These Photos Of #BlackLoveDay On Twitter Will Make You Cry Happy Tears

If you look in the right places, you can find it. Love: the quintessential ingredient on the web that can bring any emotional thug to their knees and comment with a pair of heart eyes. But when you add the idea of representation, and breaking down the toxic ideas of black men and women, you get hashtags like #BlackLoveDay on Twitter. Yesterday, the tag went viral, surfacing the most beautiful photos of black couples celebrating their love. And the rest of us — single and not — lived for all of it!

So where exactly did all this love come from? The holiday "Black Love Day" is actually in February. Twitter user, yogi, speaker, and tech author Anan Daleeke posted about this last year and dropped a little history on why the day is reserved for Feb. 13, the day before Valentine's Day. On July 6, she revisited the tweet and retweeted it onto timelines; this could have of been part of the reason the hashtag immediately took off five months after the holiday. The other theory about what led to this beautiful celebration via Twitter was a lifestyle site called Black Ballad UK, which started a thread declaring that yesterday was in fact Black Love Day. Soon the photos of celeb couples and other couples who submitted photos created a celebratory thread of melanin. Whether it's in February or July, the power of celebrating black love is ever present.

The idea of black love is one often challenged as a myth. Between this nation's struggle with equality and how that translates when you factor in gender, sometimes it's like the experiences of black men and women are positioned at odds. Black women challenging black men to think about their male privilege and speaking out on issues that affect them. Black men — depending on who you follow — insisting that it either isn't their problem or that there aren't enough men willing to stand up in talks about issues like sexual violence or rape culture. But #BlackLoveDay proved that those are narratives and sometimes healthy challenges to building solidarity in a community. And those narratives always have a different side.

I think this captures the feeling of scrolling through your TL and seeing black men and women loving and appreciating each other:

Some chose candid photos to share with us the moments that really share the couple's flavor. And again, Twitter lived for it!

Others wanted to celebrate friendships, self-love, and partnerships that didn't need to be romantic.

Or their favorite flavor ice cream? Guess black love is indeed everything.

Trading cute nicknames and dope photos, it's difficult not to get emotional.

Twitter is truly the undefeated for inspiring people to make us swoon over other people's lives.

Feeling overwhelmed yet? Here's more:

And just because representation is a real thing, even in communities of color, others took a moment to make the hashtag inclusive. Again, here for it!

Even today, if you missed the celebrations, people just couldn't help themselves.

The only question left is when is the next Black Love Day and others kept asking, "Why not every day be Black Love Day?"

Most importantly, this shows that black love is an act of resistance and that is always worth a retweet.