Love is a word we understand from a very young age. As we start to navigate the world, we feel it towards people, such as our parents, or objects, such as a favorite toy. Through our shared physical and emotional growth spurts, our understanding of love follows suit, blossoming in a messy, euphoric, and uniquely human way. I remember my early loves. The people who raised me; my mom, my sister, my aunt, my grandmother, my extended family, my childhood friends. The things that awoke my lifelong loves; Tom Petty’s music, the Boston Red Sox, skiing at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire. I’ve always felt things with an intense naivete. It’s what makes my passions so strong and my emotions hard to contain at times. I loved hard as a kid, still do, and hopefully always will. 

When reflecting on romantic love, my love life has followed similar patterns. My first taste was an infatuation with a girl in elementary school who I dreamed of at night and couldn’t get off my brain (but followed through on these emotions exactly 0%). Then came the high school and college romances where I started to see the results of my intense emotions and sought to work on leveling them out. Then the entanglement of my early 20s that set me down a darker path of resentment, cynicism, and callousness, albeit an experience I ultimately grew from. All of these loves faced a benchmark of true love set by my parents; my mom described my dad as the perfect husband with 20 perfect years together. Then he was gone forever. I was 6. My subconscious became molded and dominated by grief, anger, and fear of abandonment. I became a prime recruitment target for the Sith (I get one cheesy Star Wars reference, another seminal love of mine growing up). I faced this pull towards finding the same kind of true love and this push back from the idea that someone I love could just disappear from my life. The entanglement in my 20s rekindled those feelings. And sadly it was a love that I over-romanticized rather than seeing it for what it was (and more importantly what it wasn’t). Blame it on my youth, blame it on unresolved childhood trauma, either way I learned (eventually) from all of these failures that I needed to root my life in me rather than another person. A romantic partner was meant to enhance and expand my life, not serve as its foundation. 

So why am I telling you all of this? Well, because I have a new EP coming out that explores love in 2025, what I’ve seen in others and experienced myself, and how to make sense of it all. Is love possible when the internet, social media, and AI have warped how we connect? Is romanticizing loss healthy to know what you want or blinding because you lust after something that’s not real? How strong is the envy of the married person to the single person and vice versa? Why don’t I feel like I’ll ever act my age when it comes to responsibility, commitment, having children, etc? Why do I overthink everything and miss out on the simple joys of love and life? Is magic real and worth pursuing in the context of love? And what’s the point of chasing love if you know it’s going to end one way or another in heartbreak or death? Well I’m here to say: It’s a cruel, cruel world, darling, but don’t you ever stop loveseeking, cause baby, that’s life. (Those are the song titles on the EP, I hope you give it a listen. This is the last shameless plug of the blog)

At the time of its writing, I had given up on love. I didn’t love myself which in turn was impacting my love for the people and things that had surrounded me since I was a child. My love for music was impacted. Every new failure created more desperation. This desperation manifested itself in a reckless abandon because I thought there was no point thanks to the void that love had left me to drift in. And then life hit me in the mouth. I met someone who reignited the pure unadulterated love I had felt as a kid. I’m in awe sometimes of how powerful this kind of love is and know it’s one I’ve never felt before. With time and work, I began to heal some of those wounds, learn to trust, and feel secure within the confines of this love in ways I never imagined. It has changed me. I now have visions of what my future could look like, although I don’t have any idea of what will actually happen in this future. Nobody does and anybody who claims to, hit me up because I want some of what you’re smoking. But it doesn’t matter. I could spit out classic platitudes about “life’s all about the journey, not the destination”, “carpe diem”, or “nothing in this life is guaranteed.” Whichever flavor of the week you prefer, I’m sure Buzzfeed has a top 50 list of them. It pains me to admit it, they’re kind of right.  

Yes, the world is a scary place right now and humanity appears to be crumbling under the weight of tyranny, bigotry, self-obsession, capitalism, and self-inflicted climate destruction (we’ll save these topics for another day). Yes, everyone I talk to hates dating apps, they wish men would be better humans and stop having a minority ruin the perception of the majority (also another topic for another day), and for social media to stop presenting these falsified fantasies of fanatical fiction that ruin real world reference. Yes, the future is SCARY, especially when you feel like you have no control. I don’t have any answers for you as there’s still plenty of questions I’m asking and will be asking, both in the context of my music and within my life as a whole. All I know is that the gut, soul level feeling of joy is the best thing we have to fight against the pain, anger, and fear that’s perpetuating the world. Like the renaissance that bloomed as a result of the dark ages, I believe humans have the infinite capacity for hope, change, and love to overcome these times and reinvigorate our relationship with love in our lives. And love comes from connection. It comes from following your passions. And it comes from opening yourself up, throwing yourself blindly into the arms of the unknown in order to connect with someone, and then trusting that whatever happens next will bring you joy infinitum. This joy is your power, use it for good and spread it back into the world, the things you love, and the people that make this life worth exploring until the very end. So I implore you to seek, share, and champion love the way that I’ve learned to do.