I am so tired of the conversations we are having about love.
The gender wars. The ghosting taxonomies. The new dating meme hashtag every two weeks that names exactly the kind of low-grade cruelty you just experienced (breadcrumbing! cuffing season! situationships!). The women have decided to de-center men, the men have apparently decided to de-center everyone, and the queer folks understand humans of all genders are challenging! We’ve got thinkpieces about touch deprivation, and the loneliness epidemic, and the death of the third place, and nobody knows how to make friends anymore, and we’re all just dissociating into our phones.
The algorithm feeds me this bitter content by the spoonful. I scroll all of it, and I feel the scarcity too. I’m not immune.
As someone who’s gone through breakups so bad that I’ve felt my sanity slip, I’ve made rules, broken rules, enforced rules on myself with the grim efficiency of a hall monitor (who was also the hall!), all in the interest of making love safer.
Today I want to offer something different: A life where love is not scarce, but rather oozing through every second of every day, so abundant that you couldn’t avoid it even if you wanted to. Where heartbreak is not the cost of loving, but rather the receipt: proof that something real moved through you. A life where grief is not something to be managed or avoided or scrolled past, but welcomed and celebrated, because it means your heart muscle is working.
Today I’m here with a prayer: the world does not need more rules and safer love. It needs more love. It needs bigger love. It needs voluminous love...
