L'amour est tout ce qu'il faut

Translation- Love is all that there should be.

As a romance writer, I spend a lot of time contemplating love and its importance in the landscape of life.

First of all, it is a beautiful word: amour, laska, liefde, armastus, cinta, kama, etc... the list of words for love on our planet goes on and on and each is uniquely beautiful. Part of the complexity of the word love is that, in a way, love isn’t earthly. It's impossible to pin down with one word. It is nothing tangible that we can touch. We can not hold it in our hands (although we certainly can hold each other and objects that represent and summons our love); we cannot point to it directly, and yet our senses see, smell, feel, taste, and hear it. And boy, do we know it when we do.

Perhaps love is the glue that binds all, that binds us. In particle physics, they talk about how the majority of the universe is seemingly bound by a cosmic glue called the "God particle" or the Higgs boson. It exists, thankfully, and appears to keep the universe from falling apart. In my mind, the parallel is noteworthy. Without love to hold us together, things would fall apart.

War, the opposite of love, causes destruction and chaos. In the cosmos, without the Higgs boson, the universe would fall into chaos. But like the Higgs boson, love exists, and we are sentient beings. Anyone can feel anything. Love keeps us coming back to the table, and makes our story go round and round. Love is an exchange. We discover it in people we meet, in animals, in places, through our feelings, but in reality it was there all along. It is always present. For me, living in love and writing about love feels like a calling, an ideal, a way of life and of moving in the world. To be sure, it is sometimes, the most difficult path to travel. People can hurt you or disappoint you. Indeed, they often do. My characters hurt and get hurt, but they always sort it out through a lens of love. These are romance novels afterall.

What I love about writing romance novels is that love is imperative. It matters. Telling the myriad stories of how people bind and unbind in love, no matter how difficult the story may be, makes my world go round. I am so appreciative to my readers for allowing me to have a career telling the love stories of different women. Exploring, creating, and sharing how they grow; how love changes them and makes them better, makes me a better and happier person. L'amour est tout ce qu'il faut, indeed.