What we have lost on the way to love, Part I

Somewhere inside many of us lives a younger self who was hurt deeply and never fully left that moment.

A child who was abandoned. A teenager who was humiliated. A young adult who loved too openly and was made to feel foolish for it. The body grows up. The years pass. We become accomplished, independent, and clever at survival, but the heart, unattended, often stays frozen at the scene of the wound. Then one day we find ourselves asking why love feels so difficult, why closeness feels frightening, why we keep meeting people and not feeling met.

This is where loneliness often begins. Not only with bad timing or bad luck. Not only with the apps, though they have made everything worse. Loneliness begins when old pain becomes the lens through which we read everyone new. It begins when we no longer know what safety feels like. It begins when trust has been broken so many times that even tenderness feels suspicious, and trust, I think, is the missing word in almost everything we say about modern love.

We are trying to love in a time of profound dislocation, and before we can talk about what to do, we have to be honest about where we are.

We lost the village. nobody mourned it.

We used to find love through the people who already loved us. We have more ways to reach each other than any generation in history, and we are lonelier. We see people everywhere in cafes, in libraries, on the street, in the mall, at the bar and we do not speak to them. Not because we are indifferent, because we no longer quite know how. Approaching a stranger feels presumptuous, or threatening, or simply strange in a way it did not used to.

The line between a genuine human overture and something that feels intrusive has become so blurred that many of us have stopped trying altogether. We distrust random encounters. We distrust our own instincts about people. We have been given infinite ways to communicate and have somehow lost the most basic one turning to the person beside us and saying something real. A pandemic accelerated all of this, closing the last remaining spaces where human beings met by chance, and yes, the pandemic is over, but the isolation it normalized has not left. It has settled in. It has become a habit. Become the default shape of daily life.

Once, many people met through some kind of social fabric: family, neighbours, school, work, mutual friends, community. That fabric was imperfect. Sometimes it was intrusive, conservative, and judgmental, but it also offered something we do not talk about enough now: context. Accountability. Recognition. Someone knew who that person was. Someone could vouch. Someone could warn. Someone could say, “Take your time,” or “That one is kind,” or “That one is trouble.”

Now many of us are trying to build intimacy in private, unsupported space. We meet strangers alone. We assess one another through curated photographs, fragments of text, and the performance of self. We are expected to make profoundly human decisions in conditions that are thin, fast, and often emotionally unrooted. Dating apps did not create our loneliness, but they have monetized it. They have trained many people to confuse access with connection, abundance with possibility, and choice with wisdom. They have made it easier to encounter people, but not necessarily easier to know them. Easier to be seen, perhaps, but much harder to feel safe.

All of this lands on top of whatever we already carry. For many in diasporic Caribbean communities shaped by migration, class, race, religion, family obligation, and silence, love is cultural. It is historical. It is shaped by what our parents endured, what they could not say, what they taught us about respectability, gender, sacrifice, survival, desire, and shame. Some of us were raised in homes full of love but not emotional openness. Some were taught strength, but not vulnerability. Some learned early that appearance mattered, reputation mattered, duty mattered but tenderness was harder to name.

So, when we talk about intimacy now, we are not just talking about attraction. We are talking about inheritance.

Where to begin

• Invest in your community before you need it for love. The village must be rebuilt intentionally, one relationship at a time.
• Tell trusted people in your life that you are open to meeting someone. Remove the shame from that. Your community knowing your heart is wisdom, not weakness.
• If you use dating apps, use them as one tool among many and notice how you feel after an hour of scrolling. That feeling is data.
• Seek spaces where connection happens in context and over time: cultural gatherings, faith communities, creative spaces, anywhere people return to regularly.