I’ve been talking a lot about love lately.
I’ve been recording the audiobook of Letters to My Lovers, a task that has filled my mouth with all sorts of sweet words, but it’s not just this recent to-do I’m referring to.
Love has been one of my favorite topics of conversation for most of my life, but I never realized how much it shaped me until a few years ago. I was sitting on a boat on a warm June day when a new friend asked me to tell the story of my life. I shared my lore the way it came most naturally – in chapters of who I loved, who I was when I loved them, and how that love transformed me. As I recounted my journey, I saw for the first time love’s great power to shape, create, and destroy.
That summer storytime was the genesis of Letters to My Lovers. And the beginning of a course of study to understand what this power is and why it holds us so tightly despite our best efforts to peel its fingers from our skin.
I’ve become somewhat of a social scientist on the topic. These days, one of the questions I often ask people I’m meeting for the first time is if they’ve ever been in love. I learn a lot a person by their response. Most people have felt love at least once. Some never. But a surprising number say they just don’t know.
Not knowing if you’ve ever been in love? Not trusting the way your knees buckle in another’s presence or your head melts so gently on their shoulder? It’s a sign of how misunderstood love is.
Love is inherent to our beings, but we aren’t taught to value it and look for its signs. Instead, we are told we should look for certainty. But love is a matter of faith, and certainty is a matter of the thinking mind. We can’t see love in the way that we see the sun in the sky and trust that it’s daytime and the moon tells us it’s night. When it comes to a power so vast that it underlies everything we do, we must trust it is always present.
It’s my (perhaps unpopular) opinion that people overthink love. They put far too much meaning into three words, “I love you,” as if the phrase is a magic spell that will forever bind two people together. Those words are a spell, but at their most pure form, they create a magic that awakens and enlivens us rather than strapping a chain onto our ankles and pushing us into the deep end.
The mystics have always told me that love is the fabric of the universe. The whores have taught me that this fabric is not just a thin veil of spirituality, but the real weight of bodies on top of bodies. Therefore, we love simply because we are. Thus, it creates no harm to offer our care generously as an affirmation of our very existence.
I wonder what the world would look like if we gave our love more freely in all its forms? If we put aside the idea that love is only reserved for lifelong forever and ever partnerships, but began to recognize it is just as true in friendships, short-term connections, and long-term romances, we would elevate love’s status to the level that matches its worth.
My desire to lift up love to is why I keep talking about the topic. It’s why I will not stop exploring what this power has meant to me and to those around me. Mysteries that have captivated us from the first days we blinked our eyes open cannot be cast aside as foolish whims. Indeed, love is a form of power whose ability to crack us open and pour out our milky insides can never be diminished.
I believe that love is a form of social currency. It’s time to treasure the first kiss as equally as the first dollar.
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