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I am so tired of the conversations we are having about love.

The gender wars. The ghosting taxonomies. The new dating meme hashtag every two weeks that names exactly the kind of low-grade cruelty you just experienced (breadcrumbing! cuffing season! situationships!). The women have decided to de-center men, the men have apparently decided to de-center everyone, and the queer folks understand humans of all genders are challenging! We’ve got thinkpieces about touch deprivation, and the loneliness epidemic, and the death of the third place, and nobody knows how to make friends anymore, and we're all just dissociating into our phones.

The algorithm feeds me this bitter content by the spoonful. I scroll all of it, and I feel the scarcity too. I'm not immune.

As someone who's gone through breakups so bad that I've felt my sanity slip, I've made rules, broken rules, enforced rules on myself with the grim efficiency of a hall monitor (who was also the hall!), all in the interest of making love safer.

Today I want to offer something different: A life where love is not scarce, but rather oozing through every second of every day, so abundant that you couldn't avoid it even if you wanted to. Where heartbreak is not the cost of loving, but rather the receipt: proof that something real moved through you. A life where grief is not something to be managed or avoided or scrolled past, but welcomed and celebrated, because it means your heart muscle is working. 

Today I'm here with a prayer: the world does not need more rules and safer love. It needs more love. It needs bigger love. It needs voluminous love. 

Voluminous love is a philosophical framework and spiritual practice that asks us first to recognize that romance is just one flavor of love. If we understand that love is the energy that animates us, the molecules in our cells, the air moving in and out of our lungs, the chemistry of plants resonating with the chemistry of human bodies, we can notice that love everywhere. We understand that it's completely inescapable.

Then it requires accepting grief completely, without intellectualizing it away or drowning it in the bar. Grief is not the price of love, but rather what loving actually feels like.

In romantic love, voluminous love is adoring a particular human ALL THE WAY, allowing them to be however they're gonna be, while knowing that love itself is bottomless, regardless of what they do or whether they stay.

This also means welcoming heartbreak and loneliness as proof that something amazing happened, not evidence that love is dangerous.

Essentially, voluminous love is the lifelong discipline of noticing and enjoying all the sensations of loving before a romantic opportunity arrives, so that you can relish it fully when it does... and hold yourself sovereign when the connection ends, because you already know love is everywhere.

This kind of love is something you grow into, and middle age is when I think we're ready. By midlife, most of us have loved enough (and lost enough) to experientially understand that life is fundamentally out of our control, and that everything we love we will lose. After your 40s, the concept of "life is suffering" isn't some Buddhist philosophy… Uh, that's your average Tuesday. 

As best I can tell, the real work of the second half of life is knowing that while life IS suffering, we choose to love not despite it… but because of it.

(I'm still learning this. Some Tuesdays I forget entirely.)

Ok, so let's backtrack a bit and talk about this current cultural climate of loneliness. Here in 2026, we have not gotten worse at connecting... We have gotten worse at tolerating the cost of those connections. That's what all the dating memes and app strategies and bitter spoonfuls of content are about: if we could just control the damn situation, we could minimize the cost of loving! 

Because we’ve gotten worse at tolerating the cost, we’ve gotten worse at doing it at all. For many of us, love has become a risk-management problem. You calculate your exposure, manage your vulnerability, protect yourself with humor and rules and app filters. You protect yourself with the specific armor of someone who has been hurt before, and has done enough therapy to articulate the mechanism of their own wounding in impressive clinical detail.

But in our avoidance of grief and loss, we deny ourselves access to our mammalian birthright of feeling deeply. 

I know these moves because I perfected them. After my divorce (a decade ago now... amicable, co-parenting well, not the point) I was not OK. I am being precise when I say my sanity slipped. The marriage had been the structure of my life, and when it ended I felt something I can only describe as annihilation.

The years after were instructive: I had a nondual spiritual awakening (more about that in a moment!), rebuilt, and did the work. I turned suffering into a project with a very sophisticated set of rules to keep me safe. What I sometimes still don't understand is that rules don't actually protect me from heartbreak… they just become a heartbreaking cage.

We don't need more rules or cages. We need to love even more. When we release control of others, release control of avoiding loss or our own grief, we get to feel more a part of ALL OF IT.

I want to be honest about the conditions under which this way of loving became available to me: I make my own money, I've already had my child, I live in my own home. Love at this phase of life is different than it was in my 20s and 30s, when love was an audition to choose a partner for making a home, building a career, starting a family.

Here in the second half of my life, the stakes of loving feel more emotional and spiritual, less financial or practical. That is a specific kind of freedom that took decades to build.

I’m describing what's possible under specific conditions, because I want you to know that this love exists. More people can access it than the current cultural conversation suggests, but I won't pretend it's accessible to everyone, or relevant to all phases of life.

My spiritual awakening led me to nonduality, which means I understand god (lowercase g) as the momentum of the Big Bang, still moving through all of us as physics, chemistry, molecular biology, the ongoing expansion of everything that started fifteen billion years ago and hasn't stopped. You don't need to be a theist to believe in the Big Bang. Voluminous love doesn't require religion.

god is a verb. We are all the verb, verbing.

This kind of love is about way more than dating and romantic relationships. Voluminous love is a process of feeling the relationality of everything: old friends, new friends, the family members who drive us crazy (but we love anyway), the pets we're devoted to, the neighbors around us, and the grocery store clerk with that funny mole.

And it's not just about people! Voluminous loving means noticing how much we love our neighborhood, right down to this crack in the sidewalk and that dead rat under the dumpster. It means recognizing that you can be deeply in love with natural beauty. The sense of order in the angles of those leaves, the particular shade of the sky at twilight… because what is beauty but that sense of recognizing the perfection in the harmonious order of things? The seasons just keep seasoning!

Love is in the rituals and activities that light you up. Voluminous love is big nature and a tiny little stack of rocks in a parking lot. Art, fashion, beauty, dance, really good smut. Or a river valley near the Olympic mountains, who you write obsessive devotional poetry to. (That's actually my father, who's in a torrid multi-decade affair with the Quilcene River. The couple is doing great, thank you for asking.)

Voluminous love is about noticing all the little moments when awe and wonder come over you, and remembering oh! This too, is love!

In a time of numbness, in an era when dissociation has become the default and we're all scrolling all night to avoid feeling whatever atrocity we piped into our eyeballs all day, the ability to grieve is not a weakness. It is a privilege and a gift, because it means your heart is working. 

Love becomes easier when you normalize grief as part of the human experience. Not something to be avoided, fixed, managed, intellectualized, or drowned in the bar… but an expected (and perhaps even celebrated!) part of the ride, where you get to wistfully look into the sky and cry a little.

Grief is the shadow that proves the light of loving is real. 

What if you could welcome your sweet grief to the table? Welcome, friend. Thank you so much for joining me this evening. How does tea sound? Can we sit together for a moment?

Grief is love. I mean this precisely, not poetically. The specific tenderness of it (the tears that arrive unbidden, the softness in your aching chest, the way you can suddenly feel everything) is not the opposite of love. It is the love. 

Grief and love aren't two sides of the same coin: it's a sphere, spiraling through space. It's the fuel and the spiral itself.

When you allow yourself to actually feel grief daily (Over the news! Over your family pissing you off! Over your own failing organs!) you start to expand your capacity for experiencing the whole universe moving through you. Grief is a skill you grow, demonstrating your capacity to feel, metabolize, and keep going.

If it hurts, it's because your capacity to love is expanding.

Loving a specific human is the ultimate occasion for love! The particular person becomes a new portal that you experience love through.

By midlife, many of us have experienced several partnerships, and we know that our personal capacity to love is the thread that unites them all. Voluminous love means you can appreciate the specifics of that portal generously and unconditionally… knowing you might lose it at any moment!

You get to hold it fully but lightly, understanding that the love that moves through this specific portal is actually part of the eternal and abundant love that flows through everything.

When you voluminously love a person, it's loving the whole damn universe as it expresses itself through their particular shape. Ram Dass used to say "treat everyone you meet like god in drag," and it's about reveling in the show: god wearing that particular face, moving in that particular way, that particular timbre in their voice, and that particular smell of their neck.

But never forget that it's all just god, godding. When we rub ourselves against each other just for the sheer delight of that thrum of togetherness, it's all just god masturbating, with us as its billions of hands. 

But wait: enough about god masturbating, because I need to get practical for a moment. I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea or use this concept to do harm to yourself or others. Let me clarify what voluminously loving humans isn't.

I don't mean sex. When I think about midlife eros and eroticism, I mean the Jungian generative charge of attraction in its non-sexual form: the softening, the magnetism, the quality of attention that arrives when you are genuinely interested in another consciousness. I love sex, but this certainly isn't about fucking everyone. 

Voluminous love isn't martyrdom. You have full agency over how you spend your time and attention, and unconditionally loving someone doesn't mean spending time in situations that don't fit you. (I love plenty of people from a healthy distance!)

And finally, your integrity is load-bearing here: voluminous love does no harm to yourself or others. Don't be a creep or a villain… and also don't be a victim when things don't go the ways you want.

Wait, but what IF loving them doesn't go the way I want? What if it hurts?!

Let's get this out of the way: YES, IT WILL HURT. The specific grief of heartbreak is deeply real and does not care how spiritually evolved you are when it arrives. By midlife, most of us have been humbled by this enough times to stop being completely surprised. (And yet somehow, I still get blindsided by my own heartbreak! Just another Tuesday, I suppose.)

Thich Nhat Hanh writes: Darling, I suffer. I am trying my best to practice. 

…And what a practice it is! The suffering of heartbreak is not incidental to love, but rather a fundamental and deeply functional part of it. Heartbreak is not the tax paid for getting to love, or the cost of admission. Heartbreak is love's watermark: still legible when you hold it up to the light, proof that something real made an impact on the paper of you. 

When you understand grief as part of a healthy and normal life, you can stop treating each heartbreak like a malfunction or a failure of your dating strategy. (I'm working on it!)

You don't need another podcast or another rule… you need to remember that love doesn't depart when the connection to a specific beloved ends. It's yours to keep, and the heartbreak is how you know your capacity to love has expanded.

For many of us, it's the loneliness of heartbreak that's the true crucible. We all know this deepest sensation of loneliness: the kind that makes you feel like a pink baby mouse separated from its mother, cold and dying in the dry grass. 

We're not in the realm of metaphor here: this experience is mammalian. Loneliness feels like survival-level pain, and it serves a very specific purpose for babies and their caregivers. But that wiring might not quite be as relevant when you're in your 40s or 50s, and sad because someone isn't texting  you anymore. The pain of loneliness feels life or death, because it was.

On the days when the practice is working, loneliness can arrive differently. You can understand it as a cue: a klaxon of awareness, reminding you that you have temporarily forgotten that you're not actually separate from anything, and that love is available everywhere. 

(To be clear: it still hurts like hell! You're not bypassing the heartbreak. If you don't feel it, it will metastasize.)

When you're in voluminous love, heartbreak and loneliness can be knocks at the door of your nervous system whispering: "come back, come back, come back!" Return to the awareness that you are never actually alone, because you are an expression of something that has no edges and no timeline. 

If life is all god moving through everything, then we're just the god-ripples on the ocean, sails full and navigating by the stars. We don't get lost believing each particular wave is the entirety of love… a ripple can roll on past, and the ocean remains.

The ripple passes, and it might feel like you’re slipping under… but how could you possibly drown when you're the whole ocean?

This realization changes everything about how you can love. When the loneliness of heartbreak arrives, it can wake you up and spiral you back: holy shit, love is EVERYWHERE, and I'm a part of EVERYTHING?! 

What a gift, this process of loving is! I forget… I remember… the ocean is still there.

For the record, this process is aspirational for me, too. Some mornings I wake up and love my pillows and some mornings I wake up and doomscroll for an hour like a raccoon in a burning dumpster. We call it "a practice" because you try and fail, and try again.

Feel your way into the sensation of loving unconditionally every day, from the minute you wake up until the moment you fall asleep. Wake up and love your pillows. Go outside and love your neighborhood. Love your work. Love your rituals. Love your trees and your bodies of water. Love the friend who has known you for twenty years. Love the stranger who helps you without being asked. Love the weird specific beauty of whatever is in front of you right now. The real work is to be done in the privacy of your own heart. 

We know voluminous love isn't all sunshine and rainbows and silver lining gratitude journaling. Allow yourself to experience little bits of grief daily, so you can expand your strength and resilience. Instead of dissociating or intellectualizing, experiment with catharsis (Cry! Sweat! Scream!), expression (Poetry no one will read! Art for art's sake! Erotic novellas!), or community (it's ok to tell people you're sad!). 

If a person arrives (when the warmth opens up! when the space between your lips is electric without even kissing! when you feel the ripple and your whole chest sighs and goes oh, it's you), take stock of your emotional inventory. 

Ask yourself: Can I welcome all the love AND heartbreak that will come out of this? Can I hold myself sovereign and let the other person just exist? Can I welcome grief for tea, because I know how? Can I trust I'll be ok no matter what, because I've experienced love everywhere? 

If the answer is yes, even tentatively: reach out and embrace it. Bury your face in the pelt of it. Breathe it in with big breaths. Because while that particular godripple may be fleeting (...or not! We don't get to know! That's part of the fun of the game of nondual universal hide and seek!!), love itself is eternal and infinite. 

And when that beloved connection changes or ends? It's back to remembering that heartbreak is a healthy aspect of loving. Stephen Levine wrote that grief asks us to "keep our hearts open in hell." Heartbreak can feel like you're dying (baby mouse, I see you!), but that's your very human heart doing what it was meant to do: feeling the depth of connection and the temporary nature of all things. 

I know that promise can sound hollow from inside real pain. I know there are moments when no framework helps and your chest just hurts and weeping won't stop and the bed is too big and the frying pan is too wide. 

But loneliness can be the sweet little invitation from the whole universe: I'm right here, beloved human! There's so much love in the world that you can't escape it, even if you wanted to. Even if you're dead, the molecules in your corpse make you still a part of the universal rotation of energy! The worms love you. (I love you, worms!) 

In a moment, I'm going to stop writing these words to you, and we'll go our separate ways. That's a small grief, actually. Something real moved through this, and now it's ending, and whatever you're feeling right now in your chest about that is the whole argument in miniature.

The worms love you. I love you. Welcome to the ocean.

Shout-out to my mother for teaching me about grief, my father for teaching me about poetry & loving landscapes, the Canadian philosopher Carrie Jenkins for modeling philosophizing about love, and the book Undefended Love for being my forever favorite relational resource.

PS: If you’ve read all the way to the end, you get a reward! I’m thinking of turning this essay into a zine, because I’ve never made a zine before. If that’s the kind of thing that you’d be interested in getting in the mail, hit reply with your mailing address.