The Kind of Love That Grows Instead of Explodes

Love didn’t arrive in my life as fireworks.
It arrived as a camera turning on.

A pixelated blink.
A face appearing for one fraction of a second.
A man with the quiet posture of Clark Kent — glasses, calm smile, gentle energy —
and my stomach immediately decided to abandon me.

I panicked.
I turned the camera off.
I literally shut the screen in the face of the man who would become my husband.

That was the first time love made me do something ridiculous.
But it wasn’t dramatic — it was real.

Because real love doesn’t explode.
Real love grows.

It grows in the nervous laughter after the camera is turned back on.
In the care the other person offers without being asked.
In the way someone sees you —
your needs, your softness, your changes —
and chooses to adjust, stay, learn, accompany.

Real love grows in respect.
In humor.
In the ability to laugh at yourselves before life gets the chance to do it for you.

Real love grows in small things —
never insignificant, just small.
A compliment that hits the right spot.
A gesture made without a calendar.
A message that says “I saw you today” in the way the person listens, observes, remembers.

Even my first boyfriend, many years ago, wrote me a card saying he had “all four tires flat” because of me.
I remember laughing.
And thinking:
That counts. That’s affection.

Love, for me, has always lived in gestures —
in the tiny proofs of care that don’t need a spotlight.

Because humor sustains love.
Respect protects love.
Presence grows love.

Everything else…
erodes it.

When one person stops seeing who the other is becoming,
when humor dies,
when the partnership becomes two parallel roads instead of a shared one —
that’s when love shrinks.

Not loudly.
Just quietly.

Maybe that’s why the love I write —
in my books and in my life —
never arrives shouting.

Maya and Tomás rebuild each other with hands, not fireworks.
Mariah and Thomas learn that affection is also a language.
Marcus and Stella grow fondness in the spaces between conversations.

My characters love the way I do:
with presence, not spectacle.
With kindness, not noise.

As Machado de Assis wrote — and I included in Eu te amo! because it carries the truth of an entire lifetime — “Everyone loves in their own way. The way itself matters little; what matters is knowing how to love.”

That’s it.
Not the size of it.
Not the drama of it.
Not the noise of it.

Just this:
love that chooses.
Love that sees.
Love that stays.
Love that grows quietly, like something alive learning the shape of home.

The kind of love that once made me turn off a camera —
and then, slowly, beautifully,
made me turn on a life.