“One of my philosophy professors lectured wildly about love once, yelling: “When you’re in love with someone, that person is the lighthouse of your universe.” (I scrawled it inside Science and Poetry in pencil—lighthouse of your universe—as if I would ever forget that phrase.) He was a delightful caricature of his position. I could swear he literally tore his hair out while howling at us. He went on, “Nothing means as much without that person.” One of the men in the class repeated, incredulous, half-laughing, “So you’re saying you can’t enjoy, like, a vacation, without someone if you’re really in love with them?” “Of course not.” the professor replied. “Not completely. You recognize beauty, but beauty means less if they don’t witness it with you. Beauty is less. You see something sublime and your first thought is that they should be there with you. It’s not as good without them. They illuminate. They make everything more.”
there’s so much pathologizing over why enemies to lovers is a popular trope (something something the normalization of abuse something something) when the simplest and less moronic answer is that narratives thrive on irony and reversals, and there’s no greater irony than characters going from hating each other’s guts to loving each other unconditionally. raw thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
Shipping fictional characters isn’t representative of your moral values. It’s representative of your particular psychic damage and the themes and motifs that haunt you. Hope this helps.