I Lovecore You

What an Internet aesthetic can tell us about love

Valentine’s Day—if you don’t love it, you love to hate it. Cynics disparage its coarse commercialism, its degenerate sentimentality, its vulgar profusion of hearts that don’t even look like the real human heart, its chubby cupids (oughtn’t they to take up, after the invention of dating apps, another profession?) and docile doves, its cavity-inducing confectioner’s conveyer belt of chocolates, candy hearts, Lofthouse cookies, and chocolate-covered strawberries, its ability to make any restaurant as hard to get into as Dorsia, the flowers that, alas in this winter chill, may very well find themselves rotting in the garbage a week or two hence, the reckless abandon with which it wields its flag of red, white, and pink: they find all this, like the fragrance from an attar of roses mingled with the iron smell of blood, a little nauseating. 

Their reasons for cynicism are many. They may be single, perhaps newly single. Someone may have broken up with them the night of February 13th. They may be stuck in situationship purgatory. They may be stuck in relationship hell. The bloom may simply have faded off the rose after how many (who’s counting?) years of coupledom. They may be philosophically anti-festivity. They may be grumpy, grouchy, and Grinch-like in temperament. They may be communists. They may be like the government of Uzbekistan, who, afraid of the premarital-sex-to-toppling-the-government pipeline so seductive to the youth, recommended the day be used for the commemoration of the emperor Babur’s birthday instead. All these parties I sympathize with. Go into any store and it is easy to be surfeited on all these sappy tokens, all these kitsch conventions of love. Too much of anything induces disgust.

Not so for adherents of lovecore. Over the past few years, we have seen a mind-boggling array of Internet aesthetics sprout up, such as cottagecore, coastal grandmother, coquette, and academia of both the dark and light varieties. These Internet aesthetics are essentially vibes, created and defined through the agglomeration of cultural artifacts, such as paintings, photographs, songs, celebrities, books, movies, video games, and articles of clothing, on social media platforms like Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. They’re like the youth subcultures of old, only more anemic—anemic because they exist mostly on the Internet and mostly on the surface, rather than comprising deep identities that serve as the basis for real-life group affiliations. They are also distinguished by their sheer variety and specificity. On the Aesthetics Wiki you can find hundreds, from whimsigothic to queer villainy to vacation dadcore.¹ Lovecore is an Internet aesthetic that takes the visual lexicon of Valentine’s Day to the nth power, reveling in it, unleashing it from its sad allotment of a mere one day in February to give it free rein over the whole calendar year. 

As an aesthetic, it is obviously sentimental and manifestly gushy. It is like the bleeding out of a candy heart. Scroll through a lovecore blog on Tumblr, and you will see vintage Valentine’s Day cards, collections of heart-shaped kitchenware, old love letters, cutesy pink and red plushies, cupcakes with heart-shaped sprinkles. One of the criticisms frequently leveled against Valentine’s Day is that it is heteronormative; however, lovecore has allowed queer folk, especially queer women, to embrace love and romance on their own terms, to feel hopeful and positive about their romantic futures. Moreover, while Valentine’s Day is marketed primarily towards couples, many in the lovecore space are single—they lay bare their profound yearning for romantic love, a desire to love and be loved back, to have some real object into which they might safely deposit their hearts, while at one and the same time espousing messages of self-love and self-acceptance. 

Delving down lovecore’s red velvet-lined rabbit hole, I was reminded of the “Nausicaa” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The most obviously feminine of the novel’s eighteen episodes, the first half of “Nausicaa” parodies the style of romance novels and women’s magazines of the Victorian era; the main character here, a young, single woman named Gerty MacDowell, is the target audience of these materials, and the narration shows how her inner monologue has been influenced by this sentimental language: “The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid’s bow, Greekly perfect.” Gerty turns away from the disappointments of her real-life romance with Reggy Wylie—“He would not believe in love, a woman’s birthright”—to indulge in fantasies about her ideal husband: “a manly man with a strong quiet face… who would understand, take her in his sheltering arms, strain her to him in all the strength of his deep passionate nature and comfort her with a long long kiss. It would be like heaven.” 

Joyce’s parodying of these romantic clichés embodies the 20th century’s turning away from the sentimental. As the scientific began to triumph over the religious, reason held sway over emotion, and the disasters of the world wars, the accelerated rate of technological change, and political upheaval meant that, for many, the rose-tinted glasses had to come off. Today, we still turn away. Our sincerity burns us. Being vulnerable is not only a painful and risky endeavor, it is embarrassing. We want to cover over our more tender and gooey feelings with a hard shell of ironic distance. More than that, we feel we are supposed to. Since the sexual revolution, we have become comfortable opening up physically, but the chambers of the heart remain terra incognita, virgin and inviolable. “Historical reversal: it is no longer the sexual which is indecent,” says Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse, “it is the sentimental—censured in the name of what is in fact only another morality.” 

The lovecore aesthetic and its online flourishing has opened up an affective space in which this sentimentality is not only encouraged but actively embraced—it is the point. Joyce writes that Gerty “would give worlds to be in the privacy of her own familiar chamber where, giving way to tears, she could have a good cry and relieve her pentup feelings.” Lovecore functions as that “familiar chamber” in which sentiments not ordinarily given expression in the everyday public sphere can be released. Though, as Joyce goes on to say, “not too much because she knew how to cry nicely before the mirror. You are lovely, Gerty, it said.” Just as Gerty’s “privacy” is socially mediated—she maintains a sort of double self at all times: the “layer 1” self who feels, thinks, and acts more or less authentically, and the “layer 2” meta-self who observes, comments upon, and prescribes appropriate behavior for the layer 1 self, following conventions gleaned from romance novels and women’s magazines—so, too, does the expression of lovecore take place within a community where aesthetic conventions are established by those who participate in it, drawing from ideas of love and romance disseminated by the broader culture. Likes, reposts, comments, and other forms of online engagement function as the mirror that speaks back, that tells the feeling subject gazing at herself in the very process of her feeling, “You are lovely,” thereby affirming the expression of that feeling as sanctioned and the feeling subject as a member of that affective community. “Two tears flow in quick succession,” writes Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. “The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass.” 

Comme des Garçons, Poem Denim Jeans (2001) and Poem Shirt (2002) by Junya Watanabe

The very conventions that allow an aesthetic to be recognizable as such are also the ones that stifle the expression of more complex, multilayered emotion, that discard harsher realities and hem personal expression into a narrow mold. Dark academia, for example, embraces the darkness of shadowed libraries, of old book spines, of gothic architecture, and even of the possibility of murder in the woods perpetrated by a small group of classics majors, all while steadily refusing to look at the real darkness: the precariousness of the academic job market, the shrinking of humanities departments, the unseen, unacknowledged, and underpaid labor of graduate students.² Cottagecore erases the toil, drudgery, and difficulties of farm life, even as it embraces long linen dresses, bread-baking, and florals. 

Lovecore, too, must sustain the criticism that it waters down the blood of love, that one wears one’s heart on one’s sleeve but the real throbbing and pulsating of the veins beneath the skin goes unseen and unheard. Love is perhaps our most universal experience, but it is also our most personal. James Joyce’s love letters to his wife Nora, for example, testifying to his more peculiar proclivities in the bedroom, are unassimilable because individual—as, indeed, is any relation between two people, when you poke around in the nooks and crannies. This distance between “the aesthetic” and reality is the gap filled by art. 

Rest Energy (1980), Marina Abramović and Ulay

In Rest Energy, a four-minute performance piece with her then-partner Ulay, Marina Abramović holds a bow while Ulay holds an arrow; the weapon is suspended between the two of them, with the arrow pointing straight at Marina’s heart. Both wore microphones on their hearts and could hear, as the performance went on, the acceleration in the intensity of their heartbeats. The performance snatches the bow and arrow from the chubby little hands of cupid, where, through countless sweet greeting cards and soft paintings, the weapon has become a fashion accessory that wouldn’t prick a fly, and reclaims its fundamental ability to wound, opening up questions about trust, vulnerability, intimacy, and power dynamics between men and women. 

Heart-Shaped Bruise (1980), Nan Goldin

Similarly, in Heart-Shaped Bruise, from her larger series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, the photographer Nan Goldin captures the disparity between the heart’s saccharine symbolism and the violent, fleshly reality that has been written on the body; in its mottled pink, the bruise stands out against the pallor of skin, the black and white of its surroundings, beckoning us to look even as we feel inclined to look away. In a statement on the series, Goldin acknowledges the distance between our ideals of love and their manifestation in reality: “His concept of relationships was rooted in romantic idealism… We were addicted to the amount of love the relationship supplied… One night, he battered me severely, almost blinding me.” This, too, Goldin captures: in the photograph Nan one month after being battered, the artist stares directly at the camera, head-on and defiant. If the aesthetic is the mirror that says, “You are lovely,” art is the mirror that says, “You are you.” 

Yet the aesthetic is also a window—it is a window that shows us a world that is lovely. No matter how many times love wounds, bruises, or pricks us, we come back to it, hoping always that the next time will be different, that the next encounter with the loved one will bring, finally, a realization of cherished hopes and dreams, that we may reach out and be held, understand and be understood, embrace and be embraced in return. Even cynicism, even bitterness about love—isn’t that, after all, simply the armor we put over our tenderness, just as the turtle has its carapace? 

Lauren Berlant theorizes the concept of “cruel optimism”: “All attachments are optimistic,” but as we experience life, we realize that the world may not be “worth… our attachment to it,” that it may give us “objects or ways of life or forms of life that are constantly betraying us.” Nevertheless, we persist in our optimism about our attachment because “the continuity of its form provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world.”³ Or, as Barthes says, “I counter whatever ‘doesn’t work’ in love with the affirmation of what is worthwhile.” 

Lovecore provides this affirmation, this continuity of the form of love that enables us to look forward and to maintain our optimism. These roses, these swans’ necks forming hearts, these lipstick-stained envelopes disarm us and melt us. One of my favorite subgenres, as it were, of lovecore, is of heart shapes found in nature or in unexpected corners of everyday life: a heart-shaped pool of water sparkling among rocks, heart-shaped tire marks on a snowy driveway, heart-shaped effacements in a mossy tree trunk. These images tell us that the world still has the capacity to delight and surprise us, that, as the only home we have, it is ultimately benevolent, that it, too, has its own tenderness to offer in return for ours, that love is everywhere, abundant, able to be fashioned out of any material. 

Hearts, cupids, the color pink: let these serve as memento amare: remember that you love, remember love, remember to love. The sweetness and simplicity of love are open to everyone. You can smile, you can greet the world with joy, you can heal and sing and dance. You can always be a little kinder, you can always find meaning in the little things, you can always choose yourself if you need to. You can hold yourself when you cry. The very core of you that loves—let it split you open.

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Dear readers, Happy Valentine’s Day! May you have all the peace and love and heart-shaped things in the world <3 I hope you have the opportunity to do something sweet for a loved one or for yourself. If you have a little extra love to spare, consider liking this post, leaving a comment, subscribing, or sharing with friends/family if you enjoyed. — xoxo Ramya

1. I first accidentally typed “vacation sadcore,” inadvertently creating another, if anyone wants to take that up.

2. “murder in the woods perpetrated by a small group of classics majors” refers, of course, to Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History.

3. from Cruel Optimism (2011) and Ep. 35 of UChicago’s Big Brains podcast https://news.uchicago.edu/podcasts/big-brains/why-chasing-good-life-holding-us-back-lauren-berlant.