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“So what is the difference between rap and hip-hop? It’s simple. It’s like the difference between saying you love somebody and being in love with somebody. Rap (love) is just a word.” –Sidney Shaw, Brown Sugar

My best friend says she’s in love with three men. One her current lover. Another, her best friend. And first, and the last, someone who claims to love her too, but fails to commit. I told her, “You have love for the other two, but you’re only truly in love with one.” I sighed heavily into the phone as I prepared myself for her usual explanation of how it was different for each of them and without a doubt she made her claim that she was knee-deep IN love with each and every one.

I tried to reason with her. Three reasons to be exact:

1. ) I wanted to know if she’d deciphered the difference between love and lust. I was once stuck in a relationship that was too perfect and wanting flare, passion, and drama. So, I fled. Well, I didn’t exactly flee. It started with flirtation and gander; innocent enough, but suddenly I was cornered during a late night at the office. We were immediately, down the street at a café, drinking coffee, only speaking of work, because we knew that other things were too dangerous. The moonlight was a backdrop and forebode that crazy things happen in the moonlight. We walked outside to his car and I stepped towards the direction of the train. “Don’t you want a ride?” he asked. His voice traveled up my spine, the tingle relentlessly crawling, searching for stability. He spoke again, “I mean, I’d love to take you home.” I turned to his sinister smile and my own face loosened from the beam of a good night. It was in this moment that I realized that I loved my normal, average, damn near perfect man. He knew what sort of girl I was, when we’d met, and he never presumed that I’d throw my morals down in a parking lot after coffee and banter. How dare I speak of morals when I’d just danced with attraction? C’est la vie. I left “lust” standing in a lot, confused, after a middle finger waved him goodbye.

2.) I wanted to know if she knew the difference between BEING in love and HAVING love for someone. She inquired the distinction. Well having love for someone is an adoration that never leaves, the sort of heart-swell we have for family members, exes turned friends, and we-could-have-beens. Being in love is a different sort of euphoria. It comes in varied shapes and sizes, but it’s absolutely undeniable when it arrives. I sometimes tear up when looking at the man I love, because I’m suddenly afraid that if I let him walk away, something might happen where he won’t return. There’s an unbridled comfort, comprised of awkward kisses, farts, and things your momma doesn’t even know. In fact, being in love, is a depth that surpasses the honeymoon phase and the initial giddiness of someone new. It’s the quiet after an argument, the moment where you want to hold and touch him. You’ve just put him in his place and now you want nothing, but to console him. But he’s got to know that you mean business and so you wait for a few hours or sometimes days to reconnect. It’s an intimacy that appears even when there is no sex in sight. The content that arrives when you’ve fallen asleep in the curve of his arm or when his hand resting on the small of your back is more sensual than anything else. It’s irrational and symmetrical all, at the same time, and you’re confounded at how you’ve found such a faultless thing.

In past situations, you may have encountered someone with strange oddities that made you want to scratch your head in disbelief or do a double-take because it was just plain abnormal! But depending on your relation to the person, you learned to take it at face value purely out of the love and admiration you have for your man. His quirky personality traits probably wasn’t what you signed up for when you met, but when in love, you learn to take the good and bad which is typical in any relationship.

Here are some quirky traits you love about him:

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