Tough love is an expression used when someone treats another person harshly with the intent to help them. To me, however, tough love is what it’s like to love me in light of a stressful job, a tiny apartment and a big move to an extremely imposing city. Every day I notice girls gushing about their boyfriend’s with Facebook statuses like, “Flowers…Again?!  I have the BEST boyfriend!” or “Surprise trip to Hawaii! I’m soooo lucky!”, but you know what is really something to brag about? “My boyfriend just scraped NYC off my street feet” or “My hair is in my boyfriend’s toothbrush every day and he doesn’t even get mad”. Those are real love statuses.

Flowers, gifts, and trips are nice, but the things I will really remember are the weird times; the times when everything was a mess and being lucky enough to have someone to help you clean up. I’ll remember having to cook omelets on the floor, only being able to afford street trash, living without dishwashers, garbage disposals, washers & dryers and instead, living with mold and cockroaches. Those are the real memories worth remembering.

These imperfect situations have made me realize that the key to love is tolerance. In order to tolerate each other you have to forget, understand, and compromise.  Love is forgetting to get mad when you have to come find me when I go missing, or coming to rescue me when I get locked out. It is always being the first to forget that we are fighting. It is making me forget the world and, in turn, I’ll forget that you just put your shoes on the bed. Love is understanding that I get cranky when I don’t eat and fulfilling Dr. Mom’s orders to give me bananas. It’s understanding my problems and investing yourself in my job and school as much as I do, sometimes even more. It is compromising, even when I don’t. It’s dancing when you don’t want to and never complaining about having to be just one of the girls. It is even transitioning away from cargo shorts. Forgetting, Understanding and Compromising. In short, real love is always giving a F.U.C.