PART VI — On Love: Proximity and Its Violences

PART VI

On Love: Proximity and Its Violences

Or: The Thing That Saves Us and the Same Thing

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

6. What Love Actually Is

Philosophy has a poor track record with love. The philosophical accounts are either too abstract — love as the desire for the good, love as the recognition of value in another — or they collapse into psychology, into the attachment patterns and projection dynamics and power negotiations that constitute love as it is actually lived. Neither the abstract nor the psychological account captures the experience, which is why people who have been most profoundly in love rarely find the philosophical descriptions adequate.

Let me try a different approach. Let me describe what love is not, and see whether what remains is more honest than the positive definition.

Love is not the state of feeling positively toward someone. That is a mood, and moods change. Love is not the decision to be with someone — decisions can be revised, and the thing that makes love feel different from a decision is precisely that it doesn't feel like it could be simply revised. Love is not the possession of a shared history, though the shared history deepens it. Love is not need, though need is often entangled with it in ways that are very difficult to separate.

Perhaps love is most accurately described as a form of involuntary attention — the state in which a person finds themselves unable to be indifferent to the wellbeing of another, in which the other's joy is genuinely experienced as something, in which the other's suffering registers before the calculation of whether it is convenient to let it register. If this is right, then love is not primarily an emotion but a perceptual change: the world has a different structure when someone you love is in it, and the structure is not chosen and cannot be simply unchosen.

6.1 The Proximity Problem

The most interesting philosophical problem of love is what I will call the proximity problem: the closer you are to a person, the more accurately you perceive them, and the more accurate the perception, the more difficult the love becomes. Distance is a protection — not a falsification, exactly, but a selective vision that preserves the image necessary for the ideal. Proximity dissolves the selection. You see the contradictions, the pettiness, the specific failures of character, the ways in which the person is not the person you thought they were or need them to be.

The person who loves at a distance loves an image. The person who lives with someone loves a human being — which is to say they love something genuinely difficult, genuinely inconsistent, genuinely other than what was imagined. The long marriage, the deep friendship, the relationship that has survived genuine crisis — these are achievements of a different order from the romantic love of the early period. Not lesser. More real. More costly. Built from the material of what is actually there rather than what was hoped for.

To love what is actually there rather than what you imagined is the hardest thing love requires and the thing it most rarely receives. Most of what ends relationships is not the discovery that the other person is bad. It is the discovery that they are different from the image, that the image was necessary and the person is not the image, and that the gap between the two is a gap that must be continuously navigated rather than closed.

6.2 Love and Power

Every relationship organized around genuine care is also organized around power — not necessarily the dominating kind, but the power of mattering to someone, the power of being the person without whom another person's life is qualitatively different, the power that comes from being needed or wanted or loved in return.

This is not a corruption of love. It is a feature of love's structure. To love someone is to become vulnerable to them — to grant them a power over your experience that they did not have before the love and cannot easily be stripped of. The vulnerability is real. The power is real. The question is not whether to have power in love, because the question of whether to have it assumes a freedom that the involvement does not permit. The question is what to do with it — whether to wield it with awareness of what it is, or to pretend it is not there, which is the most reliable way of wielding it badly.

The relationship in which the power dynamics are explicitly discussed is rarer than it should be, and more durable than the ones in which they are not. This is counterintuitive — the conversation about power feels unromantic, feels like the introduction of calculation into a space that is supposed to be beyond calculation. But the power is there whether it is discussed or not. The discussion does not introduce it. It makes it visible. And visible power is power that can be used with conscience.