the falls that happen in falling in love.

And boy did those dolls have some realistic falls. As a child I was always quite observant so to me Barbie dealing with the highs and lows of her interracial love was not a stretch. Barbie home with the kids terrified when Ken, well Steven went off to war and waiting for him to return home to her. Shani searching for Jamal when the imaginary tornado touched down on their RV, all the while endlessly connected in their world that I had created.

So it is no surprise that as I matured my idea of romantic love was very, well, romantic. Full of passion and fire, longing and suffering just to be together. The stuff that films are made of, and I do love films.

Pretty Woman, the Notebook, Under the Tuscan Sun, Serendipity, Before Sunrise my favorite tale of a young American man and a young French woman who spend one night in a city, and fall in love only to part ways the following morning, and not see each other for ten years after (the sequel Before Sunset).

But what I do realize is that despite my idealized view of sharing your life with another there are the day to day realities of real love which are every bit compelling, and heart renching, and all around us everyday.

Love is in the hearts of two men, ready to take on an entire world of no's just to say to each other Yes, I do.

Love is in the heart of the mother terrified as she sends the father of her children into a war she doesn't believe in, while she supports him and works daily to ensure those children are as close to him as they would be were he home.

Love is in the heart of the man and woman who fight every single day for each other, despite all the difficulties that could have torn them apart because God put them together and made them strong enough to stay that way.

Love is in the heart of the excited bride-to-be as she prepares to marry the one who stole her heart and its in the glow of his eyes whenever she comes into view.

And love is in the heart of the man who despite the skeletons revealed from the closet stands by the one he wants because he couldn't imagine his life without her.

(You all know who you are)

Love is in movies and in dreams, in letters and stories, in hearts and in minds. It always was and will always be, there never was a time when it wasn't. Love is the immortal spirit that carries us through this life and beyond it. And as it heals our wounds when we are here, it does the same for others when we are gone.

What I know for sure is that no matter where it stems from love is love. Whether the musings of a tiny little girl playing with her dolls, or the grandmother hopelessly devoted to the man she loved and lost from this life so many years ago; the young college feminist dreaming about the man who would sweep her off her feet just like in her favorite movie, or that same little girl, that same young college feminist falling into the love of her own, what makes each of those matter is that feeling. The presence of love in her heart and soul, the dreams that it gave her, and the wishes it granted.

My love is the love that I want it to be, and Our love is made of what You and I can be.

What defines is the definition in each other. The seperate but equal. The highs and the lows. The magnetism in opposite poles.

That is love and that is something that I know for sure.

**Ashley**

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