on love

am i capable of loving? (and a poem about love)

shot on leica cl

The New York City subway, lately, has become a gallery of longing.

Tired of situationships? Find your soulmate at

Done with the games? Meet someone real on—

The ads have multiplied like a new kind of graffiti. A fresh wave of dating apps, elbowing for market share, each one promising what the last one failed to deliver.

The air underground is restless with it. Ten million strangers brushing past each other every day, and above their heads, pastel billboards insisting that love is just one download away.

—

Four years ago, I was a ghost in those chat windows.

I don’t mean this poetically. I mean I would vanish mid-conversation, or I would watch myself be vanished. The ellipsis appearing, then disappearing, then nothing. I was interchangeably a perpetrator and a victim, though these words feel too dramatic for something that had become so mundane. Ghosted, or ghosting. The vocabulary itself had flattened into something casual. Something you mentioned over brunch.

I learned to choreograph. How to present. At which date to surface the scary questions. How much vulnerability to risk before it became too much. When to accept imperfection in someone else, and more terrifyingly, when to let them see mine.

What I was learning, I realize now, was how to be loved.

I spend so much of my life on this passive construction. How to be desirable. How to be chosen. How to be kept. I curate myself into the most lovable version, smoothing edges, performing ease.

The whole apparatus assumes love is something we receive. A verdict rendered by someone else. We measure our worth by the quality of attention we attract, as if love were a kind of market transaction, and we were all just standing in line hoping our number gets called.

—

I believed this for a long time.

Then I met someone who loved me—really loved me—and I realized I had no idea what to do with it. I knew how to perform. I knew how to attract. I didn’t know how to stay. I didn’t know how to give without calculating what I’d get back. For years I had been asking am I enough? and suddenly the question that mattered was am I showing up?

Not am I loved. But do I know how to love?

Erich Fromm wrote about this in 1956, and it encapsulates what’s been on my mind quite exactly:

Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love.

Loving is a muscle. Something that atrophies if you don’t use it. Once the infatuation fades, what remains is Do I know how to stay? Do I know how to give?

This reminds me that at dinner tables, we often hear: Are you seeing anyone? Did you find the one? Maybe we should start asking: Are we any good at loving?

To be honest, I don’t really have an answer if you were to ask me. I’ve been trying though—turning the question over, watching how active love behaves in different lights. Romantic ones, yes. But even more so the others: family, siblings, friends. Practicing and practicing …… making the conscious choice to care, to reach out first without waiting to see if it’s returned, to say the tender thing instead of swallowing it, to give my love away like it’s not a limited resource.

shot on leica cl

—

Recently, I caught a glimpse. A fragment of my slowly evolving definition of love. A single frame from a longer film.

I want to collect these. Moments where the muscle moves and I can feel it.

Here you go, though I’m still not sure what it means:

On love

We spend so much time learning how to be loved,

how to be desirable, chosen, kept.

We practice the posture of being wanted.

But we rarely ask what it means to love.

When I first loved someone deeply,

love did not feel like affection or devotion.

It felt like a wish with no shape yet:

to experience your pain for you.

Pain is supposed to be obvious.

They say it announces itself.

Loud, unmistakable,

etched into faces,

folded into voices,

visible in the way bodies collapse inward.

Pain, they say, is real.

And yet, in loving you,

I begin to doubt its form.

If pain is so concrete,

why can’t it be held?

Why can’t it be moved?

Why can’t it be passed

from one body to another?

I imagine pain as matter—

something with mass,

obedient to the laws of physics.

Energy conserved, never lost.

Only transferred.

If this were true,

loving you would be simple.

And so I begin to think…

Perhaps pain is abstract after all.

Still, I love you enough

to imagine a world where love is

that if physics allowed it,

I would take your suffering into myself

without hesitation.

to my most loved person on earth