Love, Actually....

There is a particular kind of silence that follows the question "why do you love me?", not the comfortable silence of two people who don't need to ask, but the other one, where you watch your partner's face do the arithmetic and hope the answer doesn't sound like an invoice. I have been on both sides of that silence. I have never once heard an answer I fully believed.

The honest options are unflattering. I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be wanted. I want to be loved. I liked how I appeared in her eyes, a better, funnier, more assembled version of myself for a moment. None of that is love exactly, and yet none of it is separable from love either, which is the whole problem this piece wants to contemplate rather than solve.

The mirror first.

The Greeks have a story that every generation quietly re-borrows: that we were once whole beings, split by a jealous god, and now spend our lives searching for the other half that would make us complete again. It's a myth, obviously, and a slightly absurd one, but it survives because it names something true about the feeling of falling in love, which is less "I have found someone new" than "I have found the piece that was missing." That's reflected love in its purest form: not vanity, or not only vanity, but the old human hunger to be confirmed. To matter to a consciousness other than your own. I don't think this urge is shameful. I think it's closer to the truth than we like to admit. We call it narcissism when one sided, but true connection when it's mutual and it can be powerful and moving.

Then desire, which is blunter and less interested in your feelings about it.

Desire doesn't ask to be liked; it doesn't require the other person's inner life at all, only their outline, the way they hold a glass, a particular carelessness in how they enter a room, the curve of their hips, their smile. This is worth separating from the mirror above, because it wants something different: not to be recognised, but simply to have. It's the most honest of the three explanations in this essay, in that it never dresses itself up as anything nobler than appetite. Desire is necessary to love. It is not, on its own, love's engine so much as its ignition, it gets the car started and has no opinion whatsoever about where the car goes afterward.  And it too often can run out of fuel before you get there.

And underneath both, the biology, which doesn't care about either of our poetic accounts.

Strip it back far enough and love resembles a very elegant delivery mechanism: pair-bonding hormones, attachment systems built to keep infants alive, a mating strategy dressed up as a feeling so that we'd act on it without needing to understand it. Research on the brain in love maps almost embarrassingly well onto addiction circuitry, the same dopamine pathways, the same withdrawal. Say the word soulmate to a sufficiently reductive biologist and watch them wince. There's something almost comic about it: two people convinced they are having a transcendent meeting of destinies, while underneath, several million years of natural selection are quietly high-fiving.

I used to find this account depressing, the same way I used to find determinism depressing, before I noticed the trick in my own reasoning: the fact that a thing has a mechanism doesn't mean the mechanism is all it is. A moving symphony is air pressure variations hitting a membrane and strings being rubbed by bow. That's true and also almost entirely beside the point when being moved by the music of the orchestra. So yes, love is partly a survival strategy wearing a very convincing disguise. It's also, at the same time and without contradiction, one of the only experiences that reliably drags us out of the prison of our own head. Both things are true. The biologist and the poet are describing the same event from different floors of the same building.

So what actually makes us love, if it isn't just the mirror, the desire, or the programming?

I'd argue it's the point at which those three things stop being enough on their own and something has to be added on purpose. Kierkegaard has a concept he calls repetition, not repetition as monotony, but as the deliberate re-choosing of a thing you already have, which he thought was harder and more admirable than the first reckless choosing of it ever was. Anyone can fall for a stranger and the allure of the unknown. The mirror does that work for you; the biology practically insists on it. What's odd, and what none of the three explanations in this essay actually accounts for, is choosing the same particular, now-familiar person again on a wet Wednesday in November, for no new reason, when the mirror has gone slightly cloudy and the fever has long since broken. 

Which brings me to maintenance, the least romantic word in this essay and the only one that matters after year three.

Erich Fromm made the unfashionable case that love is a skill and not a feeling, closer to playing an instrument than to catching a cold. You don't drift into competence. You practise, you fail publicly, you keep showing up on the days you'd rather not. I find this admirable and slightly depressing in equal measure, in the way true things about effort tend to be. It means the version of love that arrives without any labour at all, the "I just knew" kind, the lightning strike, is usually the early kind, and it isn't built to survive contact with laundry, in-laws, or a bad decade (see my earlier piece The Idea of Her which explores this). What survives looks less like a feeling you're having and more like a position you keep returning to, something closer to keeping a promise to an earlier version of yourself who first felt it.  To keep holding hands in the night, sending the flowers, to keep writing the letters, sending the messages and pictures, to keep the other person with you every day, remembering why you love them.

I wrote once, in a piece about forgiveness, that love without the possibility of disappointment isn't really love, just an untested theory of one. I think the same applies here. You don't get to find out whether you actually love someone, as opposed to loving what they do for your sense of self, until the mirror stops flattering you and you choose them again anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with how they make you feel about you.

So, are we seeking reflected love? Yes. Is it desire? Also yes. Is it procreation dressed as poetry? Embarrassingly, also yes. But none of those three, on their own, explains the choice on a November Wednesday to continue to love. That's the part I still find genuinely mysterious, and the part I trust most, mostly because it's the only one of the four that asks anything of you.

So keep holding hands in the night, sending the flowers, writing the letters. Be a constant, beyond desire, beyond determinism.

Fall in love again every day.