Love has more than one shape

Most writing about love is really writing about romance. The word gets used as if it had one meaning, and everything that does not fit — the friend who shows up when nobody asked, the parent you are still learning to talk to, the grief that arrives because you loved someone — gets filed somewhere else.

This site starts from the opposite assumption. Love has more than one shape, and the shapes are different enough that they deserve to be looked at separately.

What this site covers

The ancient Greeks split love into several words, and that framework still holds up. But this is not a site about Greek vocabulary. It is a site about what these kinds of love actually look like in a life:

• Friendship — the relationships with no ceremony, no contract, and no obvious moment where they begin.
• Family — the love you did not choose, and what to do when it is complicated.
• Romance — the one everybody writes about, approached without the usual assumptions.
• Self-love — a phrase that has been flattened by marketing, and is worth reclaiming.
• Grief — what love becomes when the person is gone.
• Community — care extended to people you will never meet.

Each essay takes one of these seriously enough to spend real time on it.

Two languages, both real

Every piece is published in English and Traditional Chinese. Neither is a translation of the other in the mechanical sense — each version is written to be read naturally in its own language. The claims, the facts, and the sources stay the same across both.

This costs more time than writing once. It is worth it, because the ideas here are not language-specific, and readers should not have to settle for a version that reads like it was run through a machine.

What to expect

Long essays, published steadily. No listicles, no engagement bait, no pretending that a complicated subject is simple. When a piece makes a factual claim, the sources are recorded.

If any of that sounds worth your time, the essays start here.