Love, Actually: An Analog Anomaly In A Digital World

There’s a curious comfort in how often we’re reminded to love. Valentine’s Day arrives with its roses and chocolates. Mother’s Day follows, then Father’s Day, Teacher’s Day—each one a gentle nudge to pause and appreciate someone who matters. These calendar-marked tributes may have commercial origins, but they reflect a deeper truth: that love surrounds us, even if it rarely comes wrapped in ribbon.

Love, in its truest form, doesn’t demand fanfare. More often, it whispers—from the quiet kindness of a grandmother’s casserole to the reliability of a driver who shows up each morning, or the house help who skips breakfast with her own children so yours can catch the school bus.  Sometimes, it’s the stranger offering a lift during a downpour or the friend who remembers your pet’s name five years later. 

Love hides in the details, in the unnoticed.

Yet we live in a world spinning faster than ever. One-click checkouts, 10-minute deliveries, and algorithms built to anticipate our wants. Convenience is currency now.

But love doesn’t obey this logic. It doesn’t arrive overnight, can’t be tracked in real time, and certainly won’t offer a refund policy. It is, often, slow. Inconvenient. 

Deeply analog in a digital world.

Ask around and you’ll hear a thousand different definitions of love. For one person, it’s the way their father saved the last slice of dessert. For another, it’s a call from a best friend at 2 a.m., or a teacher who quietly rearranged her classroom for a neurodiverse child. And yes, love now stretches across a broader spectrum: pet parents, plant parents, adoptive parents—each form valid, each carrying its own kind of care.

Is love what we feel at the start of life, in a delivery room? Or is it what stirs us unexpectedly at the end—during a funeral for someone we didn’t always get along with, but whose absence lingers strangely? It shows up in weddings and wake-up calls, in forgiveness and small, unnoticed favours.

And, perhaps most ironically, the people who show us love most consistently are often not the obvious ones. The colleague who remembers your coffee order. The boss who lets a young father leave early to care for his child. A younger sibling who wordlessly shares her last spoonful of ice cream. These aren't the scenes that make it to Netflix specials, but they’re the ones that quietly carry us through the week.

That’s not to say love is effortless. It isn't always fair or reciprocal. Some people give it freely and receive little back. Others struggle to return the love they’re surrounded by. 

But love has never been about balance sheets. There’s no emotional audit, no loyalty points for affection. And thank goodness—because its true beauty lies in how it defies transaction.

Still, it’s worth asking: can love thrive in a world obsessed with "more"? More productivity, more data, more wealth. We’ve all been there — buying something shiny to fill a quiet evening, confusing gifts for connection. The marketplace, ever creative, often sells us the illusion that fulfilment is one purchase away.

But here’s the twist: love doesn’t scale like revenue. It doesn’t trend or compound like interest. It grows quietly, unevenly, and almost always in the shadow of patience. And despite our distractions, it persists. We see it in the small, inconvenient choices that people make for one another every day.

Even more remarkably, love’s impact isn’t just emotional. It’s physiological. A landmark study from Ohio State University  found that wounds healed 60% faster among couples who maintained loving, supportive behaviour compared to those who engaged in conflict. Another study showed that simply spending time in a caring relationship can help temper the big C over a period of time.

These findings suggest something profound: that love doesn't just feel good, it literally helps us heal. Whether recovering from illness, enduring emotional strain, or simply beginning again—be it after loss, distance, or failure—connection becomes a kind of medicine. Even in long-distance relationships or newer bonds, the presence of affection is linked to better sleep, lowered stress, and quicker recovery.

One doesn’t need a romantic backdrop to see it. Look around. 

A neighbour walking an elderly friend to the pharmacy. A colleague silently taking on your shift during a tough week. A parent, exhausted yet patient, helping a child with homework. These gestures won’t go viral, but they will linger—sometimes longer than words.

This isn’t a sentimental pitch to reject technology or abandon ambition. Love and modernity aren’t in opposition. But they run on different frequencies. And now and then, it helps to step back from the digital noise and tune into something softer. Something that isn’t trying to sell us anything.

Because maybe the question isn’t “What is love?” but “Where have we stopped noticing it?” It’s not gone. It’s just quieter than the world we’ve built around it. It waits in the margins, in the leftovers, in the look someone gives you when you didn’t ask for anything—but they showed up anyway.

So yes, buy the gift. Send the card. Celebrate the calendar days. But also look between the lines. In a marketplace of fleeting attention and transactional ties, the slow, tender work of love is still the best long-term investment we can make.

Because at the end of it all, when the dashboards go dark and the reports are done, it’s not what we earned that will matter most—but who we turned to when we needed to heal.