Faith Couch
LOVE LINE (202)643-2881
“Tell me about the person you love" first began in 2018 as an interactive project on Instagram in which I engaged my followers and greater community encouraging them to tell me about a person that they love.
The purpose was to present a prompt about love that is open-ended. People responded about familial love, unrequited love, romantic love and platonic love. People were excited to share and excited to read others responses.
The responses were coupled with an image that I found beautiful. I would repost them to my story allowing people to see the anonymous writer’s feelings. Although the words were curated with beautiful images, it still only existed in a very liminal space. instagram would allow only so many characters and the images only up for a certain amount of hours (although saved on my profile in my highlights).
For years, I dreamt of a space in which people could provide their own answers with more time and more of their personality. Perhaps hear the pauses in their voice, the shift in tonality, the nasal differences, and how some people gnash their words so fast together in shyness or shame it becomes incomprehensible.
I dreamed of a space where people, at their own pace, with their own privacy, could tell me, a sort of stranger, how they really felt. They wouldn’t be screaming into an abyss or repeating themselves to someone who had no interest in hearing. Their verbal love letters would be a reverberation to the ethos of human nature. Innately there is no demand, only opportunity for them to call if they’d like. The opportunity to hang up if they’d like and call again.
If they called on the hotline, I could guarantee them that they’d be heard. No one to tell them that loving who they loved was wrong, or that it did or didn’t make sense. No one providing filler words to assuage their grief, no one hiding secret jealousy when they exude their love.
My “Love Line” was then created to give people despite their relationship to me a chance to speak about the person that they love and have a record of it in my on going archive that will be shared. Beginning Feb 14th, 2024 and onward.