I'm Adela Mone and this is The Slowdown.

When I was younger, I thought love was about grand gestures, someone showing up under

the balcony, spouting an original love poem, or, at the very least, holding up a boombox

with our favorite song, blasting loud enough to wake the neighbors.

That's what I thought I liked, loud love.

That was back when I thought love was about fighting and making up.

I loved the drama of love.

It wasn't until I got older that I realized what I loved about love was not the drama

at all, but the deep privacy of it.

My kind of love was never made for an audience.

My kind of love is a rapturous sort of secret built out of unasked forgifts, unexplainable

inside jokes, the oddly impressive songs we sing to the dog in the morning.

It's the sympathetic raised eyebrow, the printer that always magically works when

I need it, the changing of the cat box, the garbage bins wheeled out in an ice storm,

and that last good bite left on the plate.

Today's poem speaks to that private type of love, those seemingly inconsequential moments

that make us weak in the knees.

Not-and-do commercial disguised as a love poem by Matthew Oldsmann.

So here's what I've got, the reasons why our marriage might work, because you wear pink

but write poems about bullets and gravestones, because you yell at your keys when you lose

them and laugh loudly at your own jokes, because you can hold a pistol, get a pig, because

you memorize songs even commercials from 30 years back and sing them when vacuuming.

...