By and large, advertisements shortchange romantic love. They tend to accentuate assorted high notes—the bliss of connection, the proposal, the barefoot post-retirement stroll on an anonymous beach—while eliding the strain, strife, and uncertainty lurking at the edges of countless family photographs perched proudly on mantles. Love isn’t leisure; love is work, and if matter, you will strive to nourish and sustain it in ways overt and subtle alike. Not necessarily to prove a point, but because your partner has become a part of you, the yin to your yang, the very air that you breathe.
Love, like air, is frightfully easy to take for granted; it’s always been there, and always will be there, we reason, until we’re deprived of either. “I love you more than air” is similarly almost absent in its own muted near-stasis, a lurching mass of low, low bass tones that hover on the razor’s edge of perception. It sounds like a small earthquake, someone’s remixed heartbeat, or a distant undergraduate party where the playlist is stuck on an undistinguished techno single. It sounds an inconsequential happening that has little impact on your life; your conscious mind acknowledges and then disregards it, swiveling to face other concerns, and when you’re no longer interested or aware, it dissipates completely. Sometimes, you don’t even notice that it’s gone. Your loss.