Love comes in a million different forms.

It’s pretty intuitive. All I mean is that the love you have for your parents is pretty different than the love you have for your siblings; and how you have an especially-special love for your best friend that is a little different than the love you have for everyone else. Even your dog, you probably love your dog. But when you’re loving your four-legged friend you probably don’t mean it in the same way, or at least not exactly, as you do when your loving on your other two-legged buds.

Granted, we all come to loving the people we love, differently. One size sure as hell does not fit all when it comes to this phenomenon we call love.

Whether it be your mom, dad, sister, or best friend, the common denominator in the best kinds of all forms of love is found at the heart of all interactions; it is a compromise that is not compromising.

A compromise is an agreement that is reached uniquely by each side of the agreement making concessions. In order to make our relationships sustain the majority of us will have to, at least at some point, make some sort of compromise. You may have to compromise eating sushi as often as you may wish because your significant other is allergic to shellfish. Or maybe your boyfriend makes the compromise of standing still and smiling big for the million pictures your friends always take, overcoming his hate for pictures to make you happy.

Compromise is good, it is a sign of genuinely caring about each other.

In making a compromise you are quite literally abandoning something you care about for someone else. You are being selfless; you are putting yourself second and someone else first. Which, at least as I take it, is a really beautiful thing. Unless the compromises you begin to make start compromising, well, you.

I am going to abandon my orthodox tendency of drawing on abstract examples to get my point across, and just really say it: sometimes, girls and boys, men and women, willingly compromise themselves for the sake of someone else. That is a compromise that is compromising.

It is when you do something, that requires you abandoning a part of yourself in order to do it.

The scariest part is the majority of the time, we do not realize we are abandoning ourselves in the process. We forget that life is about growing with someone. It is not growing into something.

You know, the girl who always aspired to get into law school is all of a sudden doing a teaching program. Becoming a teacher is an admirable profession, just not the one she is passionate about. But her boyfriend moved to Louisiana for his job and there are just no law schools out there. She compromised herself for, well, him.

A compromise that isn’t compromising is saving your extra cookie for your friend, boyfriend, or mom. Even though you really want it, you know you do not need it.

A compromise that is not compromising is closing your laptop even though you are in the middle of sending an email to address what is wrong with your loved one. The email can wait, but they are sad right now.

A compromise that isn’t compromising is just realizing that you are not at the center of the universe. Sometimes you can, and willingly should, sacrifice the things you have because they will mean more to someone else. When that sort of realization is shared, you are left with a love that is not compromising. A rewarding thing to work towards, to say the least.