It’s a special pastime of mine to stand off to the side of a dance floor with friends and just watch. I like watching people have fun, especially the really talented dancers. If I stand there long enough, perhaps I’ll get to see the dance floor drain onto the patio, moving away from the lights and music just long enough to share a conversation or a “walk” around the streets of Stanford.

If you’re really lucky, though, you’ll see their eyes. You’ll see joyful eyes, bored eyes, confused eyes and everything in between without ever having to take a step forward. If you watch enough, you’ll sometimes see loving eyes.

I wish I could describe it, but it’s a subject so slippery that artists have dedicated centuries to studying its infinite facets. I would call them scintillating, laden with rawness and ten thousand other adjectives. I could see their lips moving, smiling and talking, but I couldn’t hear about what.

Many of my friends groan at lovebirds. They’re right, in a way: it would be terribly annoying if you were at dinner with them. But at parties, the distance and the fleetingness let you comfortably watch love in a form you usually don’t get to see. When you’ve had enough, you can dance with your friends. If you’re observant, you might see the two of them slip away together through the crowd of heads and bodies.

You are now the ones slipping away from the crowd, but only the two of you know where you’re going, and it is rarely as scandalous or romantic as it looks from afar. But what if your escape is truly that romantic? What if you are running off into the moonlight together, just because of love? I have done this countless times, but after the tenth time you wander off to gossip or just sit together in silence, it starts to feel routine.

The lack of distance from your relationship makes it easy for love to become mundane: you know too much about your own life to feel all that strongly about it, however strong it is. You’re thinking about your person, sure, but somewhere in there, deeper than the level the eyes betray, you’re thinking about other things.

If you’re like me, it’s probably p-sets, or deciding when you need to leave so that you’ll be awake enough in the morning. Part of the trick to love is that after a while the romance and the ordinary become indistinct, and you have to figure out how to remember that it is special.

I go to parties for many reasons, but this one is closest to my heart. Watching love from a distance is one of the main ways I remind myself of how great love is. Even if my observations do not change the way I show my love, or the routines that I have formed over the years, they do change how I feel about it. I feel the warmth I felt the first time we slipped off into the night together again, freshly highlighted by the love that surrounds me.

I particularly appreciate seeing little pecks and couples just holding each other’s fingers, even if many others find it bothersome. It took me a long time to get over my own instinct to feel this disdain, but I ultimately realized it did nothing but bring annoyance into my life. It was an intentional choice to start seeing the happier side of the coin, and I really do think I am better for it.

So if you are ever bored at a party, I encourage you to look around with an open mind. If you are lucky, you’ll see something similar, and for a moment, it will all feel new again.