What if love doesn’t need to become anything?

Dear Universe,

What if love doesn’t need to become anything?

I usually start my letters with some silly little seemingly-irrelevant story that triggered a flood of thought in me.

I’m not going to do that today. Because this time the story isn’t silly or irrelevant, and it’s mine to keep for myself.

But the flood of thought? It needs a place to go.

I find myself thinking a lot about love. And apparently getting rather hot-headed about how restrictive we’ve made it.

I think somehow we’ve overloaded “love” until the word itself feels big and grand and heavy. And not only that, but we only seem comfortable acknowledging it when it exists inside containers we can define.

Partner. Family. Friend.

What if love is messier than that? What if it comes in too many forms to be held to such a limited definition? And what if it can exist outside of the standard containers?

Maybe all of our acts of care and kindness, big and small, are actually acts of love. Maybe we give and share and accept and receive love all the time.

But we don’t call that love. Those little things aren’t grand enough to be love. Or, the minute we do call those little acts love, that instantly assigns them some romantic meaning or intention.

What the fuck?

And saying “I love you” – god forbid! That apparently has to mean so much more than “I hold love in my heart for you.”

So we don’t say it.

Maybe we should.

Maybe love would bloom and grow and flow more if it wasn’t always trying to squeeze itself into our limited definitions and into our recognized boxes of where it is allowed to live.

Maybe we’ve loaded so much meaning onto “love” that we’ve accidentally made it harder to love. Maybe our love labels have filled it with an expectation and obligation and permanence it was never meant to hold.

Maybe love doesn’t need to be anything more than what radiates out from our hearts. It can be allowed to fill and permeate and move and change and expand however it sees fit.

No required label. No rigid definition. No socially recognizable target.

Maybe when we strip away all of that nonsense, we can better see what a beautiful and amazing gift it is to be able to generate love in all its forms. We can give it freely. We can stop caring about what eventually happens to it and just celebrate its existence.

That’s what I’m going to do, Universe.

Thank you for all of it – the love. And thank you for blessing me with a heart that generates a fuckton of it.

XO – Bailee

October 1, 2026