In the past few years I’ve had more breakups than I’d like to admit, with family members, friends and people I cared about. But even here in the City of Brotherly Love, we rarely talk about those close personal relationships that quietly fill our lives with joy and meaning, and when it comes to the complicated parts … all we have is a crooked “O” on the LOVE statue. So while Valentine’s Day puts romantic love on a rose-colored pedestal, on Feb. 14, let’s celebrate brotherly love by having the hard conversations that are sometimes needed to rebuild it.

Small talk has always been my favorite form of brotherly love. So much connection and community can be built just by remembering someone’s name, asking about their mom, or shouting a really good “hello” halfway down the block. On nice days, my preferred chit-chat outpost was a shaded corner of my front yard that was close enough to the sidewalk to talk with people walking their dogs or waiting for the bus. I’d see the same faces coming and going on their daily route and we’d exchange hesitant waves at first, but in time they’d warm up and occasionally reach over the fence to pass a story about their kids, a new job, or a sick relative. I looked forward to those meaningful moments of conversation when we went from strangers to neighbors, and was convinced that my fondness for small talk meant I’d mastered the art of brotherly love.

But sisterly affection is more than small talk; the big conversations matter, too. And judging by my scribbled mess of broken and strained relationships, I had a lot to learn. Minor disagreements with people close to me turned into a roster of feuds spanning several states. And before I knew it, I was parked outside of a family funeral — not overcome with grief, but planning the best way to ignore an uncle who’d wronged me in some trivial way. I went out of my way to speak to Scott the mailman and Jimmy the UPS driver, but when it came to the high stakes, high emotion moments of personal conflict that Joseph Grenny discusses in “Crucial Conversations,” I chose silent resentment over deep talks I didn’t know how to have.

Conflict is inevitable in relationships but beyond “please” and “thank you” we’re never really taught how to navigate the hard conversations. And like a lot of people, I inherited a shaky communication legacy passed down through generations of my family, added my own ego and pride, and headed off into the world to make a mess. But sorting things out meant learning to have the emotionally heavy conversations and not viewing their existence as a failure of brotherly love, but a chance to show it. Reaching out to the cousin you haven’t spoken to in three years is a little easier if you focus less on how much time has passed and more on the unique opportunity to show that you care enough to work on the relationship instead of throwing it away. Talking to the friend who hurt you is easier if you don’t reduce them to a laundry list of infractions, but approach conversation as a chance to deepen your bond by learning how their past experiences and baggage influence their actions. And texting that relative you never meant to hurt is more manageable if you focus less on the guilt you feel and more on the chance to give them the accountability and apology they deserve (even if you have to read “Sorry Sorry Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies” by Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy to learn how.)

But we’ll save the fairy-tale endings for Valentine’s Day because repairing relationships is uncertain work. Some things that are broken can’t (and shouldn’t) be fixed, and some crooked letters will never be upright again. But loving our brothers isn’t about loving them only when it’s easy or can be done from the comfort of our yard. It’s about loving through imperfections — theirs and ours. And if having a few hard conversations on Feb.14 helps us learn to love the people around us a little better, that’s definitely something worth celebrating.

Jasmine Schley, of Mt. Airy, is learning how to love.