Love Is a ForceA project by Matthew Koren
Love Is a Force

What if love is not something we feel but something that acts upon us?

Love destabilizes us. Reorganizes us. Reveals us to ourselves through one another.

Love Is a Force is an inquiry into relationship, freedom, identity, transformation, and what becomes possible when we stop trying to control the force that changes us.

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PHILOSOPHY · RELATIONSHIP · BECOMINGBY MATTHEW KOREN
The Reader Conversation · A Conversation About Love & Life

Every one of us has a story about love.

About the people who shaped us. The relationships that changed us. The things we've learned to protect—and the things we still hope for.

I'm writing a book about love, relationships, and what makes life meaningful. Before I finish it, I'd love to understand your experience. This isn't a test. There are no right answers.

— Matthew

  • About 6–8 minutes
  • Skip any personal question
  • Your perspective matters
Begin the Conversation
The central ideaA different starting point

We do not exist first
and then relate.

We become through relationship.

We tend to imagine the self as something already formed—a person who then enters relationships with other already-formed people. This work begins somewhere else: relationship is not merely something that happens between us. It is one of the conditions through which we become who we are.

Explore the philosophy

Not a promise of certainty.
A way of looking closer.

Three provocations

A few things worth
holding lightly.

01

Love changes what it touches.

Love is not merely affirmation or comfort. It can dissolve old forms of selfhood and make new ones possible.

02

Freedom makes intimacy possible.

Control can preserve attachment while making genuine encounter impossible. Freedom allows the person who is actually present to appear.

03

The self is a relationship.

Identity is real, but not necessarily fixed or self-originating. We emerge through relationship, memory, culture, body, desire, history, and encounter.

Organic roots and braided strands in earth tones, artwork for the bookLove Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning · publication details forthcoming
The book

Love Is a Force
That Gives Us Meaning

A philosophical inquiry into what love is, what it does to us, and what becomes possible when we stop confusing love with possession, security, identity, or control.

  1. I
    THE FORCEWhat is love?
  2. II
    THE PATTERNWhy does love destabilize us?
  3. III
    THE CHOICEWhat happens when we stop defending the old self?
  4. IV
    THE PRACTICEHow do we participate consciously in what love is doing?
Explore the book
Essays

Thinking in public.

The book is being written in conversation with lived experience, philosophy, psychology, spiritual traditions, queer thought, and the people encountering these ideas in real time.

Read all essays
01
Date to be confirmedLove · Meaning

Why Your Definition of Love May Be the Problem

We keep trying to make love safe by turning it into something it may never have been.

In the inquiry
02
Date to be confirmedFreedom · Intimacy

Freedom Is Not the Opposite of Intimacy

Control can preserve a relationship while destroying the encounter occurring inside it.

In the inquiry
03
Date to be confirmedIdentity · Love

You Do Not Exist Before Relationship

What if the self is less like an object and more like a song?

In the inquiry
Practice

The Invitation Practice

Ask clearly. Stop managing the answer. Let someone meet you.

An applied practice for people who are tired of carrying the relationship alone.

An invitation tells the truth about what you want while leaving the other person free.

Explore The Invitation Practice
01Something real in me↓
02Invitation↓
03Your freedom↓
04Relationship answers↓
05Receiving
Working papers

The thinking
beneath the book.

Love Is a Force is emerging from an ongoing body of philosophical and psychological research: relational ontology, love and freedom, identity, trauma, transformation, living systems, dependent origination, embodiment, and the traditions that have tried to understand what it means to become human.

Explore the Working Papers
VOLUME I
The philosophical architectureVOLUME II
Foundational thinkers and influences
Matthew Koren in a candid moment
The person inside the question

The question behind the work

I didn't arrive at these questions because love worked the way I was told it would. I arrived here because it didn't.

What began as a personal inquiry into love, freedom, identity, and relationship became a larger philosophical question: what if relationship is not simply something we have, but one of the processes through which we become who we are?

Love Is a Force is one expression of that inquiry.

About Matthew

A project by Matthew Koren

A place to begin

Enter the field.

These ideas become more interesting when they encounter another consciousness. Essays, conversations, working papers, invitations, and experiments in what it might mean to live relationally.

Occasional essays and invitations. No content treadmill.