Butterfly Effect, Heteronormativity, Why the Train Left, and All Things Destiny

Recently, I have been watching the butterfly effect take over TikTok, but not the original one. Not the chaos theory version where a butterfly’s wings might alter the course of a storm across the globe. Online, the butterfly effect has become something else: a romance plot device. A soft-filtered fantasy.

It goes like this: “If I hadn’t missed my flight, I wouldn’t have walked into that bar, wouldn’t have met you.” Or: “If I hadn’t spilled my drink, I wouldn’t have looked up and locked eyes across the room.”
It’s very beautiful to think about, I suppose. But I can’t help but notice that we’re turning chaos into choreography. We're making systems into soulmates.

And I get it. I really do. I work in operations, where systems are designed for clarity, for flow, for efficiency. But real life rarely plays by those rules. Especially love.

In science, the butterfly effect refers to the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in nonlinear systems. Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist, coined the term in the 1960s after realizing that rounding a number ever so slightly changed the entire trajectory of a weather model. The implication was profound: even tiny variables could spiral into massive, unpredictable outcomes. A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, and maybe, just maybe, a storm forms in Texas.

But the thing is: we never really know. The point wasn’t prediction. The point was possibility.

We humans, though, we always want more than possibility. We want pattern. And narrative. And fate. We want to believe there’s a reason we were late, a reason our heartbreaks happened, a reason the detour brought us to someone who made it all worthwhile. We trace moments backwards and stitch them into story. Because we crave sense-making, especially when it comes to love. And because the alternative chaos is often hard to hold.

In narrative psychology, theorists like Dan McAdams talk about how we build identity through story. We impose meaning on events so they feel coherent. But the stories we tell about love are often shaped by power. And few have named this more clearly than bell hooks, whose work offers a critical and tender redefinition of love itself. In All About Love, hooks writes, “Love is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Not destiny. Not passive chemistry. Not a red string. Choice. Care. Conscious action.

hooks reminds us that the dominant culture distorts love through heteronormativity, patriarchy, and capitalism. We are taught to associate love with possession, validation, or rescue. Women are conditioned to give too much, men to feel too little. We are told that romantic love is the highest form of intimacy while communal, platonic, and self-love are framed as lesser, or simply preparatory.

Her analysis cracks open the myth of “meant to be.” It asks: what if love isn't a plot twist, but a practice? What if it doesn’t arrive through fate, but through the everyday labor of showing up? What if the real resistance is loving without needing it to justify the past?

And in today’s social media storytelling, we latch onto whatever helps us hold hope. Burnt toast theory: the idea that when something small goes wrong, it’s because the universe is protecting you from a greater harm you’ll never know about. Red string theory: that we are invisibly, eternally tethered to a destined person. These beliefs are comforting, especially in a world that constantly reminds us how uncertain everything really is.

And make no mistake, I am no better than anyone else. I wholeheartedly turn to these in moments of suffering, grasping for a narrative that makes the ache feel like it served a purpose. But here’s the thing: not everyone has access to these fairytales. Romantic destiny, as it’s sold to us, is not evenly distributed. It is shaped by access. It’s shaped by how society reads our bodies and our worth. Race, class, gender identity, fatness, disability, immigration status—these all impact who gets to be seen as desirable, who gets to be chosen. The red string doesn’t tug equally. The toast doesn’t always burn to protect you. Sometimes, the butterfly flaps, and your world is upended, and there is no soft resolution.

Sometimes, love doesn’t come. And sometimes it does, and it leaves. And sometimes it stays but hurts.

That doesn’t mean the butterfly failed. It means we are in a complex, alive world that doesn’t owe us tidy conclusions.

And yet, still, we continue. We are here. Still worthy.

Some of the deepest love I’ve known hasn’t come from romance. It has come from people showing up consistently, unglamorously. The coworker who remembered my mom’s surgery. The friend who edits my poems at midnight. The chosen family that shares passwords, playlists, job leads, grief. The kind of love that doesn’t have an algorithmic arc but shows up like good operations: in the background, reliable, unseen, and holy.

Love doesn’t need to be fated to be sacred.

So maybe we can stop looking for proof. Maybe we can release the need for every heartbreak to justify itself in hindsight. Maybe the butterfly flaps, and that’s all. No grand romance. Just a shift. Just air. Just the reminder that we live in a world where anything could happen, and often, nothing does. And still, we build.

We build friendship. We build ritual. We build community. We build love systems that aren’t based on scarcity, or on destiny dressed in movie endings.

And before the haters come, this isn’t to dismiss romance. If you know me, and even if you don’t, I LOVE love. But I want us to expand it. To honor its many forms. I want us to stop acting like the only successful outcome is someone choosing you under fairy lights. Sometimes, love is logistics. It’s asking if you’ve eaten. It’s planning around your cycle or working with your schedule. It’s printing out an extra resume. It’s mundane, and mutual, and abundant.

Burn the toast. Watch the butterfly flap. Miss the train. And trust that not every arrival needs to be on time.
But don’t wait for the story to tie itself into a bow.
Stop trying to make chaos read like a script.

You are already a system of meaning.
You are already the storm.
You are already love, even without the string.