The Course of Love is a modular storytelling project exploring the phases of romantic relationships. Designed as a set of shuffleable cards, the project invites readers to experience love’s complexity through multiple perspectives. Each card represents one “course” of love moments of sweetness, bitterness, confusion, or clarity, seen through the eyes of four different characters.
The format allows the narrative to shift depending on how it’s read. What begins tender can end in heartbreak. What feels like an ending might become a beginning. The challenge was to design a story structure where meaning isn’t fixed but constantly reshaped by order and context. This wasn’t just about telling a love story it was about designing an experience that mirrors how love is actually lived: nonlinear, layered, and open to interpretation.
The structure is simple. Lay the cards out in a 5 x 4 grid. Rows represent the five phases of love: the Spark, the Promise, the Offering, the Temptation, and the Question. The columns represent four different perspectives: the Realist, the Cynic, the Optimist, and the Believer, each shaped by their own context and worldview.
To read a story all you have to do is pick one card from each row. You can stay within one column or move across personalities. The combinations are infinite — and each path reveals a different narrative. There is no right order. You can read top to bottom, bottom to top, diagonally, or skip around. Each reading creates a different relationship, sometimes coherent, sometimes contradictory, always layered.
Because love doesn’t follow a fixed course. It’s shaped by who’s telling the story and what you’ve already heard when you hear it.
A card about betrayal feels different if you’ve already read one about devotion. A reflection on doubt lands differently when it follows a story of joy. Each reading creates a new emotional architecture, built not just by the content, but by the sequence.
When we began this project, I had just finished The Wedding People by Alison Epoch and started The Course of Love by Alain de Botton. One was fiction, one nonfiction, but both explored how love shifts depending on timing, circumstance, and perception. That intersection sparked something.
I get fascinated easily — by people, by context, by the small things that shape how we move through the world. I don’t really go hunting for inspiration. It usually finds me, in the middle of something else. A book I’m reading spills into a project. A conversation makes me rethink an idea. It all blurs together in a way. I’ve learned to trust the process and to always stay open, absorbing everything in a relentless search for new ways of seeing and doing.
