Being in love is wild, breathtaking, infuriating. It is butterflies in your stomach when you think about your person, when you see them, when you hold them. It’s the electricity when your skin meets. It’s smiling at your person with wide eyes and an open heart and seeing them smile back at you in the same way. It’s wanting to hold someone’s hand, even when your hand is hot, a little sweaty. It’s lust and the heat of wanting, wanting, wanting. It’s seeing who someone truly is, the best and most terrible parts of them, and choosing not to look away from everything you see, actively embracing everything you see. It’s the willingness to have difficult but honest conversations. It’s compromising on the structure of your relationship. It’s about patience and being flexible and getting irritated or furious with a person but still holding on. It’s wanting to be the best version of yourself for your person but also for yourself, especially for yourself. It’s the pride you feel in their accomplishments and being as happy for their successes as you are for your own, if not more. It’s their hurts becoming your hurts. It’s feeling their absence when you are apart and the rush of joy when that absence ends. It’s liking someone as much as you love them, being interested in who they are, marveling at the ways they are interested in you. It’s a gut instinct. You just feel it. You know it in your bones. It isn’t perfect, not at all. It doesn’t need to be. It is, simply, what fills you up.

As for soul mates, I did not believe such a thing existed until I did. A soul mate is someone so deeply part of you that they feel like a vital organ, living outside of your skin. They are the hottest part of the sun, your true north, your home, the one from whom you will never walk away, no matter what the material conditions of your relationship might be. Your soul mate is the one you wait for knowing no matter what happens, that they are worth the wait. Your soul mate is the person you choose because you look at them, always and think, “You … there you are.”

But it truly doesn’t matter how I or anyone else understand love. You get to decide what loving someone, being in love with someone and having a soul mate mean. You get to choose the kind of person you want to spend your life with and for how long and what that relationship looks like. You get to fight for what you want so long as the person you love is fighting alongside you.

I hope you find that person you are looking for. I hope when you meet him, you don’t worry about how the relationship might end. I hope you find joy and fulfillment in the very act of loving and being loved, no matter what may come.

Roxane Gay (@rgay), an associate professor at Purdue University, is the author, most recently, of “Hunger” and a contributing opinion writer.

“Ask Roxane” is an advice column that appears periodically in The New York Times Opinion section.

If you’re looking for some comic relief and live in the San Francisco area, come to The New York Times Opinion Live on Friday, Oct. 19, for an evening of politics and advice — and advice on coping with politics — with Roxane Gay, Michelle Goldberg and Jennine Capó Crucet, hosted by the Sunday Review editor, Rachel Dry. Get tickets here.

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