I deeply love roses. I was reading The Nightingale and the Rose by Oscar Wilde to my daughter tonight. As I closed the book, I found myself in tears. Wilde wrote a heartbreaking masterpiece about a nightingale that bleeds out against a thorn to create a red rose for a young man in love, only for the recipient of that sacrifice to discard the flower in the gutter because someone else offered his love jewels instead. He tosses the rose away and retreats into “philosophy,” dismissing love as unpractical. It made me reflect heavily on the landscape of modern connection. We live in a culture consumed by cheap novelty and instant gratification. Libertinism is rebranded as freedom, and avoiding depth is disguised as independence. So many people operate out of a quiet fear… fear of leaving their comfort zone, fear of missing out, fear of vulnerability, and fear of building a lasting, shared project with another human being. It has become a landscape of everyone against everyone, where trust...