“Love Always Wins”: The Emotional Logic of Jim Garraty
In the Garratyverse, “Love always wins” isn’t a slogan—it’s a hypothesis. One that’s tested, doubted, and sometimes quietly mourned.
I explore this theme more freely in fiction than in nonfiction. Fiction gives me room to be emotionally honest without being autobiographical. It lets me ask hard questions about connection, vulnerability, and emotional inheritance without worrying about who might read between the lines.
Jim Garraty’s story is, in many ways, a prism through which I examine the belief that love can outlast grief, misunderstanding, and time. Not because I’m certain it does—but because I need to believe it might.
Love as Emotional Architecture
In Reunion: A Story, love is tentative—a memory, a source of regret, a gesture, a lost possibility. In Reunion: Coda, it becomes recursive: revisited, refracted, reinterpreted. And in Comings and Goings, love is quieter, less permanent, more about presence than performance.
Across all three, love is not triumphant in the Hollywood sense. It’s not about grand declarations or perfect endings. It’s about kindness, emotional presence, and the refusal to let cynicism win.
The Freedom of Fiction
Writing fiction lets me explore emotional truths that are harder to articulate in real life. I can write scenes where characters say what I wish I’d said, or where they forgive in ways I’m still learning to.
It’s creatively freeing—and emotionally clarifying. I don’t have to worry about upsetting anyone, including some of my ex-girlfriends, whose memories linger in fragments of the emotional DNA of these stories.
The Doubt Beneath the Motto
“Amor vincit omnia.” Love conquers all.
I want to believe that. But I don’t always.
That’s why Jim Garraty’s journey matters to me. He doubts, he falters, he remembers. And still, he chooses connection. He chooses kindness. He chooses to be seen.
Maybe that’s what “love always wins” really means—not that love erases pain, but that it outlasts it.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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