i think i could fall in love with anyone
i’ve always been told i love too easily. that i let people in too quickly, that i see the good in them before they’ve earned it. but i don’t think love is something that needs to be earned. i think it’s already there, waiting to be noticed.
for a long time, i thought love was something external—something i had to search for, something rare and specific, something i had to deserve. but the more i pay attention, the more i realise that love is not scarce. it is everywhere, in everything. and if i am open to it, i think i could fall in love with anyone.
when i say this, i don’t mean it recklessly. i don’t mean that i would ignore what makes people incompatible or unsafe. but i have never believed that love is just about finding the right person, some perfect match waiting out there in the world. i think love is about recognition. it is about seeing something in another person that feels familiar, something that already exists inside me.
it happens in the smallest ways. in the way someone’s face changes when they talk about something they care about. in the way they let out a laugh when they aren’t holding themselves together. in the unguarded moments, when they are quiet and real and not performing who they think they need to be. love is in those details, in those glimpses of tenderness that people don’t always realise they are showing.
i used to think love had to be built, that it was something we had to create with another person. but i don’t believe that anymore. love does not appear when someone arrives. it already exists. it is in the way i look at my friends and how they move through the world. it is in the way i hold space for people, in the way they hold space for me. it is in the fleeting, unexpected moments—meeting a stranger and feeling, even for a second, that you understand each other.
i have felt love in places i didn’t expect to find it. in conversations that lasted longer than they should have. in the warmth of someone’s hand resting on my shoulder at the right moment. in the silence of sharing space with someone without needing to fill it. i used to think love was something grand and overwhelming, but now i know it is also something quiet and unspoken, something that does not always need to be named.
so much of the way we talk about love is rooted in possession. we speak of people as ours. we measure love in commitment, in longevity, in exclusivity. but love is not a transaction. it does not need to be owned to be real.
i think about all the people i have loved who are no longer in my life. does the love disappear when they do? i don’t think so. i think love exists beyond time, beyond presence. i think it lingers in the spaces where it once was. i think it remains in the ways i have changed because of them.
i have loved people i will never see again, and i am okay with that. i have loved people who did not love me back in the way i wanted them to, and that love was still real. i have loved in ways that did not need to last forever, because love does not need to be permanent to be meaningful.
if i could fall in love with anyone, it is not because love is random—it is because love is a way of seeing. it is a way of moving through the world with softness, of paying attention, of choosing to see people as whole and human and worthy of tenderness.
maybe that is naive. maybe it makes me too open, too vulnerable. but i would rather move through the world with my heart open than spend my life pretending love is something rare.
because it isn’t.
it is everywhere. in everyone. in me.
- tat