Pinterest, and a love song

Pinterest. That great scrapbook of the internet where we go to plan our dreams of houses, weddings, children and a 5-star gourmet kitchen. You can learn a lot about people by spending a few minutes looking at what they pin. This one dreams of urban homesteading. That one loves all things old-fashioned and romantic. Another wants to travel the world. Edgy, soft, bold, quirky...all of these come through when you look at what interests people.

Pithy quotes and bumper sticker philosophy abound. Sometimes I see something that I agree with wholeheartedly and pin it to an inspiration board.

From the lovely elembee.com via Pinterest

Sometimes I see things that just make me roll my eyes and move on because of the superficiality, misspelling, or really poor theology.

And then there are pins that I see that irritate me so much I decide to devote a blog post to them. Why? Well, because I CAN!

This is one of those pins.

via Pinterest

Oh, this bugs me. I suppose it particularly bugs me because it is the time of year where we are told that love must be summed up in grand gestures of flowers, cards that cost almost as much as flowers used to cost, and jewelry. Because she doesn't know you love her if you don't buy her something from THAT store.

Yes, in order for love to be worth it there must be passion! It must be superlative! Big! Exciting!

Hogwash! (Because I use old fashioned words like that.)

Do you know what love looks like? Love looks like me, waking my husband the other morning and asking "Can you get the boys up and ready, because I'm not feeling well at all." And him doing it. Just getting up and doing it because I asked.

Love looks like a kiss goodbye in the morning and me truly hoping and caring that he has a good day.

Love looks like him when the first was tiny, holding him in the middle of the night so that I could sleep.

Love looks like him trying to find the right words to tell me how much he loves me and always worrying that he's not good enough at saying it. And I would take ten fumbling words from his heart over the most eloquent poetry any day.

It doesn't always look mad and passionate. Some days it looks like just getting by, just putting food on the table and getting the kids to bed. And if I ran away looking for mad and passionate I would miss the truth. And the truth is this: real love is extraordinary in ALL its forms. Never think that just because it doesn't look like a Hollywood screenplay that it isn't real love. Never think that just because your love story doesn't have fireworks and your toes don't tingle that it means your love is less than perfect. Look at your love on your own terms, not what someone else tells you it should be.

In the end we all find our own definition of what extraordinary love is. And I wouldn't trade this love for all the world.