Patient is first on the list

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.1 Corinthians 13:4

That verse gets read at weddings, where it is mostly decorative. It was written to a community that was arguing, and it is a list of behaviors, not feelings.

Patient comes first. Not most loving, not most affectionate — patient. The slow, unglamorous, answer-the-same-question-for-the-ninth-time kind.

Which means the afternoon you just had, the one you think went badly — the repeating, the waiting, the not snapping — was the thing itself. Not the interruption to it.