I will always prefer vanilla to chocolate.  It’s a matter of preference and taste.  I think there’s something more feminine about vanilla. It reminds me of party dresses, balloons, and record players.  Of my mother and how she kept her nightgown tucked beneath her pillow.  Vanilla is a memory to me.  Stepping on a stool to help my mother whisk.  Scraping the specks of it from a cleaved pod, running a spoon through the nape of it.  Vanilla is prettier to me than chocolate, and certainly more tasty.  I’ve always preferred it.  I can’t help it.  I think love works this way, or should.  But maybe that’s lust.  Maybe love is when it’s not about your "heart" but about your decision.  Love is when your intellect gets in the way.  Which is everything movies and art tell us it’s not.

I don’t know if there’s a more when it comes to love.  I don’t believe people when they say they love me more now than in the beginning.  I believe in less, loving less now than then at the start, but then it wasn’t really love, now was it?  Forget romantic love.  Take a mother and child.  You don’t love more or less; you just love.  There isn’t a more to it.  More implies time makes it fuller, love blooms as we grow.  I don’t think it works that way.  Love just is or isn’t.  Sometimes we forget this and try to remind our lovers with candles and cake and our best behavior.

I hate when someone tells me they love me more now.  That they didn’t think it was possible, that it grows each day.  I don’t love that way.  And if there were no word for love–if it was just “feel” instead–then really, what we’re saying is "I feel more for you now," which means I used to feel less.  It’s proof that our feelings can wane.  We can love intensely and calmly, and that means, we can fall out of it.  We can grow to change our minds; we can love less.  That’s what “I love you more each day means to me.”  It means it’s a choice, something we can will away.  Turn off.  On.  High and less.  I hate that we can control this.  “You can’t choose who you love,” is a lie. Because your head gets involved.  If someone cheats on you, lies to you, doesn’t value you anymore, you tell yourself you have to stop loving them.  Your head gets involved and turns it off.  Pushes you to the top, making your love, you, the priority.  Your intellect wins.  If it didn’t, we would stay. 

Preference.  Propensity.  Inclination.  These are words stronger than love.  It means, I prefer you, am drawn to you, and even when I want to will it away, you are that choice.  My inclination.  I crave you, even if I don’t want to.