You’re not allowed to chart love. The reason … is because we think of love as a binary thing: You’re either in love, or you’re not in love. You love, or you don’t love. I think the reality is that love is a process

Griscom challenges the impulse to quantify intimate experience—“charting” love as though it were a measurable variable. He argues that popular thinking treats love as a yes/no state, a switch that is either on or off, which encourages simplistic judgments about relationships (“in love” versus “not in love”). By reframing love as a process, he emphasizes duration, change, and ongoing work: love develops, recedes, deepens, and is shaped by attention and circumstance. The quote implicitly critiques modern habits of optimization and data-driven self-understanding, suggesting that the most meaningful human bonds resist tidy metrics and are better understood as evolving practices rather than fixed conditions.