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 first project put into question notions of an objective reality and the linear development of a story. This second project interrogates point of view. How might shifting between narrators affect a story? How might a physical form tell the same story in multiple ways? When there is more than one version of a story, can they all be true? Try creating a story within a story; a structure that can be read in multiple directions; or a series ofcontexts that might change our understanding of a story. Experiment with an unreliable narrator;multiple narrators whose accounts contradict each other or, alternatively, whose accounts togethertell a complete story; iterating on a story by varying the details, aesthetic, or form; repeated oraltered texts; or images that can be interpreted in more than one way.Keep in mind that in this project, even a simple story can become complex
When we began this project, I was reflecting. I had just finished The Wedding People and started The Course of Love by Alain de Botton — a nonfiction meditation on the emotional architecture of relationships. One was fiction, one nonfiction, but both explored how love shifts depending on timing, circumstance, and perception. That intersection sparked something.
Rather than telling one love story, I wanted to explore four. Each character moves through the same phases of love, but their perspectives — shaped by context, experience, and temperament — change how those phases feel. The result is a layered, modular narrative that invites the reader to consider how the same moment can mean entirely different things depending on who’s living it.
The Realist
Grounded and observant, the Realist sees love as a negotiation between expectations and reality. They believe in effort over fate, and their perspective reveals the quiet, often unspoken work that sustains a relationship.
The Cynic
Shaped by disappointment and sharp insight, the Cynic doesn’t trust grand romantic narratives. Their voice is cutting, sometimes funny, sometimes brutal, a defense mechanism honed by experience. But under the surface, there’s a longing they struggle to admit.
The Believer
Spiritual and steadfast, the Believer holds love as something larger, part destiny, part devotion. Their perspective is rooted in faith: in timing, in connection, in the idea that love is not just an emotion, but a choice we return to.
The Optimist
Hopeful and open-hearted, the Optimist believes in love’s potential, even when it falters. They see meaning in small gestures, beginnings in endings, and often offer the emotional clarity others are trying to avoid.
The Spark
The early intensity — attraction, infatuation, the heightened attention at the beginning. It’s often more projection than understanding, but it sets everything in motion.
The Promise
A commitment is made. Often represented by marriage or some form of formalized partnership, this is the moment when intention becomes structure — publicly or privately declared.
The Offering
The giving of something irreversible — often children, but also time, care, labor. It changes the shape of the relationship and introduces new dynamics of responsibility and imbalance.
The Temptation
An external or internal shift. Sometimes it’s another person. Sometimes it’s a version of the self that feels lost. Often it’s the space where desire and dissatisfaction overlap.
The Temptation
The moment of reckoning. It may arrive suddenly or gradually. It’s when something essential is asked — about the relationship, about oneself, about whether to stay or go.
The structure is simple. Lay the cards out in rows and columns. 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.
I think I’m just always noticing things. A turn of phrase, a pattern that repeats, something someone said that I can’t stop thinking about. 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.For me, design often starts with a feeling — the sense that something is worth paying attention to. And then I follow it to see where it leads.
