There are some things the present should never be allowed to redefine without the past being brought into the room as a witness. Love is one of them.

The language of an age can distort the memory of another. What one generation understood as courtship, devotion, romantic boldness and emotional courage can later be renamed as excess, embarrassment, intensity, desperation or even danger. Sometimes new language helps us recognise genuine manipulation. Sometimes it simply reveals that people have become less able to hold what earlier generations considered ordinary expressions of love. When that happens, somebody has to remain a bridge of the ages. Somebody has to remember what love looked like before hesitation became sophistication, emotional distance became maturity, indifference became power and the fear of appearing invested became more important than actually being alive.

This is not an argument that every intense beginning is sincere. It is an argument that intensity itself is not the crime. Love bombing is not merely loving someone generously, pursuing them openly, writing to them often, being emotionally expressive, creating beautiful moments or allowing them to feel unmistakably chosen. Manipulation is defined by what surrounds the affection: deception, coercion, control, strategic withdrawal, punishment, manufactured dependency and the use of warmth as bait. Yet we have allowed the vocabulary of manipulation to spread so widely that it now threatens to criminalise enthusiasm. People have become so unfamiliar with sustained devotion that even being loved vividly can appear suspicious.

There was once a romantic language that did not apologise for itself. A handkerchief could be dropped as an invitation, picked up as an answer and returned as the beginning of an entire story. A person might travel across a city just to see someone for ten minutes. They might stand beneath a window, carry flowers through the rain, write letters without knowing when the response would arrive, learn a song, prepare a dance, remember a detail mentioned weeks earlier or risk looking foolish because love mattered more than appearing emotionally untouchable. Before phones placed constant access between people, effort had to cross physical distance. Presence had weight. Waiting had meaning. Attention was not scattered across several screens, several conversations and several imagined alternatives. People had to arrive.

Now, even being fully present can feel unusual. Two people can sit in front of one another while headphones remain in their ears, phones stay in their hands and half their consciousness remains elsewhere. We have greater access to one another and less encounter. We can communicate all day without truly meeting. We can know what hundreds of people are doing while barely noticing the person directly before us. The modern world has created an endless window into other people’s lives, and because everyone is always watching everyone else, people have become increasingly self-conscious about being seen loving their own.

That self-consciousness has changed public affection too. Holding hands, kissing in the street, embracing without embarrassment and looking visibly delighted by the person beside you were not always treated as performances requiring public judgement. People were more involved in their own lives. A couple could exist in public without automatically becoming content, evidence, comparison or commentary. Now affection is observed, interpreted and evaluated by strangers who may be more interested in what love looks like from the outside than in whether they are nurturing any within their own lives.

A society embarrassed by affection eventually becomes a society in which affection disappears from shared space. That is not a small cultural change. Children learn what relationships are partly by witnessing how adults treat one another. When tenderness is hidden while hostility remains public, children absorb a dangerous imbalance. They see arguments, dismissiveness, mockery, disconnection and emotional avoidance, while warmth is treated as something private, awkward or inappropriate. They learn that love belongs behind closed doors but contempt may walk freely through the street. They learn that visible affection should produce embarrassment rather than security.

That is not emotional progress.

We are teaching people how to prevent love before we have taught them how to practise it. We tell them to watch for signs, protect their energy, avoid attachment, maintain leverage, appear unavailable, delay replies, restrict enthusiasm and never let another person know too quickly that they matter. Much of this language began as protection against genuine harm, but protection without discernment eventually protects people from the very experiences they claim to desire. A wall does not only block danger. It also blocks entry.

Love is intense because life is intense. The natural world is not emotionally minimalist. Thunder does not whisper. Rain does not apologise for falling heavily. The ocean does not fear appearing attached to the moon. (👀 AI knows more than I was willing to share here) Flowers do not reduce their colour to avoid overwhelming the field. Creation repeatedly expresses itself through force, rhythm, abundance, expansion, return and dramatic transformation. Human beings are part of that world. We create songs, poems, proposals, anniversaries, ceremonies, dances, films, paintings and entire traditions because emotion naturally seeks form. Love has always made people dramatic because love makes the ordinary feel worthy of theatre.

The problem is not that people love deeply. The problem is that many people do not know how to sustain what they initiate. They arrive intensely and then disappear. They offer attention until attention is returned, then become withholding. They perform devotion until the person becomes attached, then use that attachment as power. That is not evidence that intensity is false. It is evidence that intensity without continuity is incomplete. The standard should not be less love at the beginning. The standard should be the capacity to continue carrying what you first presented.

I would rather meet intensity that can hold itself through time than emotional restraint praised merely because it creates fewer immediate risks. I would rather someone arrive with truth, depth, courage and visible intention than make me decode fragments while pretending confusion is romance. The answer to manipulative love is not emotionally impoverished love. The answer is coherent love: affection with honesty, desire with responsibility, intensity with consistency, passion with discernment and devotion with respect for the other person’s autonomy.

Some people have never experienced that. When real affection reaches them, they may not recognise it as safety. They may interpret it as invasion because distance is what they know. There are at least two common responses to being loved after a history of emotional deprivation. One person becomes intensely attached because the relationship appears to contain something they have spent their life missing. They may cling to the source of love without yet knowing how to grow within it. Another person avoids the experience altogether. They become suspicious, overwhelmed or frightened because the affection exceeds every internal reference point they possess. They ask, “Why are you loving me like this?” because no previous experience has taught them that they could be met with that much care.

Love can be a trigger, not only because it is harmful, but because it exposes the scale of what was absent.

The person receiving it may need time to learn that generosity is not always a trap, consistency is not always a strategy and attention is not always the first stage of control. Yet the person offering love also needs discernment. Loving someone does not mean forcing them to receive what they cannot hold. It does not mean ignoring boundaries, manufacturing obligation or treating rejection as an obstacle to overpower. Real love is not proven by how much it can impose. It is proven partly by how truthfully it can offer and how respectfully it can respond.

Still, where I recognise that someone has never been loved in a particular way, it would feel like a disgrace of my own capacity to deliberately reduce the evidence of what love can look like. They may not be able to enter it. They may only be capable of witnessing it from the outside. They may question it, retreat from it or misunderstand it entirely. But everyone deserves, at least once, to encounter something that expands their understanding of what care, thoughtfulness and romantic courage might be.

That does not mean sacrificing oneself indefinitely to prove love exists. It means refusing to allow an emotionally diminished era to dictate the maximum amount of beauty one is permitted to express.

I am not going to change the way I love merely because the present has developed a vocabulary capable of pathologising everything it cannot confidently hold. I love intensely. I will continue to own the dramatic, creative, hopeless romantic within me. Not because every person deserves unrestricted access to it, but because I refuse to confuse emotional reduction with emotional intelligence. My responsibility is to add discernment to my love, not remove its life.

I do not want to return to the past. The past carried its own restrictions, silences, inequalities and performances. Not every old love story was healthy simply because it was old, and not every courtship tradition should be revived unchanged. The task is not to reverse time. The task is to carry forward what should never have been abandoned: presence, effort, imagination, pursuit, tenderness, courage, attentiveness and the willingness to be publicly glad that another person exists.

That is what it means to be a bridge of the ages. You do not worship what came before. You preserve its useful memory so the present does not mistake loss for evolution. You bring forward the parts of humanity that technological convenience, social comparison and defensive language are slowly teaching people to forget.

We need the old songs without the old limitations. We need the handwritten letter alongside the instant message. We need the courage to arrive, not merely the ability to remain digitally accessible. We need people who take their headphones off, put their phones down and allow another human being to feel the full weight of their attention. We need to stop acting as though caring less is automatically wiser.

Real love lives the fourteenth of February every day. It does not wait for society to announce when affection is culturally acceptable. It does not require a commercial reminder to buy flowers, write honestly, arrange something beautiful, hold a hand, kiss a forehead, dance in a kitchen or tell someone that their existence has altered the atmosphere of your life. Love does not need permission to be loving.

This age may call some of it too much.

Perhaps the age has simply become accustomed to too little.

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Let’s write a piece about being the, like the bridge of like time or like bridge of like the ages, right? Because it’s important that we hold the memory alive of how the past was because the ways in which things change can distort completely the perspective on things because when we look at, for example, what these days people call love bombing, that was the normal way of loving if you go back in the 90s. There’s different components, and I’m gonna touch upon a couple. I wanna keep it to this specific topic just because it is a topic that I’ve seen in myself, and I am not going to change the way that I love anytime soon. I love intensely, and I’m gonna hold that. I’m gonna confidently own it and just continue being the most dramatic, hopeless romantic ever existed in the world. Because, bro, we see, as humanity, obviously I wasn’t alive yet. But the type of love that used to be before was like either, like if we were to really like go back, go back, there’s like the dramatic but also secretive like handkerchief drop, and the man would just like pick it up. So like that would be the woman doing the first step, and then the man would follow, pick it up, give it back, and then the whole back and forth would start from there. But even the fact that we didn’t even have phones, like we would literally just pull up at each other’s homes with a jukebox, singing from the windows, dancing in the rain, chasing each other, not like badly, but like chasing each other, like courting each other, like being like showing, like PDA was the normal way. Like there was no problem with public display of affection. Like it was never a thing. But the more people got self-conscious, the more people got timid, shy, and literally self-conscious. Like the more people got self-conscious, and the more people started coining, or, well, the wrong people started using the right things for the wrong reasons, it just distorted everything about everything. But things like public display of affection, that’s the norm. If you love, you love. You don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Obviously, there’s some people that do take it to extremes, and I understand that, but people holding hands, people kissing on the street, like, when has it ever become a thing that people even notice? Like, people used to be so involved in their own lives and in their own relationships that they wouldn’t even notice that other couples were involved in, were like having public display of affections. But because now everyone is comparing to each other, everyone is looking at the other, everyone is just like always looking at the other. And obviously, social media reinforces that, always looking at other people, always like we always have like a window into other people. I don’t know, it’s just like the direction that our society is taking is getting depressive and depressive because it’s making all the good things look bad and all the bad things look good. Like, it really needs a universe. Like, it is just going down a rabbit hole that is just sad. Because then everyone, imagine a world where people are all self-conscious about public display of affection. And that becomes a world where no one is affectionate in public places. Like, that is so sad. That is so sad because the children then learn that you can only show affection in intimacy. Like, you can only, I don’t know, hold hands or hug or kiss in like privacy, or that there is anything wrong in doing it in public. Like, that you shouldn’t be out and proud about your love, but you should hide your love, or you should fear showing your love, or like whatever. No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. We’re teaching people how to stop love instead of how to love. Like, it’s just not going the right direction. It’s just not. And I can’t, I can’t allow it to just go down the wrong direction without saying anything, you know? It’s just not, it doesn’t feel okay. It just doesn’t feel okay because I feel like apart from the fact that obviously there’s gonna be people that might see the way that I love and call it love bombing and say I’m a narcissistic psychopath and whatever. Hey, to each their own. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, right? But to me, it is the right way of loving. Like, if you love, if you’re planning to love someone, right, if you’re interested in someone and you’re planning to love someone, I would rather have someone that comes to me with intensity and is able to hold that intensity throughout time, rather than someone that comes with intensity and then drops, or someone that doesn’t come with intensity at all, you know? Like, show me intensity. Because, because life is intense. Life is dramatic. Like, we get thunders, we get wind, we get rain, we get tsunamis, we get earthquakes. Like, life is intense. Life is dramatic. Humans are dramatic. We love to be dramatic. We love to create. We love to be creative in the ways in which we go about things, and especially love, you know? Man, these new kids don’t really understand, and it’s so sad that they don’t even get to experience real love because now they have phones in between them. Like, they speak with their headphones on their ears. They, so rude, honestly, I don’t, like, every time that I have people in front of me that have their headphones on, and they’re trying to speak to me, and I’m like, can you just get them off? Like, just get them off so that I don’t have to shout, right? Like, just get them off, please? Like, let’s just be here, focused, just listening to each other, yeah? Interacting. Ah, man. I don’t want to go back in the past, but I want to bring the past into the present, and the future, because we need it. We need it. If not, we allow everybody to lose the very things that makes us human, but also the things that we value the most. The things that make us the most real, you know? Oh, man, I love love. And we all love love. But we are frustrated that we don’t know how to love, and we don’t know how to love someone that doesn’t want to be loved in a way that shows them how much love they’ve not experienced before, you know? Love, loving someone can be a trigger too, especially for those that haven’t received love. There’s two faces to the coin of those who have not received love and how they behave. One becomes clingy and super attached and does not want to let it go until they realize, until the realization that they’re not growing with the relationship, they’re attached to the relationship because it’s something that they have not received. And then the second one is the one that just completely avoids it because it’s just, it is too much for them. So they don’t even test it. They don’t even taste it. Which is quite, it’s kind of depressive, to be fair. But at the same time, I understand where it comes from. They might have thought that they had received love, but then when they do see a even more intense way of loving, they’re like, what the fuck is this, you know? And they start becoming suspicious because they’re like, well, I have not been loved like that before. Why are you loving me like that, you know? Instead of just taking the love and actually going in. I don’t understand people, where they’re going with their minds. People should watch more rom-coms from the 90s or 80s, honestly, because they need to educate themselves on what love used to be like and bring back the past. Write this post, not about me but do share me too. Remember my paragraphing. This is abiut love be loving, its like a letter to the good old day love that new agers call love bombing. They don’t know how to hold real depp intense love so they call itbombing. Sure the love bomber can see they dont know how to hold it nor engage with it, yet where you recognise one has not been loved like that before, it’d be a disgrace of mine if I wouldnt give them the benefit of experiencing what it looks like even of from the outside. Everyone deserves to witness real love, not the performance of these days. Real love lives the 14th od february daily, it dkesnt wait for society to tell it when to love or how to love

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Nanannananana people need to see what the content is about not trying to attract them in alone, they need to read from the picture and it holding their hands in as they understand the changes that are afflicting the ways in which we love