I am one half of a “perfect” couple.

At the end of senior year, our class of 700 voted us “Best Couple” in senior superlatives. A couple of weeks later, they voted us prom king and queen. Now that we’ve graduated, we both go to school in New York City, where we live in dorms about three blocks apart.

We may not see each other every day, but we do text for several hours every night. I consider him my best friend. I’m not sure I’ve ever been closer to another human being than I am to him.

We met on the first day of ninth grade, when we were assigned to sit next to each other in World History. Two weeks later, we were on our first date, and within months, he was declaring his love. I said “I love you” then, too. Of course I did.

But here’s the thing: at the time, I didn’t love him back.

I hated myself for it. He was objectively the perfect guy: funny, sweet, caring, and, for some reason, interested in me. If I had listed the qualities I wanted in a partner, he would have met and exceeded all of them. I liked him a lot, and I wanted to spend time with him.

But I didn’t know if I would die for him. I didn’t know if I would die without him. I was fourteen and confused because my favorite books, songs, and movies had painted love as earth-shattering and all-consuming. If this mild affection I felt for a boy I had just met was love, I was disappointed.

So I assumed it was not love. And I felt like a cold-hearted bitch for it.

After all, as family lore has it, my mom came home from her first date with my dad—to whom she has now been married for over twenty years—and told her mom that he was The One. Where was that instant, unshakeable confidence in me?

But in the four years since my relationship began, I have learned something very important about myself: the way I, as an introverted writer, process emotions is very different than the way my extroverted actor boyfriend processes emotions. He’s comfortable with people, overflowing with cheer and bad puns, and prone to making friends everywhere he goes.

I am not.

I do not love like a wildfire or a tsunami. My love is quiet.

It snuck up on me while I was trying to drag it out from the depths of my mind so that I could measure it and categorize it. Frankly, it perhaps took years for me to reach the same intensity of feeling that my partner did. He falls in love fast and with certainty. But I have never done anything in my life without agonizing over it first, and this was no different.

That does not make me cold or incapable of emotion, as I feared so long ago.

The way I love is not the way he loves. That's it.

And four years later, we have grown so close that our unbalanced beginnings are negligible. Over time, we have both adjusted to one another and accommodated for the other’s different means of conveying affection.

And that’s okay. It’s okay if you don’t love explosively by the end of the first month with your partner. It’s okay if you never love explosively. Long-term love is not about shooting stars and blue moons, it’s about the ground under your feet. The former sounds prettier in epic poems and hit pop songs; the latter sounds better when he’s throwing up or you’re crying with homesickness.

Contrary to its reputation, love is really quite mundane.

Every fictional love story is intense and passionate. The lovers become so caught up in themselves that they lose sight of everything else. So that is what I expected, as I first cautiously navigated romance.

But love is not supposed to muffle the world around you; it’s supposed to magnify it. For example, I have never met anyone as interested in trees as my boyfriend. I tease him for it, but without him, I might not notice when the first green buds appear above our heads each spring.

I love him a lot. But that happened at my own pace, in my own way.

That fourteen-year-old girl was looking for something that had to grow over the course of years. The seed had been planted, and the result would eventually be beautiful. It just needed time.

And that’s okay.