In Defense of Love

I recently went on a first date and my date asked me why: “Why love and love stories?”- Yes, the irony wasn’t lost on me but we aren’t going to dissect my questionable love life just yet.

I gently explained to him: love makes for some of the best kinds of stories. It isn’t something we instantly outgrow once our frontal lobe finishes developing. It’s not less literary or academic in nature than a tragedy. And honestly, exploring the human heart isn’t less important than saving the world from intergalactic disaster by way of aliens or billionaires.

But here’s the crux of it— love is us . It informs so much of what we do or don’t do. It how we make sense of this complicated place we occupy as people.

Love is an act of resistance. It’s choosing softness in a world that wants you to be hard. It’s choosing vulnerability over detachment. It’s choosing hope over nihilistic cynicism. Love says: you matter.

And contrary to popular belief, love isn’t all hearts and roses. It's political and deeply rooted in the uncomfortable realities of identity, class, race, gender and most importantly, power. In many stories, the stakes aren’t just love—they’re survival, belonging, and most importantly, freedom.

So back to his question of why?

Because I want to see and share stories where love belongs to everyone—not just the narrow cultural default of whiteness, straightness, cisgender identity, thinness, youth, wealth, neurotypicality, and able-bodiedness that we are constantly confronted with. I want stories that understand that emotional courage is just as brave as grieving a lost child in the shadow of history, unraveling identity amid societal collapse, or facing the absurdity of one’s existence with nothing but a cigarette and a hollow stare. Simply put, I want to continue to believe that love—this fucking messy, often inconvenient and irrational, and profoundly transformative thing— is still worth writing about, despite a world that is hell-bent on making it hard to survive.

Love and its’ stories challenges us to see the world not just as it is, but as it could and should be. Better. Kinder. Sexier.

So yeah, I’ll keep chasing the stories with the swoony declarations and quiet gestures. I’ll keep watching and reading stories that make me cry over characters who learn to love themselves as much as they love each other. And I’ll keep writing about it all here, because love stories aren’t a guilty pleasure you read in the shadows. They deserve the light, just like the people they come from.