“Mommy, how do you spell I love you?”

I raise my eyebrows and swivel around in my office chair to face the asker of this question. Everett, my five-year-old son, is hunched over a homemade card, eager eyes awaiting my answer.

“What did you say?” I ask, hoping for clarification.

“I saaaaaid, how do you spell I love you?” he repeats, annoyed.

I pause, not entirely sure how to proceed. He is designing a card for his preschool crush, Caroline, who he hasn’t seen in three months. Tomorrow she is coming over for a play date—emphasis on date, apparently—and he wanted to make a drawing for her to mark the occasion. It’s a picture of Everett and Caroline smiling and holding hands, which is cute enough, but adding an “I love you” caption underneath? What would her parents think? I cringe.

“Honey, why you don’t you spell 'I like you' instead?” I suggest.

His brows furrow as he protests, “No mommy. I LOVE her!”

I imagine Caroline’s mom—who I still don’t know very well—looking at this card with a mixture of curiosity and horror. What will she possibly think? Truth be told, I don’t always monitor Everett’s Netflix choices all that closely, but I know for a fact he does not have access to Ryan Gosling movies on his tablet. I don’t know where this I-love-you business is coming from.

“Everett, what does that mean? What do you mean you love her?” I probe.

He smiles. “Because mommy. The first time I saw Caroline at preschool, I thought in my head: I want to be her friend. I love her.”

I’ll give it to the kid—he made a good case for himself. He just explained love at first sight as if it were the simplest, realest concept in the world, like gravity.

I sigh, rehearsing my disclaimers to Caroline’s mom in my head.

“Okay Ev, are you ready? I … L ... O ... V …”

***

I do not remember falling in love in kindergarten, but I do remember falling in love at 14. He was my first real date, my first real boyfriend, and my first real kiss. Does everyone fall in love with their first kiss? It seems inevitable (depending on how good the kiss is, I suppose).

He was a swimmer with the tan to prove it and wore a letterman’s jacket that always smelled like Tommy Boy cologne. From the first date, I was gone.

I loved him (I wrote that in my diary, so I know it’s true).
And he loved me (so he said).

In true, 14-year-old girl fashion, I kept everything he gave me. I saved movie tickets, notes, photos, the scorecard from our first mini golf date, mix CDs. He won a teddy bear for me at the fair and I kept that, too. Everything went into a box for safekeeping, a portable museum of my first relationship.

I remember telling my parents I loved him at the time, and I often wondered if they believed me. Looking back now, I think they did. Because when we broke up, as most high school kids do, I will never forget the night my dad walked into my bedroom to the sight of his baby girl sobbing in the fetal position on a cheetah-patterned bedspread.

He walked over to me and said in the calmest voice you’ve ever heard, “Want me to slash his tires?”

The next day, I threw my box of keepsakes in the trash.

I’d later learn that my mom secretly dug it out, just in case.

***

I tried on my first wedding dress when I was 20 years old. Surrounded by a gaggle of girls, we sighed and squealed as if we were playing the most elaborate game of dress-up ever.

The saleswoman, who had lipstick on her teeth and reeked of old lady perfume, tsk tsked at me and sighed at my reflection in the three-way mirror.

“So young to be getting married already!”

If there was one thing that enraged me as both a child and young adult, it was people telling me I was too young to do anything. A 21-year-old still-in-college bride was cause for public commentary, it seemed. My youthful appearance combined with a diamond on my finger became a magnet for criticism from older folks and peers alike.

Are you sure you’re ready?
Shouldn’t you wait until you graduate college?
You’re just SO young to be settling down.

The comments and concerns from strangers did not phase me in the slightest. I knew marriage would be hard sometimes. I knew we would probably fight (and then make up). I knew forever was a long, long time.

After all, I had been learning about love for 21 years. What more did I need to know?

***

The funny thing about love is that you only know what you know. The love I knew and understood at age three is different than the love I knew and understood at age 10, age 14, age 20, age 31.

Our understanding of love is relative to our years on earth. 

Our comprehension of love is constantly evolving.

Isn't that such a relief? To know that as we grow older (and hopefully wiser), our hearts can widen and stretch? Love gets messier and more complicated, more nuanced and layered, and yet we keep moving forward in faith and forgiveness because we cannot live without it.

My husband and I recently celebrated our 10-year wedding anniversary, and I assure you I love him more and I love him better than I did on that hot July evening when we promised before God and family and friends that we’d love each other forever. Sometimes I think back on those young, bright-eyed versions of us, the ones without a single wrinkle on our faces or grey hair atop our heads. We had never lived together. We did not have children yet. His dad was still alive.

What did we even know about marriage?

I was 21, he was 25, and we had loved each other for three whole years. I don’t know what else to say about it other than: it was enough. We loved each other as much as we possibly could, because we loved each other as much as we knew how.

And now, 10 years later, we know more.
So now, 10 years later, we love better.

Marriage is hard and holy work whether you get married in your twenties or your fifties. Likewise, I’m starting to realize a five-year-old’s understanding of love and an 80-year-old’s understanding of love are different, but that doesn’t make the five year-old’s love any less real.

Young love is still love. And all love starts somewhere.

So maybe, instead, this is what we'll do:

When she’s trying on her wedding dress, nervous smile on her perfectly unwrinkled face, tell her she's beautiful.

When she confides in you with mascara streaking down her cheeks that her heart is broken, believe her. Bonus points for offering to slash his tires.

And when he ever so sweetly asks how to spell 'I love you' at five years old … tell him the first time.

Written by Ashlee Gadd (photo of Everett and Caroline taken on the last day of preschool). Caroline and her mom loved Everett's card, especially after learning that it took 34 tries to get it right.