It's 1 am, or maybe 2 am, and I've just said goodbye to my friends and am driving back home. Maybe I dropped some friends off on the way back, or picked up a pizza from Domino's, but the last 5 minutes of the drive are always the same. Quiet San Luis Obispo streets, the moon high in the sky, and some music playing. Often it's something jazzy, or energetic, but always I keep it on low in the background. I spend those last 5 minutes reflecting on the night, thinking about my friends.

I get home, climb up the stairs to the front door, and fumble around with the lock until I'm in the house. The lights are usually on, and if it's early enough, I can still hear my roommates playing video games with friends. I go downstairs to my room, change into my pajamas, brush my teeth, and lie on my bed. I'll drift off to sleep thinking about the people I love.

Over the past year, I've thought a lot about love. Partly because my time at Cal Poly is nearing its end and I've had to say "see you later" to too many friends, partly because I read a lot of romantic books, partly because I've had to wrestle with my passion for computer science, but to be honest, mostly because I'm 22 years old and haven't been in a serious relationship, and I think that forces me to reason more deeply about all the other sources of love in my life, of which there are many.

This is partly why I'm writing this essay for Valentine's Day, because although I might be spending it without a partner, I'd rather not spend my time wallowing. I'd rather spend my time celebrating the love that I do have in my life, and all the love I have seen in the past year.

In trying to write this, I found that I can't make any completely true generalization on love. I think it's probably impossible to do so. Love is felt so differently across the world, informed by our societal norms, the movies we watch, the books we read, the people we have in our lives. So when you're reading this essay, you might find that it doesn't match your definition of love. Regardless, it is what I think love is at this current moment, and I'd like for you to try to see the world through my eyes. That's the goal: not to come up with a universal truth about love, but to show you something that I personally feel is true.

To do so, I'm going to break this essay up into 4 different sections, based on the 4 things that have had the biggest impact on my perception this year.

• Books
• Songs
• My Friends and Family
• The People of Iran

Books

To start, let's talk about The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, which I read almost the entire back half of sitting in the CS lab at Cal Poly. I had to leave the room towards the end because it was so sad. The Song of Achilles is about Achilles and Patroclus in ancient Greece, and how the two young men fall in love and how the search for greatness can get in the way of happiness.

Why is this what I'm starting my reflections on love with? Let me show you a quote.

But the memories well up like spring-water, faster than I can hold them back. They do not come as words, but like dreams, rising as scent from the rain-wet earth. This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.

The Song of Achilles is interesting because it isn't told from the perspective of Achilles, the hero. It's told from the perspective of Patroclus, someone who loves Achilles with all of his heart. To see through Patroclus' eyes is to know true love, to support the person he loves even when you may not agree with Achilles' decisions. You get to see how much Achilles matters to Patroclus, not because of Achilles' fame or skill, but because of the little things that no one else in the world took notice of.

So much of what I read and watched this year dealt with the theme of prioritizing your duty over the people in your life, The Song of Achilles included. Dark Age, Marty Supreme, even Kitchen Confidential. What they all seemed to tell me was that nothing is more important than the people you have in your life. I don't mean to push you away from ambition, but do not let your ambition cost you the people you love. They are what give life meaning, and the rest (the money, the jobs, the titles) is a means to that end. When you die, the primary thing that outlives you is what you leave behind in the hearts and minds of the people around you, what you pass on to the next generation. The rest doesn't matter.

The Song of Achilles has another quote I remember fondly, about the transformative nature of love.

I saw then how I had changed. I did not mind anymore that I lost when we raced and I lost when we swam out to the rocks and I lost when we tossed spears or skipped stones. For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty? It was enough to watch him win, to see the soles of his feet flashing as they kicked up sand, or the rise and fall of his shoulders as he pulled through the salt. It was enough.

A big theme I learned a lot about this year (and personally experienced) was how love can transform you. This isn't the same thing as changing yourself because you want to be loved by someone else. This is about seeing the world through the eyes of the person you love, of coming to understand their love for things you might not have considered and allowing your empathy to transform you, just a little bit.

I like different music than I did a year ago. I read different books. I watch different shows. I eat different food. I have very different values. This change wasn't a conscious thing, but when you spend enough time looking through different people's eyes, you don't come back quite the same. The transformation stays with you, even after the people leave. Big parts of who I am today came from people I haven't seen in years. I am forever transformed not just by my love for them, but by their love for me, too.

Songs

I listened to a lot of music this year, and a lot of it was about love. I'm actually a little concerned by how much of it was about love. Is that the easiest thing to sing about? Where are the songs about dinosaurs?

A lot of the love songs I've heard in my life are pretty idealistic, or sad, or dramatic. For instance, I spent a lot of time spring quarter listening to undressed by sombr, which has this great lyric:

I don't want the children of another man to have the eyes of the girl I won't forget

Or consider this verse from Jeff Buckley's Lover, You Should've Come Over:

It's never over
All my blood for the sweetness of her laughter
It's never over
She is the tear that hangs inside my soul forever

Great songs, but totally dramatic, representing love as this extremely intense feeling that's almost like a transcendental experience. This is what sells: love being this all-powerful emotion that brings people to their knees. It's all or nothing, and if you lose it, it hits you like nothing you've ever been hit with before. Nobody's gonna care about a song that captures some ordinary feeling.

I'm totally a sucker for this kind of storytelling. I love dramatic love poems, movies, books. I love dramatic confessions, the guy chasing after the girl in the pouring rain. It's inspiring.

Despite this, one of the biggest lessons I've reinforced this year is that there is more to love than the dramatic moments. This is probably obvious to you, but I think 95% of love is the quieter moments, the ones that don't get shown in the movies. It's someone queueing your favorite song just because they know you like it. It's someone remembering you don't like tomatoes. It's someone reading what you wrote and sending you a nice note about it. It's sitting at the table with the people you love, chatting about trivial things or playing Catan or eating dinner. It doesn't have to be grand. It has to be real, stable, something you can trust that you can come back to again. It should make you happy, not just make you feel like you have a tear that hangs inside your soul forever.

This is why my favorite songs of the year have been the less dramatic ones, the more real ones. The album that had the most impact on the way I perceive love has got to be The Art of Loving by Olivia Dean. Every song is phenomenal, and you should really listen to the whole thing, but I'm gonna go through the specific lyrics that stuck with me the most.

From A Couple Minutes, a song about reminiscing over lost love:

Back on your sofa
Of course, I still care
Love's never wasted
When it's shared

What stuck with me most from this lyric is that it's not a bitter look on lost love. Even if it's over, that love still happened, it still mattered. It may have ended, but often the journey is more important than the destination. Olivia Dean makes it seem obvious, "Of course, I still care", like there's no other option. How could I not care? It mattered to me then. It matters to me now.

From Something Inbetween, a song about how relationships don't need to be all or nothing, how your life can be more than your partner:

I'm not leaving
Just feel tightly squeezed and
Love needs breathing

The song is specifically about romantic relationships, but I think the advice is sound more generally too. A major component of love is trust, trusting that the people you love will be there for you, trusting that they love you too. You don't need to perform grand gestures or buy expensive gifts to keep the people who truly love you. Some of the people I love most are people I don't get to see very often, but I know in my heart that I can come back to them, that our bond is stronger than the time we spend apart.

From Let Alone the One You Love, a song about how your romantic partner can stifle you, how sometimes the people we love can hurt us:

And if you knew me at all
You wouldn't try to keep me small
Who would do that to a friend
Let alone the one you love?

The hardest lesson I had to learn this year is that someone who makes you feel like you need to earn a place in their life is not someone who cares about you. If someone really cares about you, they don't make you feel bad about yourself. If I love you, you can't inconvenience me, because I want you to be in my life, I want you to ask for a ride or ask to grab lunch or give me a random phone call. I'll make the time for you, not because I think I have to, but because I want to. It's easy. It is so easy for me to say good things about the people I love, and I am in constant awe of the things they accomplish. If you're a friend reading this, I hope this is obvious to you, but my friends drive me to do better in my own life, to reach for greater heights, because I want to be more like them. I aspire always to be more like you. The lesson I learned is that romance shouldn't make me feel stressed or upset, it should make me feel happy. It should make me feel loved. With the right person, it should be as easy for them as it is for me.

From I've Seen It, the song about seeing the love around you, which inspired this entire essay:

The more you look, the more you find
It's all around you all the time

and

And it makes me cry to think that I am able
To give it back the way it gives to me*

The more you look, the more you find. That's what I wanted to accomplish with this essay. I wanted to look, and I wanted to try to give back in some small way, to appreciate all the love I have been shown.

My Friends and Family

I kind of jumped the gun on this section earlier, but if it's not clear yet, nothing is as important to me as my friends and family. Everything else in my life is a means to an end, but my friends and family are the end everything else serves. Ambition, wealth, intelligence, none of it matters without people. I learned this lesson the hardest when I lived alone in San Luis Obispo for a summer in 2024. Life is just not as meaningful without the people you love.

This year, so many people have shown me such extreme kindness, have made me feel so loved and valued. I struggled a lot freshman year with making friends, and to have people in my life who are so willing to be my friend, who are so good to me, is beyond anything 18 year old Shayan could have dreamed of. I wrote a Letter to My 18 Year Old Self for graduation earlier this year, and all I wanted to tell him about was my friends and family. Perhaps I do not have a partner for Valentine's Day, but I am not alone.

Friends

To start, I'd like to talk about Jacob, Gabe, Aiden, Alaina, and Jordan. Jacob, Gabe and Aiden have been my roommates since sophomore year (Gabe graduated, but honestly, I still think of him as my roommate). Alaina and Jordan joined us our junior year when they started dating Jacob and Aiden respectively, but they are an equally integral part of my life. I tell the five of them everything, I consult them when I need an opinion (for instance, giving me feedback on this essay), and I think of them when they're not around (this is especially true of Gabe and Alaina, who are no longer in San Luis Obispo). The five of them are a big part of the reason I started to love Cal Poly after freshman year. There are few people I trust as much, or am as comfortable with. Who else can I shamelessly show off my terrible dance moves to, or make stupid jokes to, or rant about something that is bothering me to? I used to be scared of the idea of not living with these people I love so much after I graduate. It's hard for me to imagine a world where I can't just walk into the kitchen and start chatting with them. Yet, for these people, I trust the story won't end when I graduate. They'll be the first to hear of anything going on in my life post grad.

No discussion of my friends would be complete without talking about ISCO, and now ASA and MENA too. It's wonderful to think that even four years after I first joined ISCO, my love for the club is still growing. I have no better way of describing how much I love this club other than telling you a story, from the start of this quarter. Cal Poly is on the quarter system, and we get a 3 or sometimes 4 week long break for the holidays in December. When the break was over, the first time I got to see the majority of my friends from the clubs was four days after I got back, on Thursday. I parked my car, and damn near sprinted to that meeting, even though I wasn't running late. I was so excited to see them, despite it only having been a couple weeks. I couldn't keep the grin off my face.

Here's another story, to show you how much these people mean to me. It has to do with my 22nd birthday. I've always had a bit of difficulty with my birthday, because I don't really know how to ask people to celebrate it with me. For my 22nd, I decided I wasn't going to do anything special, because I couldn't imagine anything better than just doing what I usually did on Fridays, which was hang out with my friends. My friends and I went to one of their houses to play games, and we eventually got around to playing Mafia, in which everyone has to close their eyes for part of the game. One round, I closed my eyes, and I opened them to my friends walking in with a cake, singing happy birthday. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.

There are few things that make me happier than seeing my friends from the club, hanging out with them and spending time together. It is amazing to watch these people grow, to become more confident and grow closer together. Beyond myself, even just seeing their love for each other, the way they laugh and joke and help each other, inspires me every day. I still remember the day most of these people joined the club for the first time, and seeing how far they have come fills me with a sense of pride and joy. These are some of the kindest, smartest, most talented people I have ever met. I hope I am even half as good a friend to them as they are to me. If you are reading this, I hope you know how much I love all of you, and how much I will miss you next year.

There are so many other friends I would like to talk about, so many moments I would like to capture in this essay. People from my classes, people from my time at the tutoring center, people from my other clubs. People I've only hung out with a few times, people I've hung out with hundreds of times.

All my friends from high school, who have been there for me at every stage of my college career. I won't list them out, for fear of missing someone, but I still see them all as often as I can (some of them I talk to every week on Discord). Despite going different places in our lives, the times we do get to meet back up are some of my favorite moments of every year.

My roommates from freshman year, who I think of every time I use a unique phrase and realize I originally got it from them. Their influence on my vocabulary is probably permanent.

Friends who have graduated, friends who I haven't seen in a while but think of often. Friends from my childhood. Friends from summer camp. Coaches, teachers, and plenty more that I might be forgetting.

Even if I forgot to enumerate you here, if you've ever been a friend to me, I still carry you in my heart. You're there in every book I read, every song I hear, and every word I write.

Family

No discussion of my love for other people would be complete without talking about my family, the people I love most in the entire world. I would not be half the man I am today without them. From this past year, I'd like to share with you one story about my father, my mother, and my sister.

For my father:

In September, we were in Athens, after having been in Spain for my cousin's wedding the week prior. My father and I sat on the roof of our hotel, which had an amazing view of the Acropolis. I don't remember how the conversation started, but I remember asking him why my mother and him never pushed me to be more proud of my Iranian heritage, never pushed me to learn Farsi. He told me something he's told me many times: that he didn't want to push me because what mattered most to him was that I didn't just get my values and opinions from my parents, but learned to develop my own appreciation for things. They didn't push me towards my heritage not because they didn't want me to love it, but because they trusted I would get there one day on my own. I can see his reasoning, but the following quote from The Strength of the Few by James Islington sums up how I really feel: He told me that all he wanted was for me to be my own man. But all I ever wanted, all I still want, is to be like him. There are no two people on Earth I look up to more than my parents. I try every day to live up to the example they set for me. I try every day to be as smart as my father, or as kind as my mother. Every good trait I have comes from them.

For my mother:

During Fall quarter, on one of my daily calls with my mom, she told me how one of the poems I had wrote for my photography account had made her sad. The poem was about how I missed my friends who had graduated, and my mom said it made her sad not because of the content of the poem, but because she could see how I felt, see my sensitivity and see how that sensitivity can make life hard sometimes. She was sad because she knew I got that sensitivity from her, and was sorry I felt such things. I want her to know: there is nothing I am more proud of than having inherited this sensitivity from my mother. Yes, this sensitivity makes me sad sometimes, but the ability to feel things more deeply, to empathize with the world around me, is not something I would ever trade. My mother is the most empathetic person I know, and I try every day to be as kind as her, to smile on my way to class because she would want me to, to love others deeply and fully in the way she taught me to. In kindergarten, every one of the kids in my class got a nickname from the teacher based on their personality traits. Mine was "Sensitive Shayan", and when I was a kid, I thought that was a bad thing. Now, I wear it like a badge of honor, because what it really meant was that I'm like my mom, the kindest person I've ever known.

For my sister:

On that trip to Spain I mentioned earlier, my cousin Amir gave a speech for his sister Yasi's wedding. It made me think about the speech I might one day give at my sister's wedding, and while I won't spoil what I plan on saying there, I came to a realization while listening to Amir. For the longest time, I've always wondered who my best friend is, because most of the friends I have are in groups, and I couldn't imagine picking just one of them. The realization I came to is that the real reason I've had trouble picking a best friend is because I already have one: from the moment I was born, it has always been my sister. From arguing about Harry Potter when I was a kid to my visits to her in New York over the past couple years to our weekly phone calls to everything else, I guess her being my best friend was just so obvious to me that I never really considered it. In every aspect of my life, I have always looked up to my sister, and tried to be more like her. People often tell me it's obvious I have an older sister, and I think that's true. From music, to running, to books, to my entire value system, there is no one whose individual influence on my life is as apparent as Nikta's. There could not possibly be a better role model for a little brother to have.

I love the rest of my family just as much, although I do not see them as often. On that same wedding trip, my parents, my sister, my cousins, and my aunt and uncle all got breakfast together one morning. I cannot imagine being happier than I was then, at that meal. I miss all of my extended family, especially my grandma, and hope to see them all again soon.

The People of Iran

I didn't always love Iran. When I was younger, it scared me, partly because of all the western news that framed it as the enemy. I won't spend too much time retreading that ground in this essay because I already wrote about it in my One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This review, but the gist is that I was not wise enough in my youth to love my mother country.

The same cannot be said of me now. I live every day knowing I had the opportunity to love it when I was younger, and chose not to. I am trying my best to make up for everything younger me did wrong.

I love Iran. I love it because it is the country my father and mother grew up in, I love it because it is the country my grandma lives in, the country my aunts and cousins live in. I love it because the language is beautiful, the poetry beyond anything my writing can accomplish. I love it because of the food, and because of how kind I found the Iranian people to be in my travels there as a child. I love it because in another life, I might have grown up there.

Starting December 28th, 2025, many Iranian people began to take to the streets to protest poor economic conditions, but more generally to protest the regime. In response, tens of thousands of protestors were killed by their own government. To say this is a tragedy is not enough. This is a crime almost beyond comprehension.

There is a quote from One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This that I have thought about a lot in the past few months. The book is about the genocide in Palestine, but the words unfortunately ring true here too:

Today I watched footage of a man kissing his son's foot as he buried the body so torn apart by the missiles that the foot was one of the only pieces the father could find in the rubble. Tell me this man doesn't know love, hasn't been made to know it in a way no human being should.

The Iranian people have been forced to know love in a way no one should ever have to. It is not just love for one's country that drives these people to the streets. These protestors take to the streets out of love for each other, for the people they wish to create a better future for. For their sons and daughters. For their brothers and sisters. For their fathers and mothers. It's not ideology that drives them. It is their being unwilling to watch the people they love suffer any longer.

I cannot write an essay on love without talking about the people of Iran. I wish I could talk about every single person out there, fighting. They are the truest embodiment of love I have seen in the past year. To show you this love, I want to talk about three specific cases that broke my heart, that will stay with me for years to come.

Negin Ghadimi

Negin Ghadimi was a 28 year old woman who was shot and killed on January 9th in the Shahsavar protests. She was at the protests with her father. She died in his arms.

Before the protest, her father asked her not to come. She refused, and said she was coming to look after him.

Sepehr, my son, where are you?

There is a video of a father looking through the bodies of the dead, searching for his son. Over the course of the video, he repeatedly calls out, "Sepehr baba kojaei?", which translates to "Sepehr, my son, where are you?". In the background, you can hear the shrieks and cries of people discovering their dead loved ones. The number of bodies in one place is unthinkable.

Parisa Lashkari

Parisa Lashkari was a 30 year old woman shot and killed during protests in Nurabad. I saw an image of her 8 year old daughter, Aysan, curled up over her mother's grave. It hurts me beyond anything I am capable of enduring to even try to imagine the pain Aysan must hold in her heart.

Think of everything I showed you in the first three sections of this essay, of all the love one person alone is able to see and experience. Now imagine that love ripped forcefully away, turned against you in the most horrific of ways. That is what is happening in Iran.

The people of Iran are no different than you and I. They have similar hopes and dreams, they love music, and television, and food, and anything else you and I might love. No border can truly separate you from another human being.

Sit with it a moment. Try to empathize with Negin's father, Sepehr's father, and Aysan. Try to imagine their pain, just for a little while. Let it change you. Don't let their suffering be forgotten. Don't let their love be forgotten.

Closing Thoughts

If you've made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read this. It means the world to me.

Writing this essay took me over a week and a half of consistent effort, but not one moment of it felt like work. I got to spend the entire time thinking about the people I love, and what I learned from them. I got to look forward to Valentine's Day as a way to celebrate all the love in my life.

The essay is long, it's rambling, it kind of lacks structure at times, but writing it made me happy. If you're someone close to me, I hope you know how much I love you. Happy Valentine's Day.