Love as the connective force of the universe

Love as the connective force of the universe is Daniel Jae Ho Bae’s effort to give a spiritual name to the bond he feels with Natasha Kingsley. His idea moves between theology and physics: love is the connection among people, and dark matter becomes its cosmic analogue, the force that keeps things from flying apart. The novel gives the metaphor intimacy and reach, but also tests it against separation. Natasha Kingsley carries the image into her study of physics and remembers it with a quickened heart, even as both lovers later doubt what their day together meant.

A Personal Definition of God

The idea emerges in a conversation between Daniel Jae Ho Bae and Natasha Kingsley about their connection. Daniel describes what they feel as something they do not understand and do not want to relinquish, then identifies that bond with God. When Natasha Kingsley responds with amused skepticism toward his poetic manner, he expands the claim: everyone on Earth is connected, including people who have done wrong. He believes each person has done at least one good thing, and that the best parts of people are connected on some level. Sharing food, donating to charity, giving money to a street musician, caring for others, expressing love, and forgiving are among the ordinary acts through which he imagines that connection taking form. God, in this account, is not chiefly a judge or a doctrine; it is the consciousness of human goodness held in common.

The exchange makes the concept relational rather than abstract. Daniel Jae Ho Bae speaks while holding Natasha Kingsley’s hand; she draws it into her lap and holds it with both of hers. The physical gestures give the theory a small, immediate embodiment: the connection he describes is not only a proposition about humanity but the closeness they are experiencing as they discuss it. His definition also includes people he considers bad, resisting a division between wholly good and wholly evil. What binds people is not perfection but the good they are capable of sharing.

Natasha Kingsley’s Scientific Counterpoint

Natasha Kingsley does not simply accept Daniel Jae Ho Bae’s religious language. She is uncertain whether she believes in God and is more interested in why people feel compelled to believe. Science, in her view, already offers wonder: the night sky and the interior of a human cell are extraordinary without requiring a religious explanation. She also objects to a conception of God associated with people being born bad and with the justification of prejudice. Her skepticism therefore concerns not wonder itself but the use of religious belief to support judgment and exclusion.

That contrast gives the later metaphor its force. Natasha Kingsley is not persuaded by an appeal to conventional faith; Daniel Jae Ho Bae instead joins his claim to a scientific fact she supplies. She tells him that the universe is approximately twenty-seven percent dark matter. He asks whether dark matter is what keeps objects from hurtling into deep space and holds them together. Once she confirms the premise, he proposes that dark matter is love: an attracting force. His comparison is deliberately playful, and Natasha Kingsley reacts with mock disgust at the poetically extravagant conclusion. The joke does not erase the difference between their worldviews; it lets the difference become part of their shared intimacy.

From Cosmic Force to Human Connection

The metaphor works by carrying an idea from one scale to another. Dark matter holds the universe together; love, Daniel Jae Ho Bae suggests, attracts people and keeps their connections from coming apart. His account of God and his dark-matter analogy are related but not identical: the first describes the best qualities people share, while the second offers a physical image for the binding force behind connection. Together, they allow him to speak of love as both ethical and cosmic, a force expressed through care and imagined as fundamental to the structure of existence.

The novel places this expansive claim beside the pressures that shape Natasha Kingsley’s life. She fears deportation from the United States, a place where she has lived since childhood and where she has friends, school, and plans for college. Her family’s precarious immigration status makes belonging more than a romantic abstraction: institutions can reduce a person to forms, legal categories, and a history of concealment. When a law-office questionnaire asks Natasha Kingsley to explain what America means to her and how she might contribute, the request turns her life into a case to be made legible. Daniel Jae Ho Bae’s idea offers a different measure of human worth, grounded in shared acts of goodness rather than official permission or inherited divisions.

The same tension appears in Natasha Kingsley’s awareness of race and cultural boundaries. She reflects on the politics of Korean ownership in the Black hair-care business and on standards that treat chemically straightened hair as more professional than her Afro. Her own position is that she is glad to have choices and that those choices belong to her. Against such judgments, Daniel Jae Ho Bae insists that he does not care if others treat their relationship as a novelty or frame it as a clash of cultures. He says that what matters to him is Natasha Kingsley and that love can overcome the surrounding talk. His refusal to let other people’s opinions define their bond gives the universal theory a social dimension: connection becomes a way of resisting the divisions imposed on people, even if it cannot make those divisions disappear.

Memory, Physics, and the Limits of the Metaphor

The conversation remains with Natasha Kingsley after the relationship and the day in New York have receded from certainty. She finds a passion in physics, and in the moments before sleep she recalls their conversation on the roof. Daniel Jae Ho Bae’s equation of love with dark matter still makes her heart beat faster. She then stores the memory among old, sentimental, impossible things. The image thus survives not as proof that the lovers were destined to remain together, but as an experience that continues to matter to her.

Time changes the meaning of the day for both of them. Natasha Kingsley comes to suspect that she imagined its magic and romanticized it as a first love. Daniel Jae Ho Bae, too, no longer knows what the day means, though he remembers the coincidences that brought them together. The novel places those remembered signs beside the fact that they did not remain together: the same chain of circumstances that seemed to draw them into love did not secure a lasting union. Love as a connective force is therefore neither a guarantee of permanence nor a simple explanation for fate. It names the intensity of connection, the goodness people can recognize in one another, and the force of a memory that can endure even when a relationship does not.