Word of the Year: Love

My word of the year this year was Love. It started out feeling huge and amorphous and flinchy, and settled into being a warm flow in the background. It feels like it gently soaked into some stuck places and loosened them.

batdina commented on last year's post that Marianne Williamson says love and fear are opposites, and for me they have been intertwined. It feels like over the past year they have gotten more unwound from each other. I'm grateful that it's been un-dramatic, and also a little sad that there hasn't been any movement toward a romantic relationship. I did ask a cute friend of a friend to dance at a concert, which was fun, but it turned out he's married.

One of the things that let Love settle into being warm and gentle rather than scary and dramatic is separating it from Desire. I'm warily choosing that as my word for 2026. Sexual desire can feel dangerously overpowering, both my own and other people's, and wanting things in general feels like it makes me vulnerable to manipulation and can get labeled greedy.

I started out this Word of the Year tradition choosing words I desperately needed, and the last few years I've more chosen things that I want to make my peace with, although looking at the list, I still need them. I think of Love as an underlying force in the Universe, and Desire as an underlying force of being alive. We move toward what we want, and away from what we don't want.

While I feel as clear as I ever do in this Word of the Year process that Desire is the next one, I also feel a strong pull away from it. Which is part of my relationship with Desire generally, a strong pull toward and an equally strong pull away.

( full word of the year list )