I need it to not be chemicals

stories about love

“I know it when I see it,” is what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornographic materials. Well, funnily enough, the same can be said of love.

This playboy was jorkin that thang

You can’t set out to be profound and that’s especially true when it comes to the topic of love. If anything, that’s a surefire way to end up saying things that are inane and facile. I don’t believe it’s because people lack profundity; rather, someone else has likely already expressed it better. Attempting to articulate the meaning of love is like trying to describe a sunset or explain a smell. Outside the realm of my own experiences of longing, love, pain and desire, I find the stories people tell me of their lives to be the most informative, like a map to the place where the true meaning of love is buried.

I asked strangers questions about love, specifically stories about unrequited love, or what love meant to them, or just their relationship to the experience of it. I received hundreds of texts and voicemails, so many that I couldn’t sort through them all. I am sharing excerpts of the statements and stories, pieces that felt like they touched upon the pulsing vein of the thing itself.

It may only be a projection of myself and my own opinions on love, because isn’t that just how it is? Like overhearing someone’s conversation at a bookstore and making decisions about who they are and what their life is about. I can’t help that, though I do think all of these excerpts, in totality, contain something true. Something I am not yet talented enough to write. I am cheating, with your help, to find the contours of love.

You said:

When I was 30 years old I was living with my partner and we planned to get married. He had struggled with mental health issues for years, and heartbreakingly he took his own life at 29. I was absolutely devastated but had a moment of clarity in my darkness about the brevity and fragility of life, but also about the conditions that aggravated his despair: debt, lack of access to healthcare, and the isolation these ingredients brew. Since his death I became involved with local community organizations and mutual aid. I know this love grew from the ruins of my broken heart and was just a transference of energy.

You said:

Love is infinite, but the amount of time we have to express it isn't. As a trans person I know this, and I believe in love because life is too short to pretend not to.

You said:

the universe loves us so much it keeps the earth spinning.

You said:

I am a lesbian - yearning is my default position

You said:

I think love lifts the world when it happens. I think of how my face can see his face and it makes me smile.

You said:

I still believe in love I will always believe in love because I have it in my heart even when it's not being returned.

You said:

Maybe at the coffee shop over the weekend someone will ask me about my day. Maybe it'll be my cute next door neighbor who offered to help me bring up the groceries that one time.

There is something so cruel about falling in love with the potential rather than the person.

You said:

Any kind of ownership is absolutely off the table. People change, move, grow, and relationships need to have the space to accommodate that.

You said:

Finally, as an act of self-sabotage that I still regret, I asked him, "Well if I hadn't transitioned do you think something would have happened between us?"

And he paused. And that pause was not at all short.

You said:

Tell me I have love. That I was open and not hollow. That I was magnetic and not sticky. Tell me they felt my love, the way I felt it.

You said:

i have a straight friend who i know im really attracted to. last tuesday, i saw him perform for the first time. i didn't know he could sing so well. i did my best not to make eye contact with him when he was on stage. i was worried it'd make my heart flutter (it did).

i think i can allow myself a small bit of love for him, can't i? i can allow him a special place in my heart. i'm not an idiot, i know we'll probably drift apart at some point. can't i love him for the brief amount of time i'll know him?

it might hurt. sometimes i like to hurt.

sometimes i like to hurt for love.

You said:

I thought I was in love with someone for a really long time. He cared about me deeply, not sure he ever loved me though. We were only kind of together for about a year, we “stayed friends” and I thought I was in love with him for seven years after that.

I grew up in a pretty unsafe household, I think he was the first person that made me feel safe.

You said:

i'm drunk and sulking after the worst daytona 500 of my life and i saw [your question] and it reminded me that the reason i'm so mad is because of how much i love that stupid sport

You said:

I got tired of being the one to ask for change and getting nothing in return. It was not a partnership. I was merely there for the sake of being there when it benefited him.

You said:

Romantic is not in the budget. We need to love the future first.

You said:

Well, I guess I'm still too young to say it'll never happen, but it hasn't happened so far. Of course there's more in life than romantic love. I have great friendships, and a great family. I love all of them very much. I don't think it's a matter of believing in it or not, it's out there, it exists. I just wish...I don't know, I wish it would happen to me.

You said:

The world around us wants me to reduce him to a man whose death is somehow less tragic than anyone else’s because he “knew the risks” and that’s frankly bullshit. I wake up every morning and still say that I love him even though the way in which I mean it has changed drastically. Going through that horrific and frankly avoidable loss, I started to love myself and find peace in my own company. I see love actively in the way my friends and I rally around each other when shit gets bad.

You said:

The solidarity within social movements is where my heart finds peace and love, they're reminders to me of why love is truly the solution to all and why healing relies on celebrating each other's dignity and right to life. Those celebrations ARE love.

sometimes we get so stuck in despairing over not having it that I think we forget about other ways that love is meant to appear for us.

You said:

I could never let go of the trauma because with it was the most delicious love I had ever experienced.

You said:

Despite my offer to switch, she drove the whole six hours back in silence. The desert beyond stretched empty and hollow.

You said:

sometimes i fear im going to run away from my future husband and kids. though im not married or pregnant of the sort, i feel suffocated by my potential future.

You said:

I have my first girlfriend at the age of 17 and I'm so in love it's wonderful. It's been 5 months and she's just so accommodating and sweet and she gives me something to improve myself for.

We're both from Mormon families but we both secretly don't believe at all and don't care about the rules.

You said:

The idea of living in a world without her alive in it is what I would imagine the equivalent of hell is—I’m not religious. I love her more than life itself, and not sharing every moment with her would be a tragedy.

You said:

I believe in love because of my mom.

When she was dying from cancer, her last day with us she just kept saying how beautiful love is, how love was the most important thing in the world. That there was nothing like love. I think my mom meant platonic and romantic love. My mom loved so many people so deeply. I was overwhelmed to see everyone who loved her back at her wake. I’d never seen so many people before. All the way back from her childhood to people she had met a few months before…my mom was right. Love is the most important thing in the world. And love I think is the reason for keeping going when things get tough. It’s my mom’s love for me that has kept me going.

Even though she’s not here anymore, I can still feel her love.

Is love outside our grasp? Is its tendency to defy description indicative of its unruly, undefinable nature? I think the answer is no. Many of us were loved imperfectly—or, in some cases, even harmed—by our very first caregivers, who were meant to teach us the meaning of love. We are taught love by broken people, and it is inevitably twisted through hurt and insecurity, fear and loathing.

I am struck by the pervasive pain and absence that seem to form an integral part of so many people's stories about love. Perhaps love, in any form, is also defined by its penumbras—the shadows cast around it that reveal what love is not.

Notably, much of the discussion has centered on romantic love, the primary focus of some of my open-ended questions. Yet, love takes on many forms.

To me, love is the animating force behind all good things. The love of oneself and one's neighbor is essential for a functioning world. The most destructive actors are often those who are deeply self-isolated and consumed by hatred. One need only read the news to encounter powerful individuals with long histories of abuse, estranged relationships with family, and a version of self so disconnected from reality that it belies an inner misery and loneliness.

Figures like Elon Musk seem to exhibit behavior that points to a spiraling inner turmoil—a profound self-loathing that, when weaponized, contributes to the destruction of our shared future. I might have more empathy for such individuals were they not channeling their inner pain into actions that harm not only themselves but the world at large. In this sense, the absence of love is as potent as its presence. The future they see reflects back a life that they know every day: a life without love, and world without care for neighbors and even, to some extent, themselves.

This is the self-destructive reality of a capitalist philosophy steeped in relentless individualism—a loveless, bitter, and ultimately destructive paradigm.

So, did we figure out what love is?

Maybe it’s just chemicals. Probably it’s chemicals.

But it’s also something chemicals can’t capture. It’s the shape of a thing that doesn’t quite fit into synapses, a sound that doesn’t have a frequency, a code we can’t sequence. Surely, it’s not just chemicals. Or is it? But it’s not. Right? Fuck.

You said:

There's love as in the chemical hormonal reaction that occurs in our brains that affects us neurologically in so many ways.

Then there's the love that you can call metaphysical or spiritual or whatever. A force beyond physics.

I believe in this love as the intangible connective force between everything. We know that every atom affects every other atom in the universe through gravitational attraction because of the original connection between everything at the origin or the universe. I believe love is the psychic manifestation of this attraction.

Love is the song in which every part of the universe is a note.

We are all a part of each other because the very star dust that composes us used to literally be together. I love and care for humans and other-kind because they are me and also uniquely themselves, distinct parts that make up the universal whole.

Love is the ultimate numinous quality of it all.

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Today’s image is John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia” (1851-1852)