Finding love on the mountaintop

You promised presence. You promised to keep choosing the climb, even when the path narrowed, even when the weather turned.

I said yes before you finished asking.

We didn’t shout. We didn’t need witnesses. The mountain already knew. The silence wrapped around us like a blessing, ancient and patient, as if it had been waiting for this small, human vow all along.

Now, when life feels steep, I think of that first summit. Of two strangers sharing altitude and honesty. Of how love found us not when we were searching for it, but when we were brave enough to keep going.

And I know this, with a certainty as deep as the valleys below:

no matter how many mountains rise ahead of us,

we will meet them the same way—

together,

step by step,

in love.

And still, the story didn’t end there—because love, real love, never ties itself off with a neat bow. It keeps breathing.

One spring, we climbed the mountain again, not to mark an anniversary or prove anything, but because something inside us missed the way the air thinned and clarified our thoughts. The trail was familiar now, yet different—new scars from winter storms, new wildflowers insisting on life between stones. I realized then how much we had changed too. Not away from each other, but deeper into ourselves.

Halfway up, we stopped without speaking. Below us, clouds pooled in the valley like unspoken worries, things we’d once thought would drown us. Above, the summit waited—patient, unconcerned with our timing.

“Do you ever think about who you were before this?” I asked.

You nodded. “I don’t miss them,” you said gently. “But I’m grateful they started walking.”

At the top, the wind was loud enough to steal our words, so we didn’t bother with them. We sat shoulder to shoulder, sharing warmth, watching light move across the land like a slow promise. In that moment, I understood something quietly miraculous: love hadn’t made life easier. It had made it truer.

When the day comes that we can’t climb as high—or at all—I know the mountain will still live inside us. In the way we pause before difficult conversations. In the way we reach out automatically, instinctively, when the ground feels uncertain. In the way we trust the climb, even when we can’t see the top.

I once thought love would arrive as an answer.

Instead, it arrived as a companion. And every time I think back to that first summit, I smile—because I know now what I couldn’t have known then:

I didn’t just find love on the mountaintop.

I found a way to keep choosing it,

again and again,

no matter where the path leads.

Eventually, the mountain stopped being the place we went and became the place we carried.

There came a year when returning wasn’t possible. Life asked for our time in heavier ways—responsibilities, aging parents, the quiet weight of ordinary sacrifice. At first, I mourned that loss more than I expected. The mountain had been our marker, our reminder. Without it, I worried the ground beneath us might feel less sure.

But love is sneaky that way.