They keep choosing each other on the boring days

Anyone can choose love when there are fireworks — on the good days, the romantic evenings, the shared victories, the moments when the relationship is easy and bright. The couples who go the distance are distinguished by what they do on the ordinary days, the flat days, the Tuesday in February when nothing is happening and the relationship is just there, unremarkably, asking nothing and offering nothing particularly vivid. Love, in the long run, is not a feeling that arrives and stays. It's a decision that gets made, quietly and repeatedly, across years of ordinary days. The people who understand this — who have stopped waiting for the feeling to sweep them along and instead made the choice an active habit — find that the feeling tends to follow the decision rather than the other way around. Keep choosing on the boring days. That's where love either grows or slowly doesn't.