HOW WILL YOU KNOW?

When I was growing up, I wondered a lot about love. I knew I loved my parents and my siblings. I knew I "loved" football and most other sports. I knew I "loved" my mother's homemade pies.
But I was unsure how to know if I loved someone else, someone from outside the family sphere.
For many years this was not a problem, since women avoided me like the plague. I couldn't buy a date, let alone get one with a simple request. When I did screw up the courage to ask a woman out, it often was met with a look of disgust and disdain, as if she would not deign to date me if I were the last male on the planet. It is safe to say I knew I did not love any of them.
Still, I wanted to know how I could be sure I loved someone, if the right woman ever came along. People who'd experienced love would just say, "You'll know," and get a wistful look on their faces. I had no idea what that meant or how that was supposed to help me when the time came.
Then, by a miracle, I fell in love. And in that moment I understood what those people had been trying to tell me. When you know, you just know. In your heart. In your soul. In every cell of your being. You know you love her more than life itself, more than anything or anyone else on the planet. That knowledge helped explain to me why "a man will leave his mother and father and cling" to the woman he loves. It explained to me, better than anything else, the story of the pearl of great price. I could never understand why someone would sell everything he had in order to have this one singular pearl. After all, it was just a pearl! And no matter how much that pearl would get him, it didn't seem to be worth the trouble of selling off everything he had. Ahh, but when you see the pearl as love, as that one person on earth you were born to love, then that parable makes so much more sense. For you will gladly, happily sell off everything you have in order to have her in your life for the rest of that life.
Knowing you love her, however, does not eliminate all worry and anxiety. You'll still be plagued by worries -- Does she love you? What if something happens to her, how will you ever go on? What challenges and hurdles will life throw at the two of you? -- and challenges -- You'll need to be vigilant to make sure you never forget what a miraculous gift she is and to reassure her of that on a daily, hourly basis; you'll have to be ready to make sacrifices to ensure her continued happiness; and you'll have to learn to allow her space and time to herself, to let her grow and develop and become the complete woman she was born to be, all while remaining a part of that growth and that life by sharing it with her.
If you truly love her and know it, then these challenges and hurdles will be so much easier to clear because love makes everything easier. As a wise person once said, "If you truly love someone, it is not work. It is only work when you don't love someone."
And you'll know you love someone when, well, you just know.
Trust me on this, okay?