daniella does it all

Love stories are easy to dismiss. They’re often framed as soft or escapist — something we reach for when we don’t want to deal with the real world.

But the real world right now feels anything but avoidable.

It’s loud, isolating, and often cruel in ways that feel normalized. We’re encouraged to move quickly, take sides immediately, and flatten complicated people into positions. There isn’t much space for uncertainty, tenderness, or interior lives.

Love stories push back against that.

They slow us down. They force us into someone else’s interior life — their thoughts, doubts, fears, and private negotiations. They center what happens between people — quietly, imperfectly — and insist that it matters.

That insistence feels especially important right now.

Love stories make room for doubt, longing, hesitation, and second chances. They don’t pretend connection is easy or efficient. They acknowledge that people mess up, retreat, choose wrong, and still want to be seen and loved.

Love stories can still be about something more. Not because they need justification, but because they already are.

When writers take their characters seriously — their imperfections, contradictions, and limits — love becomes a way of exploring power, timing, responsibility, and choice. Romance doesn’t flatten those questions. It gives them a human scale.

And yet, not all love stories are treated the same.

Some are considered universal. Others are treated as niche — required to justify themselves, explain themselves, or carry meaning beyond the relationship at the center of the story.

I notice this most when it comes to whose love is allowed to be ordinary.

I wanted more stories about brown girls who aren’t “from somewhere else.” Stories that don’t turn culture into a lesson or love into a metaphor. Stories where being American and brown is simply part of the background — not the conflict that needs solving.

I wanted love stories about flawed people. People who get scared. Who make selfish choices. Who don’t become perfect in order to be worthy of happiness. Stories where love doesn’t fix everything, but still changes what feels possible.

Love stories let us practice sitting with longing instead of rushing to resolve it. They teach us how to live inside the ache of almost — the missed timing, the relationships that linger, the versions of ourselves we didn’t become.

That practice matters.

Especially in a world that keeps rewarding certainty and distance. Where complexity is inconvenient and softness is often framed as weakness.

I didn’t arrive at this belief through theory. I arrived at it through reading.

The more I read stories that trusted the reader — that didn’t over-explain, that let silence do some of the work — the more connected I felt. Not just to the characters, but to other people moving through the same moment I am.

And somewhere in that process, something shifted.

I’ve never written before. Not seriously. Not with a plan. Writing didn’t show up as a declaration or a new identity. It showed up quietly, because reading made me aware of an absence I couldn’t ignore anymore.

I wanted more stories that felt close to my own life. Writing felt less like ambition and more like participation — a way of staying in the conversation instead of just consuming it.

That’s why love stories still matter to me.

They keep us oriented toward one another in a world that benefits from pulling us apart. They remind us that attention, care, and connection aren’t naive — they’re necessary.

In a moment that keeps trying to harden us, love stories offer something steady and defiant: the choice to stay human.