Your job is not to lock the doors and chisel at yourself like a marble statue in the darkness until you feel quantifiably worthy of the world outside. Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other.

We all carry endless hidden selves and latent worlds, waiting for the right gaze to bring them to the surface. I’ve felt this in my bones: relationships that have remade me, expanded me, taught me. Time and again, people have been the most transformative engine for becoming I’ve ever known.

People really do glow differently in love. The right gaze is a kind of heat, loosening the self just enough for new patterns to take hold. You shine differently when you are seen with love, because that warmth remakes you. Like metal cooling in a new shape, your expression, posture, even the cadence of your speech start to carry the imprint of the... See more