Your gentle heart set this wild one free

Wait for someone who loves you differently. One who can see the fire in your soul, and the child in your laugh, and the ocean in your heart.

I’m rarely on Instagram anymore except for my end-of-day doom scroll. Thank God my algorithm is gentle. It feeds me new music and, more than anything, it shows me love that still exists. Not the curated kind. Not the proposal with the drone footage and the ring box hidden in a hollowed-out book. The other kind. A midwestern couple’s backyard wedding where the flowers are from the grocery store. An eighty-year-old man explaining the secret to fifty-three years of marriage while his wife rolls her eyes beside him because she’s heard this speech before and she’s still sitting there, which is the whole point.

There’s a pattern. And it’s excruciatingly, almost frustratingly simple: you choose one person and you keep choosing them. On the boring days. On the days they chew too loud. On the days you are not your best self and neither are they and no one films it and no one posts it and the love just continues, unwitnessed, like a faucet left running in a house where no one is keeping track of the water bill.

I’ve been replaying a song a woman wrote for her husband. I don’t know her name. I don’t need to. The lyrics found me the way most important things do, without announcement:

Messy hair and a guarded heart She wasn’t looking for a brand new start But something in his bear hugs felt right A leap of faith on a Denny’s night

You showed me that it was safe to fall Through every storm, you stood through it all I never had to doubt your love for me Your gentle heart set this wild one free

A Denny’s night. Not Paris. Not a rooftop. Denny’s. And that’s why it works. Because the truest love stories I’ve ever heard don’t have good lighting. They have sticky menus, awkward human moments and someone who stayed.