I still remember, when I was a kid who had to go to church three or four times a week, sitting down with my youth group and talking about the supernatural. We were told that the supernatural, being supra-natural, was what superseded the natural. We were told that the natural was nature unfolding, was that Edenic garden, but that everything willing either by God or by man was supernatural. We were told that choice was the most supernatural thing in the world.

I don’t subscribe to that definition of the supernatural or of nature anymore. Nature is an impossible category. Everything is nature but, then, the aesthetics around nature, having so much to do with modernity, changes all the time.

However, I still do like to think about choice as supernatural. I like thinking about the supernatural as a consequence or a response with nature. I like the supernatural as a category, which includes all the ghosts and grief things and imps and landscape things, that we can never seem to know enough about.

Love, because love is something that survives despite its shape, is also supernatural. I’m never been the type of gay person who thinks that loving is not a choice, which I understand that some people are. That's fine but it's not for me. Me, I doubt love like I doubt choice and I believe that love carries choice with itself.

Now, of course, I am also an astrologer. I work with people on the art of making prophecies for themselves. Choice is supernatural because it is a consequence and response with nature but also because choice can be eerily prophetic. Love is a little like choice in that it exists when we believe in it but we’re never quite sure if it exists at all. It’s a little like choice in that we experience a uncertain terror when we believe in it and we experience an certain frustration when we are deprived of it.

Love is supernatural, which means that it exists as both consequence and miracle. We love people even when we know, for a fact, that we will someday carry the weight of love in grief. We love people despite the weight of history. We love the same way we breathe—without thinking and miraculously.

This is why I’ll never tease anyone who talks about soulmates and twin flames. I’m a very cynical detriment-Jupiter type of person. I tend to think that everything is a marketing ploy and I can’t help but feel suspicious around reports of soulmate meetings. However, in a world that is oppressively defined by capitalist realism, I don’t think that believing in soulmates or twin flames is a bad thing. Believing in love? That you will experience the miracle of attachment despite all of your hard earned realism? That’s the stuff that romance is made of.

I understand that love takes work. I understand that it takes experience and that learning to love, through action and devotion, is something that needs cultivation. I understand that love takes time, resources, and capacity. However, love also takes courage. It also takes belief because of its supernatural condition. Love still exists, even when you don’t believe in it, but in a sorry state. Love, like other things that toe the line between realism and the fantastical, is nurtured and protected by belief.

Think of it this way—we live in a world that not only neglects love and our capacities for attachment but often actively tries to limit the types of love that we are able to describe. We live in a world where we are unable to feel the full weight of love, where we cannot take time off for limerence or bereavement. Believing in love is not a scam. The paucity of the types of love that we allow belief to describe—that's the scam.

It’s easy to make fun of people who buy into soulmate reports or ourselves when we do so. It’s so fucking easy to make fun of people who believe in love, isn’t it? But the issue isn’t that people believe in love or in Plato’s poetic idealisms around broken souls and mates. The really laughable thing is the idea, if we take on Plato’s metaphor, that souls can only be broken once and that this once-breaking results in us having only one soulmate.

We are all broken off from the stuff of life. There are as many different types of love as there are the number of people you learn to love.

If you’re someone who wonders about soulmates, someone who is always ready to suspend disbelief when sinking into a good fantasy novel, or someone who believes that dragons live somewhere out there—you’re fine. Your imagination is doing what it is supposed to be doing, which is the work of reminding you of your wonder.

Believing in love is a little like believing that the heart is not just a muscle. It’s a little like speaking with a ghost of someone who has passed on. The heart is not just a muscle and ghost encounters do happen—experiencing heartache or heartbreak or seeing a ghost doesn’t mean that you are crazy or foolish. It means that you are willing to do more than to live realistically, that you are unsatisfied with the reasonable. It means that you are willing to live supernaturally.