the higher lens : 12
Does Love Endure in Turbulent Times?
Earlier this year, I had the chance to take part in the AKC (Associate of King’s College) programme at King’s College London - a unique series of weekly lectures that runs alongside our degree, asking big questions about faith, ethics, politics, and society. The theme for 2024/25 was “Enduring Love? Intimacies and Care in Turbulent Times,” and as part of the programme I wrote an essay exploring what it means for love to survive in a world that feels increasingly unstable. To my surprise and pride, it was awarded a Dean’s Commendation.
When I sat down to write, I thought about how often we speak of love as something timeless , a constant that runs through human life regardless of era or circumstance. But as I explored more deeply, it became clear that the forms intimacy and care take are never separate from their context. They are shaped by the conditions of the world we live in: our economies, our politics, our technologies, our crises. So to ask whether love endures is not really to ask if it exists at all, but how it adapts - how it bends in response to turbulence without breaking.
One of the first things I considered was the fragility of modern relationships. Unlike in the past, when bonds were often held together by duty, religion, or survival, intimacy today is usually chosen , we stay with someone because it feels fulfilling, not because we must. This is liberating, especially in terms of equality and personal freedom, but it also makes love more vulnerable. It can sometimes feel as though relationships are as easily disposable as anything else in a consumerist society. When everything around us is unstable (jobs, housing, even borders ) intimacy absorbs that instability too. Yet this fragility doesn’t mean love disappears; it means we need to understand it as something that exists inside turbulence, not outside of it.
Another way this becomes clear is through the politics of care. Care is often treated as invisible, hidden in the private sphere of family life, but it is one of the most fundamental expressions of love. The pandemic exposed this reality. When governments faltered, when health systems broke under pressure, it wasn’t institutions that held people together but each other: neighbours checking in, families sharing resources, communities raising money or sending help across borders. These small, everyday acts of care became lifelines. They also revealed the inequalities that structure our lives , the way women, in particular, still take on the greatest share of unpaid care work, and how precarity makes that burden heavier. But just as strongly, they revealed resilience: that in times of crisis, people do not simply stop caring. Instead, love takes on new forms, reshaped by necessity, but powerful all the same.
Technology has been another force reshaping intimacy. It’s easy to see its downsides -the way dating apps can turn attraction into an endless scroll, or how social media makes love performative, something to be liked, commented on, displayed. There is truth to the idea that technology can flatten relationships, making them feel more shallow. But it also gives love new ways to last. For couples separated by distance, messages and video calls allow closeness where once there might have only been absence. For diasporas, technology keeps ties alive with home , a reminder that care and affection can stretch across continents. For communities in crisis, digital platforms make solidarity possible in ways unimaginable a generation ago. Technology complicates love, sometimes weakening its depth, but it also gives it new channels to endure.
Perhaps the most striking lesson I drew, though, is that love is not only about private relationships. It also endures through collective action and resistance. Writers like Bell hooks have framed love as a radical ethic , a refusal to give up on care, trust, and justice in a world that often erodes them. In turbulent times, love becomes political: it shows itself in migrant families who preserve language and culture, in activists who stand side by side for causes bigger than themselves, in communities that refuse to let fear or alienation win.
Love can be resistance , an act that holds humanity together in the face of forces that would divide it.
When I look back at the question I was asked to answer - does love endure in turbulent times? - my conclusion is yes, but not in the way we often imagine. Endurance does not mean permanence, like an unchanging stone weathering the storm. It means adaptation, resilience, the capacity to transform without losing its essence. Love bends. It reshapes itself when intimacy feels fragile, when care is stretched, when technology mediates distance, when communities come together against hardship. Its endurance lies in its ability to move with the turbulence, not stand apart from it.
For me, writing this essay wasn’t only about ideas in a classroom. It was also about reflecting on how love shows up in the world I see around me - in family networks, in diasporic communities, in friendships sustained across borders, in the relationships that anchor us in daily life, and in the digital threads that keep us connected when distance or circumstance pulls us apart. The Dean’s Commendation was a recognition of the work, but the greater lesson was this: love survives not by standing still, but by moving with us through change.
By Vlera Gara