on love, 2025

A canon event in college life is the weekly (or sometimes daily) talk with friends about our love lives.
Sometimes it’s a situationship, sometimes a relationship, and sometimes just one of the million stories about someone we happened to sit next to in class.

It’s strange.

We’re all so different—different types, different expectations, different lives—yet we circle around the same struggles.
And that’s not wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting love, whatever love may be.

After all, our twenties are about learning—expansively, deeply, and most importantly, clumsily.
But it’s honestly a risky bet. Not everything we learn will be the “right” things.
Sometimes we embody the “wrong” things.
Or maybe not wrong—just different from what we thought we wanted.

One thing I’ve realized is that we talk about love as if it’s approachable, controllable, and manageable.
It’s strange: the reason we keep having the same conversations, week after week, is precisely because it isn’t.
And yet, by talking it out (often too often), we make it feel approachable, controllable, and manageable, almost as if it were nothing at all.
But love tricks us.
It gives us illusions—the illusion that we hold cards, the illusion that this time might be different, the illusion that we might have a second (or third, or fourth).
An illusion.

Swipes on dating apps may look like endless better options, but they don’t guarantee better ones.
That’s why, ten times out of ten, when we read stories, plays, or memoirs, we cling to the hope of ending up with someone better than us, or someone willing to change for us—just like they did in the plot.
Definitely, an illusion.

Love is not a gamble.
It’s not a game or a market where you place bets and wait for a jackpot.
Love is more like a habit.
Commitment is a habit.
Trust is a habit.
Sacrifice is a habit.
Love is a habit—and habit is a lifestyle.

And the older we get, the more that lifestyle defines the people who stay, and the people who leave.
Maybe we shouldn’t be gambling on illusions at all.

Perhaps love is meant to stay an illusion.
That way, artists (ME) will always have something to chase.
Something to turn into work, into meaning, into food on the table.

So here’s my work on love:

On the illusion that makes us laugh and cry.
On the illusion that keeps us romanticizing and talking.
On the illusion that lets me earn pennies, dollars, and checks.