This is our guide to thirteen Rupi Kaur love poems, from the giddy first days to the heartbreak and what healthy love asks of us afterwards. Each one links to the post where Kaur shared it on Instagram, and under each link we've written what the poem says, how she builds it, which book it's from where she's told us, and why it might feel familiar.
Love is the thing we all want to talk about and the thing we're worst at putting into words. We've all stared at a message box, trying to say something true without sounding silly. Kaur's love poems are short enough to read in a breath, and they often say the thing we couldn't.
Who Rupi Kaur is
Rupi Kaur is a Punjabi-Canadian poet, illustrator and performer, born in 1992. She self-published milk and honey in 2014 while studying at the University of Waterloo, and her books have since sold millions of copies in more than forty languages. She's the best-known voice of Instapoetry, short verse that first found readers on Instagram.
Love runs through all of her collections, and in January 2026 her publisher, Andrews McMeel, gathered her love poems into a single book, Love Poems by Rupi Kaur. Not everyone's a fan, and critics have called her style simple to a fault. But simplicity is exactly why these poems travel so well between people who love each other.
How Kaur writes about love
Everything is lowercase, with no punctuation but the period. Kaur has said that's a tribute to Gurmukhi, the script of her first language, Punjabi, which has no capital letters. On the page it makes a love poem feel unguarded, almost whispered.
Her line breaks are short, so each line lands on its own before the next one turns it. Many poems close with an italic title beside her name, a one-word label like a caption under a photograph. And there's often a small line drawing: two figures, a knife, a flower. Look at the picture before you read the words, then look again after.
Falling in love
commitment
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
Most wedding vows stop at death. This poem doesn't. The speaker imagines her own death and refuses to let it be the end, vowing to keep looking for this person beyond this life. It's from page 186 of the sun and her flowers (2017).
The image Kaur uses is two hands, and the whole poem lives in that small physical detail. It turns a vow into something bigger than a single life, and it's a lovely one to send to someone you've promised forever.
The whisper
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
A lover leans in and tells the speaker she talks too much, then suggests a better use for her mouth. It's playful, flirtatious and over in a few lines, and Kaur shared it with a kissing-face emoji as page 68 of milk and honey.
The craft is in the turn. The first line sounds like a put-down, the last line reveals it's an invitation.
Lost for words
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
The speaker refuses the old cliché of being left speechless and offers something more physical: her tongue goes so weak it forgets which language it speaks. For a poet who grew up between Punjabi and English, that's a sly, personal joke. It's page 61 of milk and honey.
Notice how she takes a tired phrase and makes it new by being specific. That's a trick you can borrow for your own love notes.
An endless conversation
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
One line, and it's all you need: together, two people are "an endless conversation". Kaur posted it on the last night of a tour, telling her readers their conversations would go on until they met again, so the poem stretches to fit friends as well as lovers.
Who's your endless conversation? Send them this one tonight.
The first love that didn't matter
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
We've added this one to the collection. The speaker admits this person wasn't her first love, then explains why that doesn't matter: they made every earlier love feel beside the point. It's page 63 of milk and honey.
It's a gentle answer to anyone who worries about being someone's first. Being the one who changes the scale is better.
the chase
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
New love in three lines of glorious exaggeration, about a beauty so bright it would make the sun restless. It's the kind of over-the-top praise we only allow ourselves at the start. Kaur shared it during a grim news week as a bit of sweetness, with a reminder that it's fine to rest and recharge.
When love breaks
Shared wounds
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
In this poem, whoever wounds the speaker ends up wounded as well, because in love the damage is shared. Kaur builds the poem around a knife and a cliché, love as a double-edged sword, and makes it literal and uncomfortable. It's page 37 of the sun and her flowers.
It's a painful truth worth sitting with. Hurting someone you're bound to never stays one-sided.
The future that won't happen
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
Heartbreak, the poem says, also takes the future that will now never exist. In four short lines Kaur names a grief many of us feel and can't explain. It's page 21 of the sun and her flowers.
If you're grieving a future, not a person, this poem gives you permission. That's a real loss too.
the underrated heartache
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
This longer poem is about the breakup no one writes songs for: losing a friend. Kaur compares it to a slow illness rather than a sudden disaster, and lands on a repeated line we can't forget, "a loss is a loss is a loss". In her caption she describes friendships that changed after university, not through betrayal, just through life.
If a friendship has drifted, this is your nudge. Send the message you've been drafting in your head.
What healthy love asks of us
Your partner can't be everything
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
One person can't fill every need you have, and the poem says so plainly: your partner "can't be your everything". Kaur's caption adds that it takes a community, and that expecting one partner to be everything is a lesson she's still learning. It's page 70 of home body (2020).
This one's freeing. Release your partner from being your best friend, therapist and cheerleader all at once, and invest in your other relationships.
Love that energises
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
A two-breath declaration about the difference between love that takes and love that gives. It reads like a line drawn in the sand after a tiring relationship, and the caption, full of lightning bolts, says she's ready for the second kind.
Try a quick check: after time with the people you love, do you feel fuller or emptier? That's your answer.
Kindness
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
The poem asks us to forget what we've been taught about love and begin again from a single word, kindness, offered in both directions. Then it asks the two people to "be two pillars", equals strong enough to carry something enormous together. It's page 76 of home body.
It isn't only a romantic poem, but it might be the best advice on this list. Start with kindness and most of the rest follows.
the type of lover i need
Read this poem on Rupi Kaur's Instagram
The speaker sets out what she's looking for: someone who has known hard times, who'll carry her on the bad days, who understands her without needing words. The title turns the list into a demand rather than a wish. It's page 74 of milk and honey.
Write your own version. Knowing what you need is the first step to asking for it.
Where to read her
If these poems spoke to you, Love Poems by Rupi Kaur (2026) collects her love poems from milk and honey (2014), the sun and her flowers (2017) and home body (2020) in one small book. The three collections are worth reading whole, because each one moves through love, loss and healing in order. She's also written Healing Through Words (2022), a book of guided writing exercises.
You'll find every edition on Rupi Kaur's own website. Your local bookshop can order them too.
For more of her work, see our guides to her self-love poems and her poems on womanhood. And whoever you love today, a partner, a friend, yourself, tell them. Love grows when it's said out loud.
Lifeism shares ideas and practices for reflection. It is not medical, psychological or financial advice. Read our Disclaimer.