The Lover Girl Manifesto: Yearning, Praxis, and Other ~Just Girly Things~ ♡

At a party, someone asked with jovial flirtation, "Are you a lover girl?"

Without hesitation, I let out an emphatic "Yes."

Later, I kept returning to it. Why did it feel like the truest thing I'd ever said? And what exactly did it mean to be a Lover Girl, anyway?

There are many ways to define love, but the Lover Girl understands it not as a sentiment, a feeling, or even a verb, but as the very language through which the world becomes legible.

The Lover Girl (TLG) reaches beyond the visible, inching closer and closer to what is most untouchable. She maps the terrain of distance, finding meaning and urgency in the space between. She doesn't envision new worlds, she embodies them until they take up residence inside her. She loves with reckless ineffability: she is impractical, but she is far from frivolous. She understands that love is not a condition but a cosmology.

A Lover Girl can take on many forms. She can be found crying in the club, finding angel numbers on microwaves, Facetiming her best friend to relay her latest crush in real-time. Or, she is smiling at strangers, volunteering for a community cause, asking her Uber driver their life story. Or, she is romanticizing a 30 second exchange, under a tree writing letters she will never send, scrolling through the Missed Connections page on Craigslist.

In any case, she suspends every moment in romantic distance and intimacy, allowing herself to be woven into the secret, invisible knots that bind the world together.

She loves as praxis—as a way of knowing—in simultaneous protest and surrender, reaching for the sublime.

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The Poetics and Politics of Yearning

Yearning is a mode of becoming — the desire for something you can feel, but cannot touch. It is not passivity, lack, or waiting in vain, but an active force: an ekphrasis of the self in relation to what remains beyond reach. A way of knowing through worldbuilding rather than possession. To yearn is to articulate the possibility of what is not yet materialized; to carve absence into presence shaped by the insistence of desire. To stand at the threshold between what exists and what could exist and declare that the distance between them is worth crossing.

It is the root of myth, the architect of beauty, the reason why we look at a ruin and imagine what once stood or become nostalgic for futures we've never experienced. The Lover Girl understands that longing is not emptiness but overflow—a surplus of feeling that demands to be transmuted into something more. She does not shy away from desire; she lets it shape her, lets it carve new pathways in her body, lets it become language, architecture, movement.

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Beyond the Romantic Frame & A Brief History of "Platonic Love"

The Lover Girl refuses to let love be reduced. She understands love as an ecology—a vast, interconnected system of attachments, affinities, and allegiances that extend beyond the individual. Love is found in the intimacy of friendship, in the kinship of family, in the collective care of a community, in the spiritual tethering of strangers that defy logic.

Platonic is a weak word for the friendships that sustain lifetimes. Romantic is too narrow a frame for the loves that do not fit neatly into the scripts of partnership. But the original idea of Platonic love, as conceived by Plato, was never about the absence of desire—it was about the transcendence of it.

Over time, Platonic love was stripped of its complexity and flattened into a binary opposite of romantic or erotic love—a reductive misinterpretation that emerged primarily during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. As Christianity reshaped Western philosophy, there was a growing discomfort with desire, bodily longing, and eroticism, leading to a sanitized version of Platonic love that emphasized chastity, restraint, and an intellectualized, disembodied form of connection.

By the 19th and 20th centuries, Platonic love became a shorthand for “just friends”, a phrase used to describe relationships devoid of romance, passion, or deep emotional intimacy. What was once a vision of love that expanded beyond the self became something that simply excluded desire altogether.

In reality, Plato never advocated for desire to be erased—he saw it as the very thing that propels love forward, toward higher forms of beauty, truth, and connection. But in its contemporary usage, Platonic love has been stripped of its radical, transformative nature. Instead of being seen as a love that expands, it is often framed as a love that lacks—a friendship defined by what it is not, rather than what it is.

In Symposium, Plato, through the voice of Diotima, describes love as an ascent—a movement from physical attraction toward higher forms of connection, culminating in the love of wisdom and beauty itself. This is known as the Ladder of Love, a framework that leads the lover beyond bodily desire toward a love that is expansive, intellectual, and divine:

Love of a particular beautiful body → The initial attraction to a person.

Love of all beautiful bodies → Understanding that beauty exists beyond one individual.

Love of a beautiful soul → Moving beyond the physical to appreciate virtue and wisdom.

Love of beautiful ideas → Engaging with knowledge, philosophy, and intellectual truth.

Love of the Form of Beauty itself → The highest love, an encounter with eternal beauty, the divine.

"He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes towards the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty... absolute, simple, separate, and everlasting." 

— Plato, Symposium

For Plato, love is not meant to be contained—it is meant to bridge the physical and the metaphysical. The Lover Girl understands this intuitively. She does not love to possess; she loves to be altered and expanded. She loves so radically they wonder why: beyond what language can capture, or what labels can hold.

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Reclaiming Romance

Romanticism, as a historical movement, was defined by an embrace of emotion, intuition, and an intimate connection to beauty. And yet, when women practice this same devotion, it is treated as a weakness rather than a philosophy, as indulgence rather than intelligence. The Lover Girl understands that this dismissal is ideological—that it is not by accident to delegitimize the ways in which women relate to the world through feeling.

What is feminism, if not the right to take one’s inner life seriously? The Lover Girl claims space for the poetic, the relational, the sentimental. She insists that love—whether romantic, platonic, artistic, or spiritual—is not a distraction but a fountain of knowledge. She rejects the idea that to be preoccupied with love is to be lesser. Instead, she understands that love has always been a technology of survival and meaning in a world designed to minimize the feminine.

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A Lover's Revolution

The Lover Girl was never meant for a world where love is transactional, where desire is flattened to consumption, where romance is stripped of mystery and reduced to an algorithm. In a culture that glorifies detachment and mistakes apathy for strength, she dares to love anyway. She does not ask if love is productive, if longing is rational, if devotion is deserved. She does not ration herself—she gives freely, fully, recklessly.

In The Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han describes the collapse of eros as the inability to desire beyond the self—a world where otherness disappears, where intimacy is replaced with hypervisibility, where love becomes an act of control rather than surrender. A world without yearning is a world without poetry, without myth, without revolution.

But the Lover Girl refuses to sterilize her longing. She resists the neoliberal logic that tells her to gamify connection, optimize desire, and make love efficient. To love—to truly love—is to risk irretrievability, to embrace uncertainty, to move beyond the self. It is a direct rejection of hyper-individualism, an insistence on radical interconnection. She insists that love remain sacred, unquantifiable, ungovernable.

To love in a world built on alienation is to resist. Love—unapologetic, excessive, all-consuming—is an act of defiance against a system that severs kinship and intimacy in order to sell it back to you instead. Under capitalism, love is stripped of its radical potential and repackaged as a self-improvement project—something to be managed, performed, and priced.

Han writes:

"Today, the Other is abolished and transformed into a consumer product."

This is what Marx describes as the alienation of human relationships. Love, instead of fostering connection, is privatized. The lover becomes an entrepreneur of the self, curating desirability as social capital. Romance is stripped of risk, mystery, and surrender—rendered transactional, sanitized, and safe.

Marx speaks of alienation from labor, from community, from self, while Han extends this critique to desire. In a world where everything is flattened into sameness, love loses its strangeness, its transformative power. Capitalism replaces longing with instant gratification. It replaces devotion with convenience. It replaces eros—the yearning for the Other—with a mirror.

To love radically is to reject alienation and insist that deep, inconvenient, life-altering love is not only possible but necessary. It is to refuse the agony of eros and resurrect its power.

The Lover Girl knows that love, real love, is a disruptive force—one that undoes the logic of capital, one that insists on interdependence in a world that manufactures isolation.

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An Invitation

I invite you to see love as more than a verb, but as the ultimate act of becoming. To touch another body as proof that something beyond this world is possible. To embrace desire not as a moment, but a mythology. To trace your tongue along the edges of language until love becomes the only dialect. To let it spill, overflow, and stain with abandon.