Engaged Harry & Elvi by Juvenco

What makes a healthy relationship?

There are a lot of theories out there and we go by judgment also gut feeling. And if that’s still working after a while, we compare our two different personalities and assume we’re the perfect combination.

While we’re not exactly sure what combinations work best, we do know it’s important to achieve harmony. Love is all about balance, about finding that sweet spot between “two peas in a pod” and the law of “opposites attract.”

There are always going to be overlapping characteristics and weird similarities between two people. You can’t be completely different because then you’d never have anything to agree on.

I’ve found that successful relationships are ones in which you can enhance certain characteristics of your couple while simultaneously adding your own to the mix. Your couple helps balance out your one extreme side with his or her own extreme side.

There’s no filling in the gaps, just balancing the scale. You represent one side of the spectrum, and they represent the other. Those things that make you unique and lovable are the things that make you special and perfect for them.

There are a lot of different combinations that may or may not work with people. So instead of going off personalities, what if we went off the scales? What if the sign of a great relationship was how well you balanced the scale of two extremes?

These are what I’ve come to learn from Harry & Elvi. They are the Yin & Yang of a relationship, they need not to have similarities, but they complement each other with their opposite attracts like dancing where one has to move forward, the other has to move backward, synchronously in the melody. While she is a sleepless damsel at night, he went to bed damn early; while she eats whatever is served on the table, he can only eat if there is meat on the plate; while she enjoys reading books and watches tv series for leisure, he goes to the gym for leisure.

The subtle kind of love Harry & Elvi would be love in a distant kind of way, the same way the sun heats the earth. There are not much of skin-ships, nothing much of spoken words, but their gestures and eye contact would tell you a lot about them. Through these, sometimes you may find those similarities that warms your hearts: how they enjoy watching movies &  savouring cakes together.

They love each other in an abstract kind of way, the way a bee loves honey. Being in love is nice, sure, that’s why observing them behind the lens isn’t much work to do.

They were in love in a subtle kind of way. It wasn’t the kind of love you see in movies, with swelling music and giant gestures and running through the streets to catch a departing train. It wasn’t the kind of love that Byron or Shakespeare wrote about, with flowery language and hyperbole and iambic pentameter. It was still and deep, like water that you might mistake for shallow if you just watched the surface. It is entirely them, not dependent on their own feelings toward each other, and it would still be there whether she, or him, or everyone else on the world disappeared. It was a subtle kind of love, but it was true.

And they are in love.

written with that subtle kind of love,
Juven

MUA: Loide Ong
Dress: Yefta Gunawan & Hartono Gan