On my first day of primary school, I remember our form teacher lining us up in pairs, preparing us for the long march to the canteen. Girls on the left, boys on the right. We’d scramble and brush elbows, trying to make ourselves orderly, or as orderly as seven-year-olds ever could. Then we received the next set of instructions: Now hold hands with the friend beside you. The column on the right, where the boys stood, would erupt in great disapproval. The sounds of ee’s and ew’s would fill the hallways before we inevitably succumbed to our fate.
At home, my father never really talked about love. It would usually rear its face at the end of conversations, a loving substitute for saying goodbye. Have a good day at school, love you. Take care, love you. Goodnight, love you.
Condensing all the times I’d heard the word “love” come out of my father’s mouth into a single paragraph sounds endearing, but I never recalled it as such. Love was never given a proper seat at the dining table. I remember it being used to end conversations so routinely when I was younger that I grew insensitive to it—something to be blurted out on the phone so I could resume watching Voltron, cross-legged in front of my television. Love had a seat, but it belonged at the table in the back of the kitchen. It was something we all knew existed as the foundation of our family, but never to be discussed in broad daylight.
I think I was 12 the first time I saw love being bashed publicly. Taylor Swift was on top of the music world, churning out bangers like Love Story and Enchanted. The whole world was bopping their heads to We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together. Well, most of it.
Headlines would thrash her for dating too much, comments on YouTube would pile on her for only singing love songs—many of which were from men. Sure, misogyny definitely had a part to play in that, but little ol’ me couldn’t comprehend why men would ever hate women. To me, it just reinforced the belief that love was something I should be embarrassed about.
I noticed this same pattern repeating itself in the media. Men seem to treat love as something childish and fallible when it comes from women. But when it comes from men, love carries weight, depth, and complexity. Unless Richard Linklater directed it, movies about romance aren’t real art. Unless Frank Ocean sang it, songs about love are immature. Unless Haruki Murakami wrote it, romance novels are reserved for women and naïve teenagers.
But so many portrayals of love are by women, and after enough repetition, the message became instinctive. If love was unserious (think romcoms, YA novels, and the like), then admitting to it was embarrassing. And so, in real life, peers would sand their feelings down to something palatable: “Yeah, she’s cool.” You see this play out as a joke on TikTok too. Men are warm and loving off camera, but suddenly flinch and retreat the moment their partner starts filming.
Holding love at arm’s length is where most men find comfort, because embracing it completely would require them to take vulnerability and emotional labour seriously—and that is terrifying. But is it possible that this distance is the cause of the embarrassment in question?
If to love means risking rejection, to offer your soul and emotional vulnerability, to trivialise it means placing a shield over all of those things. As much as men may downplay love, I believe everyone treats it with a degree of preciousness—the desire to protect it will always be there. And to so many men, distance seems to offer the solution. It forms a buffer against mockery and judgment of the heart and maintains the illusion of control. And all this before mentioning how men grow up in a society that conditions sensitivity and vulnerability to be linked to femininity.
Love has consumed my life in adulthood. The quiet moments never get too quiet because of it, and the loud ones never get too loud. Other times, it’s capable of ripping out my guts and shoving them back in with a force that pumps pure life and catharsis into my veins. Because of this, I know that I will eventually measure my life in chapters defined by the people I loved, and who loved me.
When I decided at 14 that my dream would be to write novels, my mind immediately went to fiction. I conjured characters based on people I’d seen in movies, stories borrowed from experiences I never lived. I can’t recall when the switch flipped, but the thought of writing a novel about anything other than love now feels alien and absurd. This single emotion is responsible for some of the most memorable and formative moments of my life. Crafting and building a world from scratch is an admirable task, but doing that feels akin to choosing the grandeur I felt from watching Game of Thrones, rather than the beauty I experienced from my own life.
Much like the men I’ve mentioned over and over, I used to believe anything related to love was trite, cringeworthy, and overdone. It took some very special people to convince me of a truth that was buried under an avalanche of factors that prevented me from seeing it: love is everything.
It’s the reason why we were raised, why artists create art, why finance bros chase status and money, and why friends forgive.
In the end, all people want is to be seen as enough. And everything we do—no matter how subconscious—is to be loved a little more. No matter what we tell ourselves, or how many distractions and complications in life cloud this truth, I believe everything will eventually be distilled down to that four-letter word—and that’s nothing to be embarrassed about.
I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena, because it’s a line so devastatingly simple, yet entirely romantic, that I doubt I’ll ever get a chance to use it again.
“Yours,
(now I'm even losing my name—it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)”
