A symbolic composition depicts a weathered stone doorway dividing two contrasting landscapes: one open, sunlit, and inviting, the other locked, shadowed, and overgrown. The accompanying imagery illustrates trust opening the door, acceptance keeping it open, and love emerging through relationship, while distrust, nonacceptance, and separation point toward the possibility of hate. The image visually represents the essay’s central theme that love and hate are not isolated emotions but emergent properties shaped by the quality of our relationships with people, animals, places, ideas, and the world around us. (Image generated by ChatGPT using DALL·E, 2026.)
People have been trying to define love for thousands of years, and I don’t think we’ve ever really succeeded. That isn’t because love isn’t real. Quite the opposite. It’s because love is an emotion, and emotions are incredibly difficult to describe without simply replacing one emotional word with another.
People will often define love as affection, devotion, attachment, or deep care. To me, those aren’t definitions. They’re descriptions of other feelings that often accompany love. They don’t really answer the question of what love is.
I’ve come to believe that we’re asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking, “What is love?” I’ve started asking, “What gives rise to the emotion we call love?”
This isn’t a philosophical proof or a scientific theory. It’s simply the understanding I’ve developed through my own experiences and the way I’ve come to see human relationships.
To me, love is the polar opposite of hate.
I don’t use either word casually. People often say they “love” pizza or “hate” Mondays, but those words have always meant something much stronger to me. Hate is one of the most powerful emotions a person can experience, and because I see love as its opposite, I believe love deserves the same respect. Neither word should be thrown around lightly.
Over time, I’ve also realized that trust is central to understanding love.
I used to think you couldn’t trust someone unless you loved them. I’ve changed my mind about that. Trust exists on a spectrum. We trust strangers to obey traffic laws. We trust coworkers to do their jobs. We trust doctors with our health. Those relationships don’t necessarily involve love.
What matters isn’t simply trust itself, but what trust makes possible.
I’ve begun thinking about relationships as rooms connected by a doorway.
Trust opens the door.
Acceptance keeps the door open.
Every time we trust someone, we allow them a little farther into our lives. Every time they accept us for who we genuinely are, rather than demanding we become someone else, that doorway remains open. The relationship deepens.
Eventually, something may begin to emerge from that shared space.
We call it love.
I don’t believe trust automatically becomes love any more than I believe planting a seed guarantees a flower will bloom. Trust and acceptance don’t force love into existence. They simply create the conditions in which love has the opportunity to grow.
The opposite is also true.
Distrust begins to close the door.
Nonacceptance locks it.
That doesn’t mean hate is inevitable. Distrust doesn’t automatically become hate any more than trust automatically becomes love. But distrust and rejection create conditions where resentment, fear, contempt, and eventually hate can begin to grow. They move a relationship in that direction.
To me, love and hate aren’t simply emotions floating around inside us. They emerge from the way we relate to the world around us.
This way of thinking also explains why I don’t believe in the phrase “unconditional love.”
In my mind, it’s almost an oxymoron.
If I only love someone as long as they become the person I want them to be, then I have to question whether I ever loved them in the first place. Perhaps I loved an idea of them. Perhaps I loved my expectations. But I wasn’t loving the person standing in front of me.
That doesn’t mean love has no boundaries. Relationships absolutely should have boundaries. Trust can be broken. People can become abusive, dishonest, or manipulative. Sometimes the healthiest choice is to walk away from a relationship.
But walking away because someone has violated trust is different from asking someone to abandon who they are in order to earn your love.
To me, genuine love begins with accepting another person as themselves.
As I’ve reflected on all of this, I’ve realized something else.
I don’t think love has an essence.
You can’t point to love the way you can point to a mountain or a tree. Love isn’t a physical object waiting to be discovered in nature. It’s a human construction—a way of understanding an emotional experience that arises through our relationships.
That doesn’t make it any less real.
Language is a human construction. Money is a human construction. Marriage is a human construction. They’re all profoundly real because they shape the way we live our lives. I think love belongs in that same category.
The way we experience and understand love is influenced by our individual lives, our cultures, and the historical moments in which we live. Someone from another society or another century might understand love differently than I do, and I don’t think either of us would necessarily be wrong.
Perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to anthropology.
Anthropology has taught me that human beings create meaning. We don’t simply discover it lying around in nature. We build it through our relationships, our cultures, our histories, and our shared experiences.
Love, I think, is one of those meanings.
So if someone asked me to define love today, I wouldn’t describe it with another emotion.
I’d say that love is an emergent property of a relationship.
Whether that relationship is with another person, a cat curled up beside you, a hobby that has become part of your identity, a place that feels like home, or even an idea that has shaped your life, love doesn’t simply appear. It grows through trust, acceptance, shared experience, and the ongoing relationship itself.
I don’t expect everyone to agree with this definition.
In fact, I hope they don’t feel obligated to. Every person’s understanding of love is shaped by the life they’ve lived.
This is simply mine.
The Legacy I Hope to Leave Behind
By Katherine Walter
On July 1, 2025
In legacy
Image: ChatGPT
Legacy is not built all at once. It takes shape over time—quietly, unevenly—through the choices we make, the truths we speak, and the lives we touch. I don’t imagine mine will be written in bold headlines or etched into stone. But I hope it will be felt in subtler, more enduring ways. In the freedom someone claims because I once stood up. In the insight sparked by something I taught or wrote. In the love that lingers in the spaces I leave behind.
I’ve lived many chapters in this life—some of them linear, others far more tangled. I began as a student of anthropology, drawn to the study of culture, meaning, and human complexity. It taught me to listen deeply, to question what seems natural, and to honor what is often ignored or devalued. Anthropology gave me not just tools for understanding others—it gave me a way to understand myself. As a transgender woman, as a spiritual seeker, as someone shaped by forces both seen and hidden, I learned to situate my life within broader currents of history and identity. That perspective never left me.
Eventually, I put my education into service in a different way—as a SNAP program specialist with the USDA. There, I saw how policy lives not in abstract theories but in the faces of people trying to feed their families. I worked at the intersection of administration and survival. It gave me a profound respect for the dignity of everyday life, and a deepened sense of duty to advocate for those so often silenced by red tape and economic cruelty. That role grounded me in the real: in food, in need, in systems and the people caught within them.
But even before all of that, I served my country in uniform. I am a U.S. Navy veteran. I served as a submariner and fought in Desert Storm. It was a life of discipline, of structure, of submerged tension—both literal and emotional. That chapter gave me a close relationship with mortality, with silence, with sacrifice. And later, it gave me the courage to live my truth. Because once you’ve survived war, you learn how little time there really is for pretending.
Though my time teaching in a classroom was brief, it was profoundly meaningful. Education, I believe, is one of the most radical forms of love and hope. I did not stay long enough to become a fixture, but I hope I was a spark. I hope that somewhere, a student remembers me not as perfect, but as present. As someone who saw them clearly, challenged them to think differently, and held space for who they were becoming.
Throughout it all, I’ve remained a writer, a creator, a witness. I write not just to tell stories, but to make space—for desire, for defiance, for complex and beautiful lives that rarely make it into the mainstream. I write for those on the margins, for the ones building new worlds from the ruins of the old, and for the future selves who need proof that we were here.
If I am remembered, I hope it is as someone who lived with fierce honesty. Who loved without shame. Who fought for justice, even when she was exhausted. Who stood in her womanhood and her queerness not as burdens, but as blessings.
I hope my legacy is not one of perfection, but of permission. Permission to live. To change. To desire. To dream beyond the roles assigned at birth or by circumstance. I hope I leave behind courage in those who need it. Gentleness in those taught to harden. Fire in those told to shrink.
And if some future soul—browsing an archive, reading a quote, hearing a story—finds a piece of me and thinks, “Because she lived, I feel less alone,” then that is all the immortality I will ever need.