#46: L♥V3 C0D3 = LOVE CODE

I am proof of someone’s battle. Like a medal resting on a soldier’s chest, my existence testifies to a victory that came at great cost.

I have always understood love as a complete offering; it asks for your hands, attention, restraint, and courage all at once. To me, it has always been like a house that is intentionally built, brick by brick, with sacrifice as the foundation, consideration as the walls, and presence as the roof that keeps everything from collapsing when the weather changes. Your love is not proven by intensity, but by how often it chooses to stay, to listen, to adjust even when there is nothing to gain or when no one is watching.

It’s the month of love, and as people speak openly about their struggles with love — with parents, friends, communities, and romantic partners — I find myself both tender and observant. I’m in awe of how differently love is interpreted, how deeply our definitions are shaped by what we received or were denied. So now love has become subjective and revealing. How someone loves tells you who they’ve had to become to survive.

Before I had language for it, love had already found me. I came by the careful convergence of lives that had no idea what they were ushering in. Before grandparents crossed paths, before parents conceived me, before I ever formed a thought about worth or belonging, love was already in motion. I am proof of someone’s battle. Like a medal resting on a soldier’s chest, my existence testifies to a victory that came at great cost. Jesus’ triumph over death is not an abstract theology to me; it is deeply personal. It means that before I could speak, before I could earn, before I could fail, love had already decided I was worth everything. So I grew up knowing love in its deepest form — as a gift already given. That kind of love doesn’t lie, belittle, manipulate, or humiliate. It isn’t condescending, ungrateful nor does it demand erasure to maintain proximity. I know love to consider, stay present, pay attention, ask, listen and move accordingly.

Yet as I interact with people I have begun to think that many people don’t recognize love because while they might have never had the chance to grow in love, they also never took the time to define it for themselves. Ask most people what love is for them and they will struggle to articulate it. At best, they offer something generic, borrowed, or reduced to a framework. They wait for grand declarations and overlook the small, faithful ways they are being carried. Familiarity dulls their sight, and love becomes invisible simply because it is consistent. To say that love feels like warm coffee with two cubes of brown sugar, soft music in the background, extra cream added slowly, and the temperature held just right so it doesn’t burn your lips on a cold morning — that level of specificity feels too intimate, too exposing. Naming love in detail requires self-awareness, and self-awareness asks for honesty and honesty is demanding.

I’ve learned to be detailed about what love looks like and what it is not for me. That clarity has saved me. It allows me to recognize when I am unloved, to teach people how to love me, and to walk away without negotiation when those teachings are dismissed. I think the world is wide, and love is not rare in it so why then do people behave as though the people in front of them, who don’t value them, are the only ones capable of loving them?

If we believe that life often meets us at the level of our audacity, why do we reserve that belief for careers and ambition? With work and money, we are precise. We negotiate. We refuse crumbs. We know our worth but with love, we suddenly become flexible. We settle. We excuse absence and call it maturity. Why is that?

Is it because many people know they cannot ask for devotion they themselves have not become? That when a mirror is held up, what stares back feels unfinished or hollow? Is it because becoming a good person requires a kind of inner labour that feels too slow, too uncomfortable, too costly? Or because some people lost this war before adolescence, and they’ve been surviving instead of healing ever since? These questions sit heavily with me, because the answers shape entire lives.

As I write this, I feel my anger rise — deep and burning. I am angry that people are afraid to ask for love in detail, afraid to say this is how I need to be loved, because they fear loneliness, judgment, or rejection. I hate that peer pressure convinces people to accept emotional starvation and call it compromise. I hate that so many will never be deeply loved, fully seen, or completely heard, and because of that, they will shrink themselves to fit relationships that were never designed to hold them.

A well-loved person blossoms. You can see it in how they move through the world, how they speak, how they create, how they give. Love births people who heal rooms, who expand spaces, who change outcomes. I hate what the absence of love does to people. I hate the number of could-have-beens walking around dimmed because no one nurtured their becoming.

I don’t know if there is a clean ending to a conversation like this but I know this much: if this generation does not take the time to discover who we truly are, we will never know what we want, what we deserve, or what we are capable of asking for. We will keep mistaking familiarity for love, endurance for devotion, and we will keep passing down unnamed wounds as inheritance. The next generation will then inherit our silence, our fear of asking, our habit of settling.

A world raised in love does not shrink people and if we continue to let hate rule this world, then nothing truly changes. Not systems. Not families. Not futures.

Until next Thursday,

know you are loved.

Pherkeh.