Where Is the Love?

My name is Stefano D'angello. I am a creator, an author, and perhaps most importantly, a traveler. My journey has taken me across countries, through cultures, and into worlds both vibrant and desolate. I have feasted my eyes on wonders and listened to the cacophony of humanity. Yet, the more I see, the more a single, haunting question echoes in my soul: Where is the love?

I don't mean the fleeting, transactional affection that flashes across screens. I am searching for the love I saw in my grandparents. I can still see them, well into their nineties, sitting on a quiet porch, their wrinkled hands clasped together. I remember the way they looked at each other—a silent conversation built on a lifetime of shared sunrises, weathered storms, and unwavering devotion. It was a magical, romantic love; a quiet force of nature, as real and enduring as the mountains.

That image is the bedrock of my understanding of the world, the "normal" I was raised with. It was a simple, beautiful blueprint: two souls, a man and a woman, uniting to build a sanctuary called family. It was a world of defined values, of promises kept, of feelings that deepened, not faded, with time.

But when I look around me now, the world I travel through feels alien to that blueprint. The air is thick not with love, but with envy and avarice. I see a frantic chase for more—more wealth, more status, more fleeting pleasures—but very little pursuit of genuine connection. The magical love of my grandparents seems to have been replaced by a society fractured by ideology and modernism.

We are told this is progress. But what I see is a world obsessed with deconstruction. The sacred union of man and woman, the foundation of my "normal," is now just one of many options on a confusing menu, often overshadowed by a narrative of pure sexual attraction or fluid identities. Deep, romantic sentiment seems to be losing ground to ephemeral chemistry. The world I knew, built on the loving polarity of masculine and feminine, is dissolving into a grey area of concepts and labels where the heart struggles to find its footing.

Where is the normality in a world that feeds us a constant diet of negativity? Every news cycle is a parade of fear, conflict, and disaster. Every screen screams with aberrations, with bizarre theories of superior alien civilizations living secretly amongst us. This relentless barrage of chaos and strangeness numbs the soul. It makes us cynical. How can the simple, tender flower of romantic love possibly grow in a soil so saturated with anxiety and absurdity?

We are becoming disconnected from ourselves, from each other, and from the quiet truths that governed generations. The gentle act of holding a hand has been replaced by the frantic swiping on a screen. The deep gaze into a lover's eyes has been substituted by the vacant stare into a digital abyss.

So I ask again, not as a critic, but as a lost son searching for the warmth of home: Where is the love? Where is the quiet strength of lifelong commitment? Where are the values that build, not divide? Where is the simple, profound normality of two people looking at each other at ninety and seeing a universe of shared love?

Perhaps I am just a romantic, an author chasing a story that is no longer being written. But my travels have taught me that the human heart, across all borders and cultures, has the same fundamental needs. It craves connection, it craves meaning, and it craves a love that feels like coming home.

I have not found it in the noise of the modern world. But I will keep searching. I will keep looking for that glimmer of my grandparents' magic in the eyes of strangers, hoping to find that the normality I cherish is not lost, but merely hiding, waiting for us to quiet the world down enough to hear its timeless song once more.