What it means to love

It slipped my mind that it was Valentine’s Day last Saturday, overrun by the series of events that capped the week. We were shocked at the turn of events surrounding young businessman Kingston Cheng’s death, which included the perpetrator being granted temporary freedom. I was around the area where he died on Valentine’s Day. Many were hounding the area and laying flowers, all in tears. With this development, the longing to love has become absurd and rather bleak, even to a point of being difficult, especially with the circumstances that we are in.

What really does it mean to love in the day of too much modernism and the era of social media? I’m not sure if it is defined by the freshness of the flowers received or the dinner reservations set out at a very posh, fine dining restaurant. It is not even about the public gestures or the little things done to make one smile. There is always something deeper to the word, one that speaks of being feisty on this day.

As a Cebuana, it is about fighting for the vendors who are struggling to find their spaces in the city grounds without having to pay for too much rental fees. It is about standing up against extravagant developments on top of hills and mountains. Love here is rarely extravagant. It is practical, habitual, and often unspoken or even heavy.

Truth be told, we love a city that keeps breaking our hearts. We fall in love with people who are taken away too soon. We find love in the shadow of systems that fail us repeatedly, where justice feels delayed, diluted, or altogether denied. In moments like these, love is no longer romantic. It is political. It is moral. It demands anger, vigilance, and memory. To love, now, is to refuse forgetting.

As we narrow down the meaning of this rather difficult word, we come to the conclusion that it is to insist that names are not reduced to headlines and that lives are not footnotes in a news cycle. Love means sitting with grief long after the hashtags have faded. It means asking hard questions even when the answers make us uncomfortable. It means choosing to care when indifference would be easier.

In Cebu, love shows up in vigils held under streetlights, in prayers murmured beside candles melting onto the pavement. It is in conversations over coffee where voices drop not out of fear, but out of exhaustion. It is in journalists continuing to write, even when the words feel inadequate against loss. Perhaps love is not always gentle.

Valentine’s Day will come and go every year. As it was over the weekend, there were roses, chocolates, and declarations of affection. In loving Cebu and in truly loving it, means more than celebration. It means accountability. It means compassion that extends beyond private circles and into the public sphere. In a time when life feels cheapened by speed and power, to love is to insist on dignity.