This morning on my volunteer calls, I spoke to a couple of clients about how Albo married his partner Jodie Haydon yesterday. No one I spoke to seemed particularly impressed with him, and more than one person questioned her taste in men. I personally like him, though, and I’m genuinely happy for them both. Their wedding looked simple and elegant, and I hope they have a long, happy life together.
I was reading about how Jodie and Albo met. At the time he was the opposition leader and giving a keynote speech at a national union conference in Melbourne in 2019. During his address, he mentioned his favourite NRL team, the Rabbitohs. Jodie, who was in the audience, called out “Up the Rabbitohs!”, which immediately caught his attention. Later, she slid into his Twitter DMs and said, “Hey, we’re both single,” and that message led to them meeting up — and the rest is history.
The ancient Greeks used the word Eros for this kind of love — passionate love, desire, longing, the spark that sweeps people off their feet. They had an entire classification system for what they believed were the different types of love: Philia, a deep friendship or companionate love; Storge, the love between parents and family; Agape, a universal, selfless, unconditional love; Ludus, playful, flirtatious love; Pragma, mature, long-term, enduring love; Philautia, self-love; and Mania, obsessive love.
I was thinking about all of these categories, and honestly, I don’t quite buy it. You can divide love into as many boxes as you like, but the principle remains the same. Love is love is love.
When I think about the things people do for love, I think of gestures like a family member or close friend donating a kidney to someone they can’t bear to lose. Sometimes, in rare cases, even a portion of their liver. I once read about a father whose young son had a brain tumour and was left with a long surgical scar across his scalp. The father went out and tattooed the exact same scar on his own head, just so his child wouldn’t feel alone. That kind of love floors me.
I think about partners who relocate across the world for someone else’s career, starting again from scratch because the relationship is worth it. I think of parents working three jobs so their children can have the kind of education they never had. People hiding their own fears so the person they love can feel safe. The kind of quiet loyalty where someone stays up all night in a hospital chair, not because it’s comfortable, but because they want the person in the bed to know they aren’t facing the darkness alone.
Love makes people do extraordinary things — sometimes grand gestures, sometimes completely ordinary ones. But whatever form it takes, the common thread is the powerful connection between two people, that invisible pull that binds them together with the ancient language of love.
My experience of love is not limited. Most of it comes from my parents and my Nanny. Even though the way I received that love might have looked different from how other people experience it — what the ancient Greeks would call storge, the deep familial love between parents and children — it was still powerful. And up until now, I’ve carried a feeling of being protected by it.
When I was around eighteen, I’d just come back from Alice Springs. I wasn’t hanging around with the worst crowd, but we were definitely drinking too much, smoking too much, and wandering the city late at night. One evening, at a friend’s house before we went out, I drank an entire bottle of some liqueur. By the time we got into town, I was completely blind drunk. We tried to go somewhere, but I couldn’t manage it. We ended up on North Terrace, and I passed out on the grass.
It was late, but my friends called my parents and told them I needed help. They got out of bed immediately, rushed into the city, and took me home to bed. At the time, I didn’t appreciate what that meant — things between us were often tense, and I didn’t recognise the gesture for what it was. But looking back now, I see how unconditional it was, how instinctively they moved to protect me, and how love sometimes looks like a midnight drive into the city to pick up your daughter when she’s too far gone to look after herself.
My mother has always been unwavering in her love for my brother and me. If she was at work and I needed her, she would drop everything to take my call. Whenever there were fights in the family — she was the one who made things work again. She sorted things out, pushed for peace, and wouldn’t rest until everything was smoothed over. Her love was practical, fierce, and constant.
My dad, on the other hand, could be a bit of a control freak and often very critical of me, especially when I gained weight. At the time it felt harsh, but looking back, I can see that a lot of it came from a place of worry and love. He knew how unforgiving the world can be toward women, and he didn’t want me to struggle because of something he saw as preventable. It doesn’t make his delivery perfect, but I can understand the intention now more than I ever did then.
One of the clearest memories I have of his love is from my twenty-first birthday. I didn’t have a best friend who knew me well enough to make a speech, so Dad offered to do it. He was confident and sincere, and he didn’t care what anyone thought — he was simply a father who loved his daughter and wanted to show it.
He was also incredibly supportive when I lived in Sydney. He once told Mum that he felt sorry for me because I didn’t really know anyone there, so he decided to pay my rent. It was his way of protecting me from loneliness and hardship. In that sense, he and I were similar — both a bit solitary, both a little “lone wolf.” And in the moments when it mattered, he showed his love in the only way he knew how: quietly, practically, and without asking for anything in return.
A little while back I read that puma cub siblings stay very close when they’re young, but when they grow up they separate, often never seeing each other again. I compared my brother and myself to puma cubs, and when I told Eric he dismissed the idea completely. And to be honest, he’s behaved in ways recently that I’m not sure I can easily forgive.
But last year, when he was back in Adelaide for one of the three funerals he attended here, he’d had a lot to drink. We were out the back while he had a cigarette, and he told me that he would always make sure I have somewhere to live. I’m not entirely sure what he meant — maybe he worries I’ll struggle with housing because I haven’t worked in ten years — but the sentiment was still beautiful in its own way.
Nanny had no biological obligation to love me, but she did. She was a lot like Dad — incredibly harsh in many ways — but from the day I was born she gave me a kind of unconditional love that never wavered. My brother and I only ever met one biological grandparent, and she died when we were very young. So when Nanny and her husband came to Grandparents’ Day at Scotch College, we saw them as our real grandparents. It was Nanny’s job to pick us up from school, clean the house, and stay with us until one of our parents got home, but it wasn’t her job to love us the way she did. Yet she did, fully, fiercely, and without hesitation. Even when I was older, she was still my Nanny.
One night — when I was much older than I’d like to admit — I was back living with Mum and Dad. I loved Dad, but he carried a lot of toxic masculinity and he could be frightening when he was angry. One night he yelled at me about something, and even though he would never have physically hurt me, I suddenly panicked and felt genuinely unsafe. I was too scared to leave my room, so I called Nanny and asked if she could come and pick me up. It was around midnight, but she rushed over immediately and took me home with her. Looking back, I know it must have been a horrible situation for Dad, and an awful thing for me to do, but in that moment I was scared — and Nanny was there for me, without question, the way she always was.
Nanny’s granddaughter Rebecca once offered to take three demerit points for me, and it meant a lot — it showed me, in a very real way, how much she loved me.
In the realm of Eros, I haven’t been shown a lot of love. For a long time I thought that meant I wasn’t good enough, but now I think it’s because I was never really open to love in the first place. I can only think of one moment where a man did something that made me feel genuinely loved.
I was starting a new temp job at AGL, and when I opened my car door I somehow laddered my stocking. I was devastated — they were black pantyhose and the ladder was glaringly obvious, and it was my first day. I called my boyfriend at the time, Luke, and told him what had happened. Without hesitation, he offered to go and buy me new stockings and bring them to me. He offered because he knew how important that first day was for me, and he was willing to be late to work just to help. I didn’t end up taking him up on it, but the offer itself made me feel loved.
I have experienced philia, which I’ve spoken about before on this blog. When I was living in Alice Springs at Gillen House — the student accommodation mostly used by apprentices coming to town for tradeschool — I made friends with an apprentice chef who was passing through. One day we caught a taxi from Gillen House to the cemetery, of all places. We spent the entire afternoon walking around, talking, wandering between the old graves, and it was one of the only times in my life I have felt completely free — and completely loved.
I’ve had many friends over the years, but it was that day with my friend Bianca that I felt something different. Something steady, safe, and uncomplicated. Of all the friendships in my life, that moment stands out as the time I felt truly loved.
There was a man who loved so deeply that his devotion has always stood out to me as an example of love rooted in ritual, reverence, and lifelong commitment. After Marilyn Monroe died in 1962, Joe DiMaggio arranged for fresh roses to be delivered to her crypt every week — for twenty years. Despite their divorce years earlier, his gesture remained one of profound loyalty and remembrance. He didn’t do it for show or for praise; he did it because the love he carried for her was something he couldn’t put down.
Romance like that used to appeal to me. But now, my idea of love has shifted. It’s the love I have for my mother and for my best friend Maiki. It’s my love of stories and classic books like Dracula and Frankenstein. I love flowers and bioluminescence. I love travel and the thought of meeting new friends. I think love is love is love — and it appears in so many different shapes and sizes. At the end of the day, love is the only thing that truly matters.
I’ll tell you someone I love unconditionally, and that’s my cat Chloe. I adopted her from the Animal Welfare League in 2018. I’d been there twice before and hadn’t found a cat I felt connected to, but on the third visit I came across this little alley cat with attitude. I loved her instantly. She started off as my cat, but then she took a real liking to Mum. And then we introduced a stray cat into the house — Charli — who adored Mum too. Charli is younger and has even more attitude than Chloe, so now Charli sticks with Mum and Chloe has become my shadow.
She sleeps on my bed every night. She’s gentle and loving in her own quiet way. Sometimes in the middle of the night, when the house is silent and it’s just me and Chloe, I think to myself: this is enough for me.
Below you can see a photo I took of Chloe today, right at home in a styrofoam box.
