When people fall in love with your flowers and not your roots, they don't know what to do when autumn comes.

Attraction to the surface is easy. Commitment to the full person is different. The bloom — success, appearance, the best-day version of someone — is visible and immediate. The roots — values, patterns under stress, the self that shows up in difficulty — take time to see. Relationships built on the bloom without the roots have no mechanism for winter. The question to ask early is not just whether you like who someone is when everything is good. It is whether you can be present for who they are when it is not.