Like＞Love
We've been chasing the wrong thing for a long time.
For centuries we've built our entire civilization around love — the songs, the movies, the holidays, the grand gestures, the heartbreak, the drama. Love gets worshipped. Love gets analyzed. Love gets all the cultural weight.
Meanwhile, like — the thing that actually makes you want to be around someone — barely gets mentioned, and that's a problem.
And it's time we talked about it.
Lucky in Love
To begin, love and luck make for strange bedfellows. Love isn't lucky. It just sort of… happens. It's like the relationship equivalent of a car accident — BAM, you're in it, nobody consulted you, nobody asked your permission. One minute you're fine, and the next you're stumbling around with your heart doing things hearts aren't supposed to do, all the while telling everyone it was worth it even when you're not entirely sure. For all its majesty and mystique, love is unbidden, happenstance, precarious, provisional, contingent. Love is a lot of things, but lucky isn't one of them. So why do people conflate the two?
Luck is arbitrary fortune — pure chance with no regard for effort or desert. Love doesn't operate on that frequency. Love doesn't need luck. It needs patience, repair, vulnerability, a tolerance for disappointment, and the willingness to stay when every evolutionary impulse screams at you to bolt. Sure, maybe you need some luck to cross paths with someone at the right moment, but that someone who's right today could be, and quite often is, your worst nightmare tomorrow. Love shifts. Luck doesn't help you find it or make it last.
Lucky in Like
Like is different. Far different and far more nuanced, which is probably why we talk about it less. Nuance doesn't make for good drama. To like and be liked back, steadily, over time, across the full range of someone's personality, requires a particular compatibility of temperament, a naturally shared cadence, and a felt sense of ease that needs no translation.
Love arrives with scripts, stakes, inherited expectations. It's culturally amplified, societally mandated, the plot of roughly all human storytelling. People perform love, declare it, endure it, survive it, write songs about it, get tattoos commemorating it — "SHIRLEY ♥️ FOREVER" in gigantic Gothic script — then laser those tattoos off six months later. The whole apparatus comes pre-loaded with intensity, consequence, drama, an operatic momentum that makes everything feel capital-M Meaningful.
Like is the opposite of drama. It doesn't need the spotlight, the proclamation, the carefully-curated Instagram post. Like just shows up. As comfort, as curiosity, as unforced rhythm. As conversation that isn't performed and silence that never feels awkward. Like is also rarer than love, and I realize how that sounds, but stay with me. It's less guaranteed, harder to sustain, far less inevitable, and astonishingly, almost cosmically fragile.
To be lucky in like is to stumble into genuine fortune. To have people you truly click with, and when I say click, I mean that unmistakable, ineffable, impossible-to-fake recognition. People whose presence alters the room's emotional barometric pressure without doing anything particular. Whose company needs no interpretation services or user's manual. People who make being together feel less like successfully completing an interpersonal obstacle course and more like walking into your house after a long trip — it just clicks, it just fits, it just is. Just like home.
Soulmates (And Why We've Got It All Wrong)
Before getting to the heart of the matter, let's talk about hearts. And souls. And the whole silly, irrational, completely misdirected idea we've built around both of them — soulmates, a word we throw around with remarkable certainty considering how little we've actually examined what it means. Somewhere along the way, this big, expansive, sacred word got pancaked down to a single meaning: the romantic partner destiny hand-picked for you before you born, written in the stars, inevitable as gravity, blah blah blah.
Just think about that for three seconds and you'll see how wildly, almost comically reductive it is.
Setting aside the very real fact that no one actually knows what the human soul is, your soulmate is supposed to be someone who gets you at a soul level. Someone whose existence makes yours make more sense. Someone who feels less like a discovery and more like a reunion. If that's what "soulmate" actually means then why on earth have we limited it exclusively to romance? And why have we convinced ourselves there can only be one, or at best, only one at a time? Why can't your best friend be your soulmate? Or your mother? Or father? Or sister? Why can't you have several soulmates across your life? Different people who each connect with different parts of who you are.
I've known the answer to that question since I was a kid. My younger brother died twenty years ago at thirty. We were nothing alike. He was quiet and reserved, I'm neither; he was athletic and calm, I'm cerebral and fiery. I was adopted into our family as an infant, he came later. But ever since we ran into each other in the hallway that first time, I considered him my soulmate. Why? Because of course he was. He was my brother. He is my brother, my best friend, my soulmate. When our teenage friends started using that word for their boyfriends and girlfriends, it made no sense to me. It sounded absurd. To me, to us, it was always him and me. I understand life is complicated, but this isn't that hard. So why? Why do we limit soulmates solely to romantic relationships?
Because we're obsessed with love. We've built an entire cultural mythology around it, entire industries devoted to helping us seek it out, find it, hold onto it, let go of it, and find it again. Love gets the movies, the songs, the captions, its own holiday. Love is the main character. Like barely gets a speaking role.
This reductio ad Hallmarkium has always struck me as not just wrong but borderline infantile. But fine. Do you. Whatever. I'm not here to tell you who your soulmate is or isn't. Feel how you feel. Love who you love. But what I know is that love alone does not and cannot make two people soulmates. You can love someone, even deeply, and still not like them. Still not want to spend quality time in their company. Still feel exhausted by their presence. Many do. We see this constantly in marriages that persist out of duty, in families held together by obligation.
That's because genuine liking, the steady, mutual, unforced kind, is what turns love into something that lasts. It's what makes two people feel fundamentally matched rather than merely bound. What actually makes people soulmates is like. Like is what closes the gap between "I have to be here" and "I want to be here." Like is what makes someone feel like home rather than homework.
And when it happens, it doesn't announce itself. It just settles in. Like recognizing someone with whom you can just exist. Someone you'd choose even if nothing were requiring you to choose at all.
Try A Little Experiment With Me
I realize all of this might sound abstract — love versus like, soulmates requiring both. So let's make it concrete.
First, bring to mind someone you're certain you love but you also know you don't really like (don't be shy, we've all got 'em). The old friend you see out of obligation rather than desire. The family member whose calls you let go to voicemail not because you're busy but because you need to mentally prepare. Love them? Sure. Vibe with them? No. Like them? Not really. Not in any way that matters.
Now flip it. Think of someone you unquestionably, undeniably like — that lifelong camp friend, that coworker who makes Mondays bearable, the barista who remembers your order without making it weird. You like them. Genuinely. But you don't love them. You don't need to.
Now close your eyes. Bring these two people to mind. Picture them. Hear their voices. Feel what it's like to be in their presence.
It's different, right? Yes. I know.
The Family Paradox (Or, Why Thanksgiving Is Complicated)
Once you start separating love from like at the individual level, once you've made the cut and seen they're not the same substance, it raises uncomfortable questions about families. Specifically, how often do love and like actually coexist in the people we're supposedly closest to?
Answer: much less than your intuition tells you.
Love and like don't overlap in families nearly as often as our carefully curated lives suggest. The genuine, notarized-by-your-heart combination of both — love and like — particularly within families, is more often the exception than the rule. And if you sit with that for more than thirty seconds, if you're honest about your own family dynamics, you already know this is true.
Why?
Because love, especially in families, is inevitable. Deterministic. Mandatory. It's preloaded with expectation, underwritten by shared DNA, decades of childhood photo albums, and the inconvenient fact that these people know you, really know you, and remember who you used to be. You love your family because they're your family.
But like? Like is a slippery agent. It's emergent and stubbornly un-inevitable. Like doesn't care about your genetic code or shared history or the fact that you spent eighteen years under the same roof. It shows up fast when it shows up at all. You feel it in your chest, in the easy flow of conversation, in how time moves differently around certain people. Like is what happens when you genuinely enjoy someone's company not because you're supposed to or because it looks good, but because you'd be legitimately bummed if they weren't around. You can't manufacture like. You can't hope for it. You can't create it through proximity or shared trauma.
If love is a grand theatrical drama full of spotlight moments, rehearsed declarations, and someone definitely crying by Act III, then like is closer to good jazz — improvisational, collaborative, organic, spontaneous. Just players playing.
"I Like Him"
I'd been thinking about this distinction for years when I came across a passage that crystallized everything.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the most influential literary voices of the 21st century. I realize that's the kind of declarative statement that usually precedes some tedious genuflection, but bear with me. Her work, especially her fiction, is precise and gorgeous and clear-eyed. It's political without being preachy. Emotionally devastating without tipping into manipulation or sentimentality. What I most appreciate about Adichie is her willingness to trust her readers to sit with discomfort, to not smooth over life's jagged edges, to let difficulty be difficult.
Her emotional intelligence operates at a different frequency entirely. Her unflinching attentiveness to life's exquisite nuance and people's interior architecture would feel unfair if it weren't so illuminating and so generous. Reading her work, you get to stand on her shoulder like a butterfly, like a sublime witness, and what she shows you — about yourself, about other people, about the distance between what we say and what we mean — stays with you. She teaches you to see differently.
When I learned she'd published a memoir, Notes on Grief, chronicling the loss of her beloved father, James Nwoye Adichie, in June 2020, during those terrifying early days of the COVID pandemic, I didn't just want to read it. I needed to.
Adichie, unsurprisingly, delivered.
To say I cherished this book is putting it mildly. And I especially cherished this passage about the relationship Adichie shared with her father and her deep adoration for him:
I not only adored my father in that classic manner of a daddy's girl, but I also liked him so much. I like him. His grace and his wisdom and his simplicity and how utterly unimpressionable he was. I liked his luminous, moderate faith, strong but worn lightly.
—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Read that again. I like him. Present tense. Even in death.
I'd never seen anyone else name it this clearly. Love versus like, why one gets all the glory while the other does all the work. And here was Adichie, talking about her father, a man she loved so deeply she wrote a book about his life and passing, and the word she chose was like. Not love. Like. Her appreciation of who he was, her admiration of him as a person. She says it deliberately, returns to it in interviews, emphasizes it like she knows exactly what she's saying.
Because she does.
In Adichie's hands, like isn't casual. It's the entire point. It's the whole thing. Love is the baseline, yes. But like is where the real substance and durability lives. The thing that actually holds a relationship together over time.
Adichie's words hit me with a jolt of recognition because I know exactly what she means. I live it. Every day. As much as I love my children — and I do love them both with that fierce, irrational throw-myself-in-front-of-a-bus intensity that parenthood installs in most (but strangely not all) parents — I feel just as fortunate, maybe even more so, that I genuinely like them. Both of them. And I know they genuinely like me.
I like how seriously they take the world but not themselves. I like how differently they navigate it and how lightly they each carry the weight. I like how much they expect from life and how willing they are to go after it without apology or permission. I like how much we laugh, and how easily. I like how a quick phone call or short errand often stretches into hours-long conversations, how we can sit in the same room doing entirely different things and feel perfectly content in the silence. Although I must admit, it's rarely silent.
In some alternate reality where I'm not their dad and they're not my kids, I have zero doubt we'd find each other and be close friends. In this world, they are my family. In that one, they'd be my people.
This observation might strike you as odd — an of course statement with a twist, like saying water is wet but noting the particular way it feels on your skin. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized just how significant this distinction truly is. And once you notice it, once you start seeing the gap between love and like as actual measurable distance rather than just semantic quibbling, it's hard not to see it everywhere — including, uncomfortably, in your own life.
"How's the Silence?"
So, what does it actually look like in real life? The thing that actually matters most — genuine, unforced, lightning-in-a-bottle like?
Turns out there's a diagnostic test. And, it comes from an improbable source — one of the greatest operatic tenors who ever lived. Luciano Pavarotti — THE Luciano Pavarotti, voice like warm honey poured over gravel — once dispensed the most gloriously Italian, most perfect relationship advice to his eldest daughter.
She came to him one day with that particular species of confusion only love can produce. Her heart full, certain about the man, but gnawed at by the uncertainty of marriage. How could she really know if he was the one?
Pavarotti, ever affable, his smile radiant as a Tuscan sunrise, didn't hesitate. He just asked: "Are your conversations easy and natural?"
"Yes," she says, nodding. "We never run out of things to talk about. It just flows."
He nods back, his approval registering in real-time. "How about laughter? Do you laugh a lot together?"
She smiles. You can hear it in her voice: "You know we do, Dad."
Then — and God bless the man for this — he pivots to his daughter's sex life. She shoots back with that universal daughter response: "DAD!"
But before her embarrassment can fully register, he interrupts, gentle but insistent, the way only a father who actually gives a damn can: "No, no. Go on now. How is the sex?" Knowing her father to never be frivolous or salacious, knowing this is genuine inquiry and not prurience or tomfoolery, she answers honestly: "Yes. It's wonderful. Intimate and sweet and fun."
Pavarotti takes this in. Gives a slow nod, then another. The tiniest hint of a smile breaking across his face like dawn. Then, leaning forward slightly, eyes widening with the weight of the question he's been building toward, he asks:
"How's the silence?"
Three weeks later, the world learned that Luciano Pavarotti's eldest daughter was engaged to be married.
The Real Fortune
That question, those three words — how's the silence? — gets at the heart of what I've been trying to say. Pavarotti understood instinctively what most people only learn through painful experience, if at all. Love can be easy or hard, sweet or demanding, but like is what makes the silence comfortable. Like is what makes you want to be there in the first place. Like is the real prize.
What Pavarotti grasped, what he'd learned through the accumulated wisdom of having lived a big, bountiful life, is that love matters but like is what makes living livable, exciting, interesting, fun.
The thing about relationships, all relationships, romantic or otherwise, is that they're complex because humans are complex. We're walking contradictions wrapped in skin suits, running on coffee and delusion and those brief, disarming moments of genuine connection that make the rest of it worth enduring.
Love? Love can be easy, sweet, positively delicious. But it's also raw and hard and occasionally feels like solving a Rubik's cube in the pitch black during an earthquake. Love demands things. Maintenance, repair, emotional translation services. Love is work. Hard, beautiful, meaningful work, the kind that shapes you into someone better. But work nonetheless.
Like? Like is different. Like is easy and natural almost by definition. That's the whole point of it. Like is space and breathing room even when nothing's happening. It's silence that doesn't need solving. It's disagreements that don't poison the air for weeks. Like is what makes you actually want to be there.
Love, especially in the relationships we're born into — family, blood, the people who knew you when you still believed in Santa — is often automatic, installed at birth like factory settings. It just is. But like? Like lives in the realm of choice. Like has to be earned, fostered, actively maintained. You can't inherit it. You can't demand it. You can't guilt someone into it through proximity or shared DNA or eighteen years under the same roof.
Love is given.
Like is earned.
Love is foundational.
Like is everything built on top that makes the foundation worth having.
Like is the thing we should've been obsessing over all along. Love is common. Like is rare. Like is what makes love worth having. Like is the thing we should actually value and pursue. Love exists everywhere, but like is both the real treasure and the secret sauce.
I'm not dissing love. Love matters. Love is profound, essential, perhaps the most powerful experience a human being can have, this bizarre, irrational willingness to bind our happiness to another person's continued existence. But here's the distinction that matters. We've spent centuries writing sonnets about love, building holidays around it, making it the center of every story, every song, every vow and promise. Meanwhile, like — the thing that actually turns obligation into choice and duty into delight — barely gets mentioned.
That's the problem. Not that love doesn't matter. Of course it does. But we've been so busy chasing love, so obsessed with finding it and keeping it and surviving it, that we mistook intensity for compatibility.
So sure, be lucky in love if you want. Good luck with that. Enjoy the fireworks, the drama, the operatic sweep of it all. But the real fortune, the thing worth recognizing and protecting and feeling genuinely lucky about, is being lucky in like. The difference between a relationship you endure and one you'd actually choose — tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
That's the thing worth building a whole life around.