Daniella M. Aponte

Love stories are easy to dismiss.

They’re too soft, too sentimental, too unserious for the world we live in now. In a political and cultural moment defined by crisis, violence, greed, and spectacle, love can seem indulgent — a private emotion in the face of public collapse.

But I’ve been thinking lately about how wrong that is.

Because love stories, at their best, don’t pull us away from the world. They return us to it. They ask us to care, to witness, to imagine another person’s interior life as fully real. They insist that tenderness is not trivial. That longing is not weakness. That intimacy is not separate from politics, but one of the ways we learn what matters and what it costs.

And maybe that’s why they matter so much to me now.

The world right now rewards distance. Performance. Certainty. It teaches us to consume one another quickly and flatten each other into symbols, positions, optics, content. It asks us to live at the level of abstraction.

Love stories refuse that.

They slow us down. They force us into specificity. Into attention. Into the stubborn, inconvenient fact of another person.

To love someone — romantically, platonically, familiarly, politically — is to admit they cannot be reduced to a type. They are not just useful to you. They are not just legible at a glance. They are complicated, interior, contradictory, unfinished.

A good love story knows this.

And more than that, it makes us practice it.

That’s part of why I read the kinds of books I do. Not to escape, exactly, though I used to think that was the answer. I read because I want to be brought closer. To another person, another life, another set of stakes. I read because I want the world to feel more populated, not less. I want to remember that other people are as vivid to themselves as I am to me.

Love stories do that in a particular way.

They make emotional attention the plot.

They say: look here. This ache matters. This miscommunication matters. This timing, this restraint, this devotion, this failure to say the thing until it’s almost too late — it all matters. Not because romance is the only thing worth writing about, but because human closeness is one of the clearest ways we understand who we are, what we fear, and what we’re willing to risk.

And I think, especially for women, especially for women of color, there’s something quietly radical in insisting that our emotional lives deserve that scale of attention.

Not as metaphor. Not as side plot. Not as lesson. As life.

I grew up loving stories, but I didn’t always see girls like me at the center of them — not in the full, ordinary, complicated ways I wanted. Brown girls could be desirable, tragic, spicy, strong. But to be interior? To be messy and soft and contradictory and still worth following all the way through? That felt rarer.

Love stories taught me to look for that anyway.

And now they’re part of why I write.

Not because I think romance is an escape hatch from the world, but because I think love clarifies the world. It reveals our hierarchies, our longings, our habits of self-protection. It shows us what we think we deserve. It shows us the stories we’ve inherited about being chosen, being known, being safe, being good.

A love story can be politically thin, of course. It can reproduce every fantasy of possession and power we’ve ever been sold.

But it can also do something else.

It can ask what it means to really see another person. To stay. To risk tenderness in a world organized around estrangement. To build something with another human being that is not optimized, spectacular, or detached, but alive.

That doesn’t feel trivial to me.

It feels like one of the last places we still practice being human in public without calling it strategy.

Lately, I’ve been less interested in stories that offer distance and more interested in stories that demand presence. Stories that refuse irony as a shield. Stories that understand love not as naivete, but as attention. As labor. As recognition.

Maybe that’s why I can’t dismiss love stories, even now.

Or maybe it’s why I need them more.

Not because they make the world disappear.

Because they make it matter.

Because they ask us to remain in conversation with it instead of just consuming it.

That’s why love stories still matter to me.

They keep us oriented toward one another in a world that benefits from pulling us apart. They remind us that attention, care, and connection aren’t naive — they’re necessary.

In a moment that keeps trying to harden us, love stories offer something steady and defiant: the choice to stay human.