Valentine’s Day is coming up. I don’t care for it and never have. I don’t like the Hollywood-esque iconography that comes with it. Real love is beautiful and messy. It’s not naked babies with bow-and-arrows, or a fixed-price dinner. Or a diamond ring (although… 😉). Love is not something you perform once a year, and it’s not something you outsource to marketing.
Love as belonging
Belonging has been on my mind lately, partly because I just spent time in the Netherlands. The U.S. has been my home for many years now, but returning to the country where I grew up still affects me. It doesn’t feel like “home” anymore. This year marks twenty years since I moved away, and the Netherlands I returned to is not the one I left.
Some changes are obvious, others more subtle. I notice them, and I notice how much I’ve changed too. Being back brought up a kind of friction I’d been aware of for some time. It didn’t feel wrong. It simply made it clear that the place still matters to me, and that I’m in the right place now, here in the U.S.
Love as connection
I’ve also been thinking about love in a broader, more social sense. It’s hard to ignore how divided things feel right now. We seem quicker to label people into categories than to actually spend time with them, and once that happens, curiosity tends to fall away.
Out of that discomfort, I recently started a women-only Meetup group called In Good Company. We go for walks, hikes, or coffee. There’s no topic and no agenda, other than parking our politics at the door. The goal is simply to spend time together and get to know the person, not their opinions. It’s been really good so far.
Love as creativity
Then there’s writing and books, and the fact that we get to make something and put it into the world at all.
As authors, we’re living in a moment where publishing is very accessible. We can write a manuscript, prepare the files, and hold a printed book in our hands without too many obstacles. That hasn’t always been true. Being reminded of how disruptive the printing press once was put that into perspective for me. It didn’t just change how books were produced; it changed who had access to ideas and who got to participate in shaping culture.
In that sense, our current experience with AI feels like another shift. It raises real questions, challenges assumptions, and isn’t entirely comfortable. And still, people keep writing, and stories keep getting told. That part thankfully hasn’t gone away.
Maybe that persistence is another form of love. Not romance, but commitment. The decision to keep paying attention, to keep making things, and to keep contributing thoughtfully, even as the landscape keeps changing.
Love as expression
I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day, but I do try to express love as it shows up in everyday life: in language, in shared time, and in the work of creating something that didn’t exist before. As writers, that may be one of the most honest expressions of love we have.