On Love

I’m really drawn to the idea that it is partly the vision of the person you think you can only become by entangling yourself with an other which makes them the object of your affection.

Maybe the way they interact with you gives you short glimpses of the person they think you are, and in this imperfect and blurry reflection you spot a version of yourself you yearn to become more like; or maybe you just see in them a trait you wish you saw in yourself. Either way, I like the thought that it’s them as an aspirational aide which triggers an inescapable desire for closeness, and that it’s in searching for this proximity that the other components of love are given the space to develop.

Another idea I can’t quite shake is that the process of becoming can be really well modelled as a conspiracy of one. In both, you are pursuing a privately articulated goal without being able to rely on the cooperation of agents external to your project. To become, you will conspire (earnestly, hopefully) to hide who you currently are in order to allow others to spot and interact with the imperfect outline of the person you need them to see. And both rely on you cultivating and protecting an internal steadfastness, to deal with external doubt or resistance, to adapt without losing track of your end goal.

Becoming-as-conspiracy is one way to explain why being known is such a mortifying ordeal to submit yourself to. You’re inviting others into a previously private project, running the risk that they’ll pull, push, or dampen you away from your goal, leaving you aspiring but compromised. The conflicts between who you currently are and who you hope to become left on display and leaving you exposed to the risk of others deciding how they ought to be resolved.

The above ideas are, to me, the source of much of the difficulty in at once loving and feeling loved. Loving, in as much as it is a special kind of aspiration giving direction to your conspiracy of becoming, invites obfuscation; feeling loved, dependent as it is on feeling understood and known, demands transparency.

For a long time, I understood “I love you” and “I am loved by you” as implying two agents, two distinct spheres with their own goals and identities, wholly independent outside of their mirrored feelings for each other. But this model of love now feels incomplete, too superficial, unhelpful.

If at first you love because it gives you access to a new aspirational image, to love also means delegating to the person loved some agency over who you hope to become, a handover of control they reciprocate by loving you. You both come to have shared ownership of something previously largely private and internal to the other.

It’s in the process of this transition, in the tentative attempt at going from two conspiracies of one to one conspiracy of two, that the tension between obfuscation and transparency feels most difficult to navigate. What if, as they get to know you, the aspirational image they project back to you drifts or fades? What if, as you get to know them, they gradually stop looking like legitimate or trustworthy custodians of the image of who you hope to become?

[…] everything about its substance and development can be explained to the unenlightened by comparing [love] to a suit fashioned by the soul of the imagination and used to clothe those whom the mind thinks it fits, when they happen to come along.

But every suit, since it isn’t eternal, lasts as long as it lasts; and soon, under the fraying clothes of the ideal we’ve formed, the real body of the person we dressed it in shows through.

Contra Pessoa above, maybe it’s not the inevitable-with-time fraying of ideals you should be afraid of; maybe it’s their fading without something consciously created and maintained taking their place.

In pedagogy, proleptic engagement is the act of thoughtfully dealing with an other as if they were already the person you hope they will eventually become. Maybe that is one of your responsibilities as the person loved: to keep an aspirational vision that the person who loves you yearns to embody visible and within reach, even when doing so is constraining (reflexively defining who you can become) or difficult.

Alignment over time is not guaranteed, of course. In fact, taking seriously that you are loved in part because you can see a version of the other they are struggling to fully articulate on their own implies the need for a certain amount of risk taking, a willingness to project an image beyond those already unambiguously believable and desirable to the person who loves you. Like Mary, you have a responsibility to be ambitious in your love.

It’s a Wonderful Life is, in part, the story of someone becoming, kicking and screaming, against all intentions and desires, a big man. Mary sees the big man in George from the first, because she is a big woman.

[…]

To be chosen and known and loved by such a woman is not a small thing. It is seeing Mary without him that breaks George enough to make him ask for life, as it is her just anger at him that sends him into the most desperate phase of his downward spiral. When he chases the alternate Mary through the streets, his desperate cry is not “Mary! What have they done to you?” but “Don’t you know me? What’s happened to us?” If Mary does not know him, if Mary does not see who he really is, he must not exist indeed.
https://www.thebulwark.com/there-is-no-mary-problem-in-its-a-wonderful-life/

Seeing love as a special kind of aspiration and framing it within a pedagogical context has gradually expanded my willingness to use the language of love outside of romantic relationships. It’s really clear to me now that I want to love and to be loved by my friends, and my colleagues, and by myself.

Said another way, I think I now aspire to love.