MEDITATIONS ON LOVE

words by FRANCESCO PIZZUTI

In an age of seemingly infinite choices, has love lost its meaning? Has its significance shifted? Can an emotion so intrinsically human and visceral suffer from radical change?

What has definitely transformed is the economy of love, the ecosystems that surround the emotion and its expressions. I don’t just mean that love got capitalised and gamified through acquirable products and dating apps; I mean that culturally, socially, and politically, we are different people than we were fifty years ago. We move through the world differently. We want different things. We know too much, maybe.

In a nihilistic way, sometimes love feels almost like a joke we are all in on. We grew up with examples we admire yet refuse to follow, because we want more. We hate social media, yet we favour it time and time again through infinite loops of story likes, thirst traps, half-assed texts, and carefully timed replies. In a way, it would be easy to say that true love is dead, that romanticism is dead because we refrain from grand gestures, but the intention is still there. We still want to meet. We still want to talk, to understand, to try, to touch, to love.

Love isn’t abstract. It is felt, it overtakes, unsettles, softens, and ruins you a little. That remains. What changes is the ways we are allowed to want and the ways we are expected to perform that wanting. It is all more complicated now, more open, more unstable. Yet it is far from being less powerful. If anything, it’s the opposite. Love is still what makes us feel alive. In its driving force, it reminds us we have — and we are — physical bodies, and that matters. What are you doing, really, if not acting on love?

Maybe love used to mean stability. Marriage. A shared life arranged around recognisable forms. Or perhaps that is too easy, too nostalgic, too clean. Love was made of rules set in stone and steps to follow attentively, yet, looking back, there was something almost radical in staying, when staying was not just an obligation but a desire; when the two intertwined.

Now, love has taken a more fluid form; it has started slipping out of the old binaries of marriage or failure, romance or friendship, desire or care. We all date, we all question these codes, we all somewhat experiment. What has changed is probably that fewer and fewer people have an answer — and that is what comes with openness: the realisation that there is never truly a perfect way to do something. There is no final right way to love. There are ways to perform it, paths one can choose, structures one can inhabit or refuse. And there is nothing wrong with choosing a structure, either. But openness does not mean that love has to become vague. Freedom does not mean that feeling has to lose its intensity. Because love is intensity.

Love is visceral. It nourishes the soul and, at times, absolutely destroys your peace. Love tells you so much about who you are. It is self-discovery, but not in the clean, inspirational way. More like being exposed. More like suddenly seeing the shape of your own need, your own fear, your own tenderness. Love is still pain. Love is still an obsession, at least for a while. Love is still the thing that makes you ridiculous and alive.

But when the choices are endless, or at least when we are made to believe they are, how can one direct love? How do you know where to put it? We end up all over the place, all wrapped up in the messiness of the current day, seeking who knows what stimuli, chasing ambition, protecting ourselves from the inevitable pain of loss. We want to feel everything, but we also want to survive feeling it.

So what can guide you home?

I think friendship can.

That is love too, familiarity, knowing the other person, being adjusted to them, being used to the shape of their presence. What a beautiful proof that love can last outside performance and outside conquest.

Love means recognition. Memorising someone; their face, their bedroom, their habits, the way the air changes around them. The intensity of being in their space, of belonging there, of feeling yourself there. Remembering how it feels and how it tastes. It is the desire to make a choice, to care, and to move toward something. I don’t think that can ever change.