I’m writing this from a terrace café in Dubai, where Valentine’s Day unfolds itself in fascinating patterns of human behavior that feel like research for my next novel. The afternoon crowd provides a perfect laboratory for observing how love expresses itself in our hyperconnected age.
At the table next to me, a couple leans across their coffee cups, phones face-down, entirely absorbed in conversation. Their eye contact feels deliberate, almost defiant against the digital noise surrounding them. Three tables over, another pair barely speaks, each curating their romantic afternoon for Instagram — capturing the perfect angle of heart-shaped pastries, adjusting lighting for story posts, pausing mid-bite to check likes on their couple’s selfie.
This contrast captures exactly what I’ve been exploring in the new manuscript. How do authentic connections survive when every moment becomes potential content? How do we distinguish between experiencing love and performing it?
Once people wrote love letters in ink, words flowing across paper with the permanence of commitment. Now we send emoji hearts through messaging apps that delete conversations after 24 hours. But has the feeling itself changed, or have we simply altered its expression? The intensity remains, but the language evolves.
My own small revelation came this morning — receiving a digital Valentine from someone meaningful felt surprisingly moving. The animated hearts and carefully chosen GIF conveyed genuine affection despite arriving through pixels rather than post. The medium didn’t diminish the message; it simply required different literacy to decode.
This observation feeds directly into Omnichannel Hearts, the novel I’ve been developing since completing Eastern Empire. The title reflects how we now navigate multiple channels of emotional expression simultaneously — text messages, video calls, shared playlists, location tags, photo albums. Love becomes omnichannel, distributed across platforms yet somehow still singular in its essence.
The characters emerging from this exploration understand digital intimacy as fluently as physical presence. They fall in love through voice messages sent across time zones, maintain relationships through collaborative playlists, express vulnerability through carefully chosen memes. Their emotional vocabulary includes read receipts, response times, and the semiotics of emoji selection.
But technology doesn’t replace traditional romance so much as complicate it. My protagonists still crave presence, touch, the irreplaceable warmth of shared physical space. They’re learning to balance screen time with face time, algorithmic suggestions with organic discovery, the safety of digital distance with the risk of genuine proximity.
Working on this material from Dubai feels appropriate. The city itself represents a successful fusion of tradition and innovation — ancient hospitality culture expressed through cutting-edge hospitality technology. Watching couples navigate their relationships here, I see the same synthesis: timeless human needs met through contemporary tools.
The nail art appointments I maintain between writing sessions reveal how intimacy adapts to available channels. Clients share relationship stories while I paint their nails, creating physical connection that enhances rather than competes with their digital communications. The ritual of being cared for opens conversations that might feel too vulnerable for text messages.
Omnichannel Hearts won’t judge digital love as inferior to analog romance. Instead, it will explore how genuine connection transcends medium while acknowledging that every platform shapes the message it carries. The challenge isn’t choosing between authentic and digital — it’s finding authenticity within digital frameworks.
Valentine’s Day in the age of algorithms: still about love, just with more complexity and infinitely more documentation.
Posted from Dubai, where every sunset gets photographed but some still get simply watched.
— Writer Julia Zolotova
