In school, we are often taught that narratives have a beginning, rising action, climax, and dénouement. But most personal stories don’t have such a clearly demarcated arch, and your love story is probably no exception: if a relationship could be so easily divided and sorted out, you wouldn’t be reading this right now. 

I find this lack of narrative definition to be both distressing and comforting. It’s distressing because it’s natural to want to understand what you are experiencing and then to fit those experiences into recognizable shapes or definitions; it’s comforting because understanding anything is such an elusive goal and something that is recognizable one day can become alien the next. 

Yet, this isn’t to say that it’s impossible to narrativize, define, or explore the complexities of a relationship. You just need to let go of the idea that your love story has to follow a strict set of grandiose rules, fit into a particular shape, or conform to an externally imposed definition: every relationship, and thus every love story, is unique. 

Try to approach writing your love story as an invitation to define your relationship with a language that y’all elucidate together while embracing the excitement of the unknown side by side instead of being overwhelmed by it. So, do your best to forget about The Notebook and Disney’s empty happily ever afters that ends with marriage— abandoning the love story blueprints that we have been fed via media is probably the best thing you can do for your own love story.

Step One: Decide how you want to tell your love story 

Make a list of whatever images or sounds surface when you close your eyes and think of the relationship you are writing about. 

What came to mind when you closed your eyes? How does this make you feel? Use these thoughts to formulate a means by which you want to convey and structure your love story. Here are a few examples:  

• If a particular song started playing over and over accompanied by a series of memories, you might want to organize your love story using that song. This means that your love story could consist of a series of vignettes connected by the common thread of that tune.  

• If one particularly striking moment overshadowed all others, invest your time in that instance rather than attempting to construct something that covers the entirety of y’all’s relationship— sometimes a seemingly minuscule part can be the best way to outline the significance of a whole. 

• If thoughts pertaining to y’all’s relationship manifested primarily in visual snapshots, consider telling your love story through a photo album accompanied by thoughtful captions.   

• If you want to write concurrently with your partner, you can each make a list of what came to mind when you closed your eyes and compare them. Then, you can use your lists to pinpoint what you can both write about. This can be interesting because it allows you and your partner to each see how the other uniquely perceived something that y’all have experienced together. 

Step Two: Figure out your love story’s theme

Yes, since you are writing a love story, the primary theme could be boiled down to being “Love.” However, in order to make it more meaningful, you need to decide on what kind and/or aspect of love it is that you want to emphasize: Is it unrequited love? Is it forbidden love? Is it reckless love? Is it enduring love? Is it selfless love?

The term “theme” (aka the central message of a text) gets thrown around so often in discussions of narrative structure that it can feel empty of meaning, but it can actually be pretty helpful. This is because the motifs and symbols that develop a theme can serve as fulcrums for your love story from and to which both visible and internal experiences can unfold and return.

Essentially, themes are constructed from two primary elements: symbols and motifs. A symbol is something concrete that represents something abstract (like a ladybug that represents luck) and can be used to reinforce a motif; a motif is a recurring element or idea that reinforces a theme (the appearance of many ladybugs and/or events like never missing the bus when you are with your loved one can develop the theme of luck). So, a theme is more or less established by what the confluence of motifs and symbols construct. 

Though this may sound complicated, a symbol can be something as simple as that cheap bottle of wine y’all pick up from the liquor store around the block before spending an evening together.

Use the list of what came to mind when you closed your eyes as a reference point for identifying potential symbols and motifs. 

Step Three: Write a rough draft

As with most things pertaining to “Love,” the pressure to be profound can arise when you write your love story. Try to not let that pressure infect your mind. When you begin writing a rough draft, imagine that you are either talking to your loved one or gushing to one of your best friends about them. What are the primary thoughts you want to convey? What do you want them to truly understand? What events are you the most excited to talk about?

As you are imagining talking to them, use the symbols and motifs you have previously identified as guides for the direction of your thoughts. Doing so will help not only your theoretical—and eventual—reader but also you remain oriented and facilitate a sense of cohesion that will allow the intended theme of your love story to burgeon and unmask itself. 

Step Four: Edit your love story

This is when you need to let go of anything that may be unproductively obscuring your intended message. Though this could come in the form of significant revisions and deleting a few sections, it can also take place in the minutest of details— sometimes a punctuation mark can change the entire meaning of a sentence. 

One way to approach the task of editing the rough draft of your love story is to read it backward from end to beginning. This helps you to not get distracted by the narrative and thus allows you to focus on whether or not each sentence makes sense on a syntactical level. I also recommend that you set aside time to read your entire love story out loud: it’s easy for our mind to rapidly fill in the blanks when we aren’t speaking since we already know what we think we are saying, but sometimes slowing down via the audible externalization of our thoughts reveals errors we wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. 

Ideally, editing will also help you clear and organize your thoughts enough that you are able to let yourself move into a more meditative, feeling-oriented headspace. This transition is important because it is needed in order to sincerely reflect on your love story. So, take your time on this step— editing serves a purpose beyond grammatical precision!

Step Five: Reflect on your love story

If editing is the act of analytically slowing down, then reflecting is the act of effectively slowing down. 

This is when you acknowledge the unique shapes your love story forms as opposed to all the shapes you—or outside influences—already had in mind prior to the composition of your love story. Let these shapes wash over you prior to directly considering them. Ask yourself what parts of your relationship these shapes fill and what they leave vacant. Is what’s filled a positive or negative part of your relationship? Is what’s left vacant something to aim for or continue steering clear of? Is there a filled section that you wish you could erase? If so, ask yourself how you can re-write or revise it in the future. 

Then, let yourself imagine the language these shapes gesture toward or perhaps even begin to define. What feelings do that language and its unique definitions produce? How do these developments challenge or reinforce the means by which you previously understood your relationship?

Step Six: Apply your reflections to real life

Now that you’ve reflected on the different layers of your love story, you need to talk with your partner and apply what you’ve learned to how you engage with your relationship on a day-to-day basis:

• If there’s something you wish had happened more frequently, figure out how to make that happen! 

• If there’s something you wish had never happened, ensure y’all strive to prevent it from happening again.

• If there was a moment you can pinpoint when a spark was ignited and your relationship is feeling more or less sparkless, devise a means by which that same spark can be reignited within the context of y’all’s current relationship!

• If you and your partner wrote about the same events from different perspectives, see where what y’all experienced overlapped and diverged before using that information to understand each other more completely in the future. 

In the case that you are struggling to identify what aspect of your love story should be applied to your life, ask yourself questions like these:

• If you had to demarcate certain chapters or sections of your love story, what would they be called? What are the implications of those titles?

• What are the most impactful moments that surfaced? What lead up to and followed those moments?

• If you successfully identified a motif, stop to consider why the presence of such repetition is meaningful. In other words, how does that single motif influence how you understand and/or experience the rest of your love story?

• What were the primary obstacles that tested your love? 

Step Seven: Live your love story

We’ve been talking about how to write a love story but be sure that you don’t forget to live your love story while it’s happening, too— documenting a relationship is only helpful if you use the information gleaned from that practice to positively influence y’all’s relationship. 

A love story is a living story, and y’all should move through each chapter together, one moment at a time, while embracing the beauty of the unknown with gratitude. As Esther Perel, a renowned sex therapist, says, 

“For erotically intelligent couples, love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life time… They see their relationship as something alive and ongoing, not a fait accompli. It’s a story that they are writing together, one with many chapters, and neither partner knows how it will end. There’s always a place they haven’t gone yet, always something about the other still to be discovered.”

So, put away your phone or computer for a while and go live your love story together without worrying about the unknown— tell your loved one that they are the name of things, which is really the only definition that matters.