The Place That Made Me

How a Small West Virginia Town Taught Me Everything I Know About Love

There’s something about the first place you call home. It gets under your skin in ways you don’t fully appreciate until you’re somewhere else, sipping overpriced lattes and pretending to know how to pronounce “charcuterie.” For me, that place is a speck on the map of West Virginia—a town bracketed by rolling mountains and wrapped in a rhythm that’s equal parts fireflies and coal dust. It was a place where life was slow, love was complicated, and relationships were as much about compromise as they were about connection. And boy, did it teach me how to navigate the wild, wonderful world of love and intimacy (sometimes the hard way).

Growing up in Appalachia, I didn’t exactly have a front-row seat to the kind of love stories you see in rom-coms. There were no meet-cutes at artisanal bakeries or grand romantic gestures in bustling airports. Love in my town looked more like this: two people meeting at the local gas station, bonding over a shared distaste for dollar store coffee, and then spending the next 40 years arguing over the thermostat. And honestly? That’s way more romantic than anything you’ll find on Netflix.

Lesson One: Love Is Built on the Mundane

West Virginia has a way of humbling you. The landscape itself is beautiful but rugged—those lush, green hills also come with pothole-riddled roads and a wi-fi signal that flatlines at the worst possible moment. Relationships in my hometown mirrored that same paradox. They were beautiful, yes, but far from perfect. Any couple that made it past the one-year mark had spent more than their fair share of Saturdays dealing with busted washing machines or navigating Uncle Earl’s post-football-game rants.

There’s a kind of quiet romance in making life work together. It’s not the candlelit dinners or passionate declarations you see in books. It’s splitting a PB&J because payday is two days away. It’s learning to communicate not with words, but with the affectionate nudge of a steel-toed boot under the dinner table. It’s showing up for each other, day in and day out, even when the shine wears off.

Love isn’t built on fireworks—it’s built on laundry. If you can fold matching socks together without wanting to throttle each other, you’re already ahead of the game.

Lesson Two: Don’t Ignore the Cracks

In every small town, gossip travels faster than an unmasked sneeze. Betty Jo’s marriage is on the rocks? Everyone knows before she’s even had time to properly cry about it. While I don’t endorse this level of nosiness, it’s taught me an important truth: no relationship is perfect. Even the ones that look rock-solid from the outside have their fair share of cracks.

I watched couples in my community hit some pretty hard lows. Sometimes they patched things up through sheer grit and determination. Sometimes they walked away, because that’s the right choice too. What I learned is that you have to face those relationship cracks before they turn into full-on earthquakes. Avoiding issues only amplifies them, and silence can be just as cutting as a shout.

Growing up, I saw how honesty played out—not as a Hallmark moment, but as those raw, real conversations over a plate of fried chicken. It’s messy and uncomfortable, but it’s also where real connection happens. If you’re not willing to face the cracks in your relationship, you’ll never understand just how strong the foundation can be.

Lesson Three: Patience Isn’t a Virtue, It’s a Survival Skill

If small-town life teaches you anything, it’s patience. You wait for the mail to show up (three days late, usually). You wait for the fog to lift before you can make the drive to work. And let me tell you, the DMV line near my hometown can make a grown man want to start whittling furniture just to pass the time.

That same patience is a non-negotiable in relationships. I’ve seen too many people rush into love expecting it to be all doe-eyed glances and movie montages. But real love takes time. It’s messy, inconvenient, and requires a kind of resilience you don’t fully understand until you’ve had to calmly explain why it’s “my turn to pick the restaurant.”

My parents, bless them, made patience look effortless. My mom once waited six hours on a hard wooden bench at the ER while Dad got six stitches in his forehead after trying to build his own deck without “wasting” money on blueprints. Patience, in that instance, looked a lot like restraint. But it stuck with me: loving someone means suspending your own timeline and making room for theirs. Sometimes that means sitting through endless recountings of your partner’s fantasy football triumphs, even if sports make your eyes glaze over. Patience is the heartbeat of longevity.

Lesson Four: Keep Your Roots, Grow Your Wings

Moving away from West Virginia wasn’t easy. I traded coal trains for palm trees, two-lane roads for eight-lane highways, and Loretta Lynn crooning on the radio for... whatever experimental noise my California neighbors called “music.” In LA, I discovered a lot—brunch culture, yoga mats, and, yes, a love that eventually fizzled out. But through it all, what stuck with me were those Appalachian lessons: Keep things simple. Be honest. Stick it out when it matters. Let it go when it doesn’t.

Maine, where I now live, feels like a happy middle ground. It’s quieter here, with its rocky coastline and lobster traps, but the lessons of home come flooding back. Romance isn’t in a grand ocean view or a perfectly executed Instagram post. It’s in the long walks down dusty roads, the off-key singing while you fix up a junky old house, and the laughter that sneaks out when neither of you expect it.

Love, Like Home, Is Where You Make It

I used to think the purpose of relationships was to be someone’s everything. That’s what the movies told me, at least, and it sounded poetic enough to believe in. But West Virginia taught me a different truth: good relationships aren’t about being someone’s everything—they’re about being someone’s everyday. They’re about found moments of quiet joy, quick kisses while the kettle boils, and the unspoken knowledge that, no matter where life takes you, there’s a person who knows the best and worst parts of you... and sticks around anyway.

So whether you find your “home” in the hills of Appalachia, the chaos of a big city, or a sleepy little coastal town, remember this: love isn’t about where you go. It’s about who you’re with and how fiercely you’re willing to nurture the life you build together.

And don’t underestimate what a well-timed boot nudge under the table can do.