Love and Everything Else

A friend once told me, at what should have been one of the happiest moments of his life, that he'd never been more frightened. He'd just got engaged to the love of his life. He said the fear arrived about four seconds after the joy did, uninvited, and hadn't left since.

I understood him completely, which worried me more than the sentiment itself.

That's the part nobody puts on the greeting card: love doesn't just make room for despair, it creates the possibility of it. Before you loved someone properly, their leaving you couldn't ruin your life. Now it can. Joy and despair aren't opposites here. They're the same transaction viewed from either end. You don't get the elevation without also accepting the possibility of the drop.

The joy first, because it deserves its due before I start complicating it.

There is a specific, almost embarrassing lightness to loving someone well, the kind Virginia Woolf gives Clarissa Dalloway when she remembers a kiss from Sally Seton decades earlier as she moves through her own party. An ordinary moment, and then, without warning, what she calls the most exquisite moment of her whole life.

That's not a metaphor for love. It's what love does to attention. Everything becomes more interesting because someone else finds it interesting too. A terrible film becomes a great evening because you're laughing together. An ordinary Tuesday acquires a little more weight because of the hand held, the hug, the kiss. Or a wet Wednesday in November, as I described in my previous article, Love, Actually.

I don't think that feeling is an illusion, whatever the biologists say about it. It is real in the only sense that matters: it changes what a day is like to experience.

The despair is the price of that possibility.

Kierkegaard thought anxiety was the emotional response to freedom: the dizziness of realising that you could do something, and therefore might do the wrong thing. Love gives you a more intimate version of that dizziness. You have handed someone the instructions for how to hurt you, and you did it voluntarily. Every serious love contains some awareness of its possible ending, whether through betrayal, neglect or the much more reliable method of mortality. You don't get to keep the joy and refuse the fear. They arrive together in the same delivery box.

Which brings me to the bigger question this piece is actually about: whether any of this is the main point of a life, or just one crucial part of it.

Our culture has mostly decided the answer. Love is staged as the finish line, the thing every other plotline leads towards. The career, the friendships, the ambitions, the years spent becoming someone, all treated as prelude to the meeting, the wedding, the reunion, the person across the table. We've all seen the Hollywood movie. I understand the appeal, and frankly I love the romantic vision more than most men. The ending of La La Land, where Seb and Mia get together in a different, parallel universe, remains a particular favourite. It's a beautiful story. Find the right person and everything else falls into place.

I don't believe it though, and I'm suspicious of my younger self, who did.

Bertrand Russell opens his autobiography with a sentence I often think about. Three passions, he says, have governed his life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and an unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. What strikes me isn't the love. It's that there are three. He doesn't rank them. He doesn't suggest that the other two were really just preparation for the first. They run alongside each other, sometimes reinforcing each other, sometimes competing for attention. None is the whole of a life. That feels truer to how an actual life gets lived.

Aristotle had something similar in mind with eudaimonia, although the Greeks were far less interested than we are in reducing a good life to a single source of happiness. Human flourishing was composite: friendship, virtue, thought, meaningful activity, pleasure, and a fair amount of luck. Remove some of those things and the life is diminished. But none exists simply to serve another. Love, on this account, isn't the summit. It's one of the things that makes the landscape worth living in.

I think this is where the joy and the despair actually make more sense.

If love were the entire point of being alive, its loss would be unsurvivable, an ending rather than a wound. Most people, even after the worst heartbreak, put it in a box and go on to have a Tuesday that isn't about love at all. There is work you care about, a friend who makes you laugh, a book that says something true, a conversation that changes your mind, a place you've never been before.

Or a surfing trip and solitude.

That capacity to keep going somewhere else isn't a failure of love. It's evidence that love was never meant to carry the whole weight of a life. But this is where I have to be careful, because saying that doesn't make love merely one item on a list.

There are things about loving someone that have mattered to me more than almost anything else. The quiet things, especially. Snuggling up and holding her hand in the night. Sharing ideas and moments and experiences. Watching a favourite TV show. Sending flowers and seeing the notes afterwards. The strange intimacy of knowing what makes someone laugh, what music they will like, what they look like when they're half asleep. Of listening to them dream.

Those aren't additions in the sense of being optional extras. They have changed the architecture of my life. And I couldn't honestly say I would choose a life without them simply because it would be safer.

So perhaps the distinction is not between love being central or peripheral. Perhaps it's between love being part of a life and love being the whole meaning of a life. It can be enormous without being everything.

That matters because the fear my friend described isn't an argument against loving. If anything, it's evidence that something real has been allowed to matter. I'd still take the fear.

I'd take knowing that someone could hurt me over the safety of never being invested enough for them to do so. I'd take the possibility of the deepest joy alongside the possibility of the greatest loss.

But I no longer think the story of a life ends when we find love, or that everything before it was merely preparation. There is still work to do. There are friendships to keep. Books to read. Places to go. People to help. Things to understand. There is the world beyond the person we love, which doesn't disappear simply because we've found someone with whom we'd rather spend a wet Wednesday in November.

Love doesn't complete the architecture. It becomes part of it.

And perhaps that's why it can survive being lost. Not because it wasn't important enough, but because it was never meant to be the only thing holding the roof up. I don't think that diminishes love. If anything, it makes it more extraordinary.

To love someone deeply, knowing they aren't the whole of your life is different from needing them to be. And I'd still choose it.

Love is the beautiful addition.

And long may we love.