Moldova does not have sex education in its school curriculum. The absence of open discussion about intimacy, communication, and love in classrooms is mirrored at home and in society at large. This silence is striking when compared to our parents’ generation, who grew up in the final years of the Soviet Union. Despite early Communist ideology promoting sexual equality and “free love,” by the late Soviet period sex was treated as something shameful, associated with promiscuity and moral decline. The legacy of that attitude lingers. It was summed up in the now infamous statement made on Soviet television in 1986 — “There is no sex in the USSR.” We all knew sex existed, of course, but what the phrase revealed was the puritanical ideals the state sought to enforce.

As a teenager, I felt the weight of that silence. I was too shy to admit crushes, too embarrassed to ask questions at home. Like many girls, I believed intimacy would simply unfold when I grew older, without guidance or conversation. When I moved to England for university, I was startled to overhear my peers casually discussing sex, health, contraception, and pleasure. It made me realize how uninformed I had been — and how difficult it felt to catch up once you were already “too old” to ask.

This gap between experience and silence is what led me to begin Young Love. In Moldova, adolescence is rarely photographed, except in staged or sanitized ways that leave out its uncertainty, vulnerability, and beauty. I wanted to capture those fragile, awkward, formative beginnings — the tenderness and clumsiness of young intimacy. Over the course of the project, I photographed more than 20 young couples. Some of them have already broken up, but that impermanence makes the portraits even more precious. First love always feels like it will last forever.

The timing of the project, during the pandemic, added another layer. Young people were already navigating questions of identity and future — should they remain in Moldova or leave abroad? Lockdowns only deepened that uncertainty. To make a series about closeness and touch in a time of social distancing was paradoxical, but it also underscored how vital intimacy remains.

Young Love grew out of that paradox. For me, the photographs are both documentation and quiet acts of resistance against silence — attempts to create space for tenderness, vulnerability, and conversation in a culture where these remain taboo.