As a kid, I always looked up to my parents' relationship. They've been together for 22 years and the love is still apparent between them. As children, we learned from the relationship between our parents. We are creatures of our environments, after all.

As an adult, I've learned that love is one of the most amazing things in the Universe. I don't think I understood the concept of love when I was younger because I never imagined myself getting married or really being in a lengthy relationship at all, yet here I am, madly in love with my boyfriend. I still never even planned on dating someone when I met my current boyfriend over Tinder. This was last June, and I remember him telling me that he only had a year of college left, and then he was going to move wherever he could find a job. At that point, I didn't think it was that big of a deal. I liked him and our first date had been around 11 hours long, but I still didn't really see myself dating anyone.

However, he turned out to not be trash. Whenever we've had a problem, we've talked about it and figured out a solution. By December, I was realizing that I had caught the feels HARD for this lovely man.

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I realized his presence made me incredibly happy and I couldn't imagine being with anyone else. We've been dating for a hot minute now (a little over a year), and I'm madly in love with him. He took me to the coast for my birthday and by the end of the trip, I was falling even more in love with him.

I literally never would have imagined myself being in a serious relationship and being in love a year ago. My whole perspective on life, marriage, and relationships has changed ever since I started seriously dating Gabe. We don't always see eye to eye on everything, but we always try to understand where the other person is coming from, and I've learned a lot about him and myself in this past year.

Relationships are incredibly complicated and I will be sad when he moves away in less than a month. But, as the French say, c'est la vie.