Love First presents
The Game of Love
You were born into a game you didn’t choose, with rules you didn’t agree to.This is the funner game.
Here’s the first level:
Think of someone close to you: a partner, housemate, friend or family member. Now think of something you’ve been assuming they agreed to. Not something you fought about, just…assumed.Most relationships rely on hundreds of such inherited defaults and unconscious practices. Absorbed into your mind from parents, teachers, films & TV, and whatever culture you were immersed in. They work…until the unspoken expectations clash, and then you’re fighting over topics that were never named out loud.The Game of Love builds its foundations differently: explicitly, and by mutual agreement. And on the new platform we’re building, the first “app” is precisely about that: a Conscious Relationship Designer, where relationships are shaped with intention.It takes ten minutes to lay a foundation that can save you a long and painful misunderstanding, disagreement, or fight — and make your relationship stronger, too!
The game you were born into
The Game of Power is the interconnected system of Patriarchy, Imperialism, Colonialism, and Capitalism — built on hierarchy, dominance, and control. It uses power-over logic to perpetuate itself, and reward those who perpetuate it.But this game is a recent aberration — a few thousand years at most — even though it now shapes nearly every institution, relationship, and assumption about how life works. For most of our history — 290,000 years of it! — humans lived in societies that actively prevented anyone from accumulating power over others.The Game of Love is an alternative way of being. Not a retreat from the world, but a different way of playing in it — one built on explicit agreements, conscious relationships, and the radical idea that love is a strategy, not just a feeling.
Now in Early Alpha
We’ve recently soft-launched our early alpha release of the platform supporting you playing the Game of Love. It ships with the Conscious Relationship Designer, a tool that helps you:
Create explicit agreements for any relationship;
Propose, renegotiate, and select from expertly crafted samples;
Get notified when agreements are accepted, rejected, or customized.
If you’d like to play along, make feature requests, and report bugs to me when you encounter them—again, this is an alpha!—you can sign up for free:first.thegame.love
STAY CLOSE
It takes courage to open your heart and believe in a better world. Do it anyway!
Subscribe to the Love First newsletter and stay updated on all developments in the Game of Love:LoveFirst.substack.com
Hi. 👋🏼
I’m Faruk, the founder and creator of Love First. I’ve spent 20 years building award-winning technology, for companies ranging from startups to Apple and other Fortune 500 giants. But I kept studying my even bigger passion: understanding how people work.What I found as the missing variable in high-performance systems — in teams, in companies, in lives — is love.Not as a sentiment. As strategy.So for the past 8 years I’ve been studying Love and developing frameworks, modalities, and teachings, all while living a Love First way of life. Now I'm formulating that way of life in the Game of Love, and building the technology and platform to support it.
I can’t stress enough how much “going Love First” has changed my life for the better, in almost every way. It's given me the most loving community of people I've ever known, and the most magical relationships.I believe it can do the same for you.
