A month ago, one of my adorably few friends in Atlanta invited me to her friend’s apartment. The studio layout was complete with high ceilings, exposed beams, salvaged artsy furniture, and an abundance of dead flowers and smoking devices. I stood among four women, passing a bottle of Evan Williams around a high table and talking about love. The dull wood displayed a collection of candles melting into one another like an oozing heart.

“If they hadn’t been looking for an assistant on set, I wouldn’t have met my soulmate,” one of them said. She and her boyfriend had started dating around the time that Robby and I did. Their first experience together was of making a film.

I thought back to my first experience with Robby. When we met, he was dating a mutual friend of ours, who is still one of my favorite people. He and I barely knew each other, and certainly didn’t pay each other much mind. Summer turned to autumn, their relationship fizzled out, and she broke up with him. He texted me around Christmas. “I’m driving through Charlotte. I can feel the churches staring at me.”

I don’t remember when I told him that I lived in Charlotte, and I assume that we had exchanged numbers because the cross country team, which my friend and I were on, occasionally made plans to visit his family’s nearby lake house. I’m not even sure what I said back. I just pictured him driving down Providence Road, peering upward out of his silver car at Charlotte’s towering steeples.

Three years later, we live together in an apartment full of hope and puppy breath.

“Is your boyfriend your soulmate?” one of the women asked. It was a formality. I had talked about how wonderful he is, how happy we are, and how much I loved our new apartment. Of course he would be my soulmate.

I laughed. “Robby and I are not soulmates,” I said.

There was a beat, followed by a head cock from the delicate woman standing next to me. “Then what are you?” she asked. She looked like a deer peering through eaves.

It’s a question I spent an entire, anxious year answering. The surface truths are correct: We are people who love each other. A lot. We listen to each other’s ideas and convince the other person that yes, they can do the thing they’re scared to do. But, like many couples, we are also truly and wildly different. The disparities can leave us staring at each other, slack jawed and bug-eyed, full of astonishment as to how the other person could have possibly  arrived at some given conclusion. Our relationship started off with us “ending things” about three times. Each. Our minds don’t mesh; our personalities often don’t, either. After three years, we still cannot jointly finish a sentence. To me, being a soulmate involves a rough, core understanding—weakly described as an intuition or feeling—of the stuff that makes that person, that person. I have a friend who may be one of my soulmates, and what makes our relationship unique is that it takes very few words (although we use many) to fully depict our choices or realities to one another. With Robby, though, it takes paragraphs and hours to reveal ourselves and make the other one understand. And we are so, obnoxiously happy. That happiness doesn’t come from any sort of fall; it comes from intention and energy.

That’s the beautiful truth to a relationship between not-soulmates. We have to bleed our way through basic, daily communication. We speak intentionally and often because if one person shifts on a stance or generates a new idea, the other will certainly not pick up on it naturally. Our brain barometers don’t connect. Therefore, when things that actually matter arise, they’re cake. We are armed with continuously sharpened communication tools.

I explained this to the women at the table in the alternatively-trendy apartment. They seemed to appreciate it. I talked about how I grew up knowing that relationships weren’t what Hollywood depicted, yet dove wholeheartedly into that trap the second it presented itself. While I understand the sentiment behind the term “falling in love,” I hate the phrase. So much of love derives from choice. I agree that things are better when there’s at least a “spark” (a term that is usually misconstrued, yet I can’t help but like), but building a deep and real love involves waking up each day and intentionally strengthening the other person. There are millions of people—soulmates, even—with whom I could fall in love, and share sweatshirts, and get a dog, and argue about which constellation is which. I just daily pick the one I’m with.

Robby and I drove through South Carolina two nights ago. We were bone-tired, breathing in the scent of sandy suitcases and leftover beach food. A church with a straight, off-white steeple loomed out of the darkness.

“This is the church I passed the first time I texted you,” he said.

I thought back to the fateful letters stacked across my phone screen. “But we’re not in Charlotte,” I replied.

He gave a small smile. “I know,” he said. “I just wanted to talk to you.”