Love, relationships, and building a life

A life of exploring love

13 April 2026 - 1,424 words

For a long time I have wanted to write this blogpost exactly. I’ve literally spent the entirety of what I term “my conscious life,” referring to the point at which I realized I was vaguely not a man, really in pursuit of an understanding of this amorphous concept we call “Love.” And I’m still trying to figure it out.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to write this blogpost because I thought that a completion of it would be the point at which I fully understood my relationship to love, and what it meant to me. I thought that if I could just find the words to describe love and write them all down, that I would never again be lost in the mess that we call life, because for me, there is nothing to life but love.

My gender blew up my first serious relationship, and from that point on, I realized that love was something we had to learn about, to explore, just as much as gender is. And I quickly realized that it wasn’t as simple as trying to figure out what the proper place of romance is, or how we should divvy up our life in relation to both romance and friendship, because the more I interrogated these concepts and structures that make up our lives, the less I actually understood them.

I used to have a rule that I would try to force myself to obey, it went something like this: never make life decisions based on love; the only permanent person in your life is you. Later I slightly shifted this to something like: never put romance before your friends, because your friends are the only people that will stay in your life. The clever among you will have predicted that the eventual evolution of that is to view all relationships as permanent in my life. And that’s true, but only through an extension of that second rule.

When I moved from exploring how life should be divided between romance and friendship, to exploring the very division between these two structures―and I do think they are first and foremost structures―I began to build relationships that lie outside of these two categories. I don’t mean that they lie between them, or on the margins, but beyond this categorization. And when I began to do this, the borders between different loves started to become porous.

If I’m honest with myself, I did internally categorize these particular relationships as romantic in my own head. But I don’t, and never did, feel as though that particular categorization was fundamentally or essentially true. It was just what I was most practiced at doing, I categorized them that way out of habit.

For me, I categorized them that way not because of a particular kind of feeling―I felt very different about these people―but because of the intensity of my love for them. Recently I’ve realized that it was this intensity that I subconsciously attributed to romantic love. It’s hard to generalize things from merely my own perspective, but I want to ask you to look inwards and forwards in your own life, your own feelings, and ask yourself as you continue to live your life and love your loves what it really is about your feelings that distinguish them.

I think a lot of queer people overestimate their separation from amatonormativity¹. Amatonormativity places a hierarchy between romance and friendship. Our society has collectively agreed that romantic feelings are more intense, more important, more serious, and friendships as, well, less of all these things. According to our society, your life must be structured around romance, and friendships are just a cherry on top. I really want you to consider how your own categorization of your love for others may be affected by this. I think that I have based my categorization, implicitly, on this; more serious, more intense, more committal feelings are more likely to be read as romantic in my eyes. Relationships that structure our lives are more likely to be romantic, and those that don’t are more likely to be platonic.

This isn’t to say that if I ever wanted to live with someone, I would instantly read these feelings as romantic. It’s definitely continuous (in the sense that it lies on a spectrum), and it’s more a probability calculation than anything else. But the point here is that after years of exploration, I have only found it more difficult to categorize my feelings, my relationships. The point is that I don’t know how to categorize my love outside of amatonormative prescriptions.

Through this post I’ve made reference to how we structure life in relation to love. What I mean here is that I think an often overlooked component of what love actually is in a society (and we do of course, live in a society) is that it is the very thing, arguably the only thing, that makes up social structure. The Deleuzian way of looking at this is that “desire” (not necessarily sexual) regulates the “flows” between all people and things, so for example when I eat an apple, I am pulled towards the apple through desire. In a house full of friends, our social situation is held together by the desires that flow between us freely. I love my friends, my friends love me, and thus, we choose to stay together, we feed one another, we coordinate with one another (also maybe notice how each of those things implicates other desires, such as related to food, structure itself, order, housing, etc.).

The key point here is that love is like the glue that binds us all together. Love is the very thing that creates the structure we live. I think we really need to lean into that as much as we can. And I think once we begin to interrogate this as the core feature of love, it’ll give us a lot more ground from which to explore what love means to us, and what the different types of love are, for us. I wonder if we’ll find there is more to love than a simplistic romantic/platonic dichotomy². I wonder if we’ll throw away those categories entirely and construct new ones. Or maybe you’ll decide that those categories just kind of get in the way of things, and that all we really need to do is negotiate those desires, negotiate that love, on a case-by-base, contextual basis.

More recently, I’ve started thinking of life itself as a lover of mine. An active partner who fucks up and makes mistakes, one with whom I have to constantly be figuring things out with. Life isn’t something pre-ordained or forced upon me. It’s another participant in my existence who sometimes I have to work things out with. Sometimes things are great, and sometimes they’re something to work on. But love isn’t something perfect, it’s not something that goes great and if something goes wrong its a sign to throw the whole thing out. From my first explorations of love I accepted the idea that love is a project, and that’s never left me. Love truly is, and always will be, an endless project, with its hardships, its ups and downs, its joys, its struggles, and its perfect little moments. But it’s a project we get to embark on together. And every day I get to be a part of it with my loved ones is a day that I appreciate my relationship with life.

I’m choosing to write this today not because I have figured everything out, and that these words are the last ones I’ll ever have to speak on the matter. I’m choosing to write this because I’ve realized it really is the journey that matters, not the destination. I don’t want to have the answer to what love really is, because then I wouldn’t get to explore it quite the same with the ones I love.