Text by Emma Kanafani

Visual by Julia Walusiak

Monday, January 10th, 2026

when

does love end?

Read more on The Margin, from our readers.

Emma Kanafani

For some reason, the collective tends to visualize love as

a tangible contract between two or more people. Wherever this unspoken definition stemmed from, romanticized media,

half-true stories, unconscious beliefs, love as a concept has far more depth than any tangible definition. In fact, you never truly know what it is until you experience it... and then you experience it again and know more than you did before...

and then you experience it in

a different form, and what you thought you knew changes drastically from the first time you believed you’d felt it.

Before you know it, you’re four years older, traumatized, and either happy or unhappy with your life. It’s funny how time influences one’s definition of love. You look back at your past experiences and realize how little you knew about the world, yourself, or what was right or wrong. The collective idealization of a “first love” tends to be true in most cases, actually. It’s like a prophecy that eventually fulfills itself, usually when you start learning how to think for yourself outside of what you’ve been taught, the coming-of-age drama. You meet someone, and it either feels like peace or hell. Peaceful hell at first sight. Long story short, you end up committing your entire being to a person who seems to hold the missing part of your soul. You feel bound to them because of this. You have no way of verbally defining your feelings, but they become so intense that they consume all boundaries of the 3D world, so you call it love. “I love you with all of my heart and soul”

is a common phrase, but when you try to truly understand it,

only those who have experienced this peaceful hell will understand what it means to “die for love.” It makes you illogical, because

the concept of love isn’t materialistic.

The funniest thing about love is how it can erase itself. This is when you start questioning everything you know, usually followed by an existential crisis that slips casually into your life as you grow older. Time is a blessing in disguise. The best part about a relationship is the learning. You look back at the person you once imagined yourself “dying forin the name of love,” and you laugh a little because it feels like a distant memory. The intensity

of that commitment vanishes two years later.

And then you ask yourself: Did I really love this person? Did they really love me? But the answer is something you already know and still can’t verbalize. Something the collective fails to disclose is that feeling is truth. Just like it’s a fact that I'm sitting in my uncomfortable chair writing this now, it’s a fact that my ass hurts and my hand is cramping. The feeling is real, but I won’t feel it as soon as I finish. And even if I look back on this moment and think that I could have typed on my computer instead, it doesn’t matter because I didn’t. I wrote with a pencil. When you’re seventeen and tangled up with

a man who feeds you alcohol and contradicting statements about how he would die for you and kill you at the same time, you can thank God for loving him and moving on because the timeline forced you to. And if you’re smart enough, you’ll know that you can consciously choose to forget while still knowing that the feeling served its time. Then, you’ll meet someone who completely changes the trajectory of what you once thought you knew, and you’ll repeat the cycle.