30x30: Observed Methods for Falling in Love

These are ways, that I've either witnessed or experienced, of falling love. 

So far, I can report that falling in love is not limited to love felt toward a romantic partner. Also, falling in love can can happen on the scale of atoms in the most microscopic of increments - or it can happen on the scale of super novas, big bright, and cosmic. Sometimes it happens both of these ways at once, which I have always found very exciting and confusing. The list is not exhaustive. I am always searching for more.


By having your first real argument and realizing that the only reason you're arguing is because you actually care. A lot.

By being busy doing everything else and not thinking about love at all because you have the thing ready for work, or the show ready to open, or come through on that thing you said you'd do, or practice, or take some "you" time, or other such activities that allow you to be you doing whatever it is that you do, at which point you are incidentally your most charming and beautiful and able to be caught off guard.

By sharing music with each other.

By happening to notice the tiniest of things, and they happen to take your breath away. Like the way a breeze blows through her hair. Like a way of sighing. Like laugh lines. And crows feet. Or the lilt in his voice. And how she does the thing she does so well.

By learning from them.

By taking care of them when they need to be taken care of.

By sharing a casual meal with them in a crowded restaurant and discovering through conversation that they kind of have a thing for someone else, so if you're gonna make a move, it better be now.

By doing things for them.

By listening to them.

By working on something important together like, in the case of my sister and me, choreographing a rollerskate dance to Mariah Carey's Hero when we were kids.

By recognizing the better version of yourself that they make you want to be.


Original illustration by Isabella Rotman