For almost forty years I stayed off the dance floor. I danced at my first high school dance, an older boy made fun of the way I looked doing it, and I took what he said as a ruling. He gave the verdict once. I enforced it for four decades, at weddings and parties and in other people’s living rooms, always with a good reason and a drink in my hand.
I started again in my fifties. A woman I had fallen in love with got me to dance in her kitchen, and later, at her big sixtieth birthday party, in front of everyone. I was finally letting go, and I have her to thank for it.
I tell you this because it is the shortest account I have of what love asks of a person. Take the armor off. Stop performing. Let somebody watch you do the thing you were told you couldn’t do, and find out you survive it. This piece is a longer version of that kitchen, plus what it costs, and what is left when the music stops.
Why I keep reaching
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.
I have been married twice, and both marriages ended. After each ending I told myself I was finished with all of it, and I meant it for a while. Then I reached again. For years I read that as a slow learner’s loop. I read it differently now.
I believe, and I hold it loosely, that to love is the point. Not to be loved. Being loved is grace when it comes, and I’m grateful for every bit of it. But the part that is ours to do is the loving. I don’t know whether I’d call that divine. I use the word the way I use it with myself, as a pointer to something larger than my preferences and not a claim about how the universe is run. Swap in a word that suits you.
Sue Johnson spent her career with couples in trouble and boiled the whole business down to one question underneath all the others: are you there for me? Can I reach you, will you respond when I do, will you stay close? I find it hard to improve on. The question doesn’t expire at six or at sixty. It only changes addresses. Attachment theory is a lens and not a law, and I distrust anyone who says a framework settles love. But it fits what I’ve felt in my own chest. The craving isn’t really for a person. It is to be seen, fully, and to find the other one still there. I read that craving as a compass. I could be wrong. It has pointed me the same way my whole adult life.
The armor
Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.
Good advice, and also how armor starts. We all build some. Mine is the kind that looks like generosity. I give a lot and I’m easy to lean on. I show people the part of my life that is going well and hold the rest back until it feels safe, and it never quite feels safe, so it stays back.
Love is the one place where all that competence works against you. Nearly everything else in life rewards control and self-sufficiency. Then someone you care about asks, in effect, that you take some of it off. Not all of it. Just enough that they can see what is underneath.
We say that people fall in love, as if it were an accident, and the early part is. The chemistry chooses you. What comes after is a decision. The fall gets you to the door. Walking through it, and staying, happens in small unglamorous acts: admitting you’re afraid, saying what you actually need, letting someone see you when you aren’t performing strength. Each one is a risk. Each time the other person meets it with tenderness and not advantage, something gets laid down. Not a feeling. A fact.
I used to think love meant finding someone who completes you. I think now it is closer to finding someone worth being incomplete in front of.
Hard isn’t the same as right
I used to believe the difficulty was proof. If it hurt, it was deep. If it was deep, it was right. It’s a comforting idea, and it has a true half, which is why it lasts.
The true half is Erich Fromm’s, from the 1950s. He argued that we treat love as a problem of finding the right object when it is really a problem of developing a capacity, a practice like any art, and a practice is hard because you are bad at it before you are good. Staying present when withdrawing would be easier. Forgiving at a cost. Having the conversation. That kind of hard is the work, and anyone who tells you a good relationship should be effortless is selling the running shoe that makes you fast without training.
The false half is that all hard is the good kind. Some of it is a warning. In The Brothers Karamazov, the elder Zosima tells a woman that love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. I believe him. I don’t believe that harsh means good. If the hard in your life includes being afraid of someone, or being made smaller, or never knowing which version of them will arrive, that is not sacred work. That is a reason to talk to someone who can help.
And intensity is not depth. I have mistaken the charge for love more than once. My best current theory, and I want to flag that it is a theory, is that some of what I felt as destiny was recognition: a part of me meeting something old and familiar and calling it the one. Familiar is not the same as good for me, and the part of me doing the feeling can’t always tell the difference.
So how do I tell the work from the warning? The best test I know is repair. Everyone ruptures. John Gottman spent decades watching couples argue in a lab and found that what separated the ones who lasted was not fewer fights. They repaired, and they turned toward each other’s small bids for attention far more often than they turned away. His samples were particular groups of American couples, so I take it as a pattern worth watching for and not a guarantee. But when I look back honestly, the question that sorts my own history isn’t how much it hurt. It’s whether anyone came back.
What the ending takes
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
When a serious relationship ends, you lose more than a person. You lose the future you were building: the trips, the house, the version of growing old with someone beside you. Those plans lived in the space between two people, and they don’t transfer. They stop existing. You grieve a life that will now never happen.
You also lose some of yourself. Arthur and Elaine Aron proposed that in close relationships we take the other person into our own sense of self, so that their outlook and resources and way of seeing start to count as ours. It’s a model with decent support and not a law of nature. It fits how the end feels. You aren’t only missing someone. You no longer know which parts of you were you and which were us.
I once grieved a short relationship as if it had been a long one. The size of it embarrassed me, and I took it as proof that something was wrong with me. My reading now, and it is only my reading, is that the loss had landed on top of an older one, and the grief was the size of the older wound and not the recent one.
Underneath it all, for me, is a low sorrow that doesn’t spike and doesn’t end. It is the water and not the wave. People imagine heartbreak as the wave. Mine has mostly been the water.
The part I would most like to spare you is what sits under all of that: the quiet question of whether love is possible for you at all. If this didn’t work, maybe nothing will. Maybe the problem is me. I have said that sentence to myself. Here is what I would say to someone else, and it applies to me. That is what grief says when it is tired. It isn’t a finding. It is also true that I had a share in every ending I’ve had. Both things hold. Having a share is not the same as being the problem, and the size of the pain doesn’t prove you failed. It measures what you risked. It doesn’t measure how right it was.
A love can be a season
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
That is the standard most of us were handed: love that never alters. It’s a beautiful standard and a brutal test. By that measure, every love that ended was never love, and we spend a lot of energy doing the retroactive accounting.
We don’t say a sunset failed because it ended. We don’t call spring a failure for turning into summer. Yet when a love runs its course we reach for the word failure, and we treat the ending as if it cancels everything before it. The Buddhist tradition puts impermanence, anicca, among the basic features of existence. I’m not a Buddhist and I won’t pretend to teach it, but it is hard to argue that love alone is exempt from the rule everything else follows.
I have been married twice. Both ended. Neither, I think now, was a failure. Each built a home and a life and made me into somebody different. Both of my wives loved to dance, and I owe each of them an apology for standing at the edge of the room. They deserved a partner who would take the floor. I’m sorry it took me this long.
I should be honest about the limit of the idea. “It was a season” can be a way of not asking what was yours. It can dress a pattern up as weather. I try to use the word only after I’ve looked at my own part. A season can be worth honoring and still have been mishandled. Both can be true.
The ones who live in you
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Tennyson wrote that after burying his closest friend, and it took him about seventeen years to finish the poem. I find that reassuring. Nobody I trust has ever got through this part quickly.
Nothing I’ve loved has gone. It has gone quiet, and it has changed what I am. Somebody taught you that you were worth listening to, and their voice is still in how you listen to yourself. Somebody first made you feel beautiful, and they are there when you catch your reflection and almost smile. Somebody broke your heart, and they are there too, in the tenderness you bring to your own vulnerability and in what you now know about what you need and what you can survive.
I think of it as architecture. Every person I’ve loved is a load-bearing wall in a house I’m still living in. Some I wouldn’t build with again. They are still holding up part of the roof.
When I look back across both marriages, and the women who shared part of the road for a season or a few months, I am not carrying grievances. I am carrying the fact that it happened. The mornings. The way a hand felt in mine. The ordinary Tuesday evenings I didn’t know were precious until they were gone. No ending can unmake them. Gratitude is the response that holds up best, and not gratitude for how it ended. For what it was while it was.
I consider myself lucky to have loved as deeply as I have, and to have lost it. I know that is an easy sentence to say from this side.
What the wound lets in
The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
The next sentence in the novel is less comforting. It says the world kills the ones who won’t break, the very good and the very gentle and the very brave, impartially. And the book ends with the woman dying in childbirth. Hemingway was not selling a payoff, and I would rather stand beside him than beside anyone who is.
There is a line I have carried for years: the wound is the place where the light enters you. It is credited to Rumi, through Coleman Barks, and I’ve repeated it more than almost anything else. I went looking for it while writing this, and the sentence isn’t in Barks the way people quote it. The nearest thing I could find is in his version of a poem called “Childhood Friends,” in The Essential Rumi, which tells the reader to keep looking at the bandaged place, because that is where the light enters. The same poem is about trusting a teacher and not believing you’re healing yourself. So the popular line is a compression. And Barks, who doesn’t read Persian and calls his work versions, has acknowledged taking the Islam out of them. Rumi was a Muslim scholar and teacher. The Rumi most of us love is partly a translator’s gift. I still love the line. I just try to remember who I’m loving.
Researchers call what sometimes follows a serious loss posttraumatic growth: closer relationships, a changed sense of what matters, a clearer sense of one’s own strength. Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, who named it, are careful about it. It is reported by a good many people, it sits alongside the distress and doesn’t replace it, and nobody can order it up. People like to mention kintsugi here, the Japanese repair of broken pottery with gold. I like it too. But the bowl doesn’t choose to be dropped, and some don’t get mended. Strength at the broken places is something that sometimes happens. It is not a prize for suffering.
The quieter thing on the other side
The first rush of romantic love is not love, I’ve come to think. It is the invitation. C.S. Lewis described Eros making extravagant promises, permanence and totality and cosmic significance, and then the morning comes and the intoxication fades, and the question is what two people build in the clearing. Rilke pictured love at its best as two separate people who guard each other’s solitude and still reach across it. Fromm drew the simplest line: immature love says I love you because I need you, and mature love says I need you because I love you.
I’m learning, late, to value the calm kind over the intense kind. I wrote about that in The Quiet Kind and won’t repeat it here. I’ll say only that the deeper love, the one that grows where the fantasy used to be, is quieter and less photogenic, and it makes my heart steady instead of racing. It is the love of two people who have seen each other clearly and kept building anyway. That choice, renewed daily, is the most sacred act I know.
Wherever you are
I don’t know where you are in your own story of love, so let me say a few short things and you can take the one that fits.
If you are in the wreckage, in the empty apartment with the silence where a voice used to be, I can’t promise it gets better on your schedule. I can say that grief this size is what it costs to have meant it, that it changes shape with time, and that you don’t have to carry it alone. Tell someone.
If your relationship has lost its early fire, that does not by itself mean it is dying. It may be asking you to go deeper. It may also be telling you it’s over, and I can’t tell which from here. Ask the repair question: when we break, do we come back?
If you have been alone a long time and have half-convinced yourself that love is not for you, look at that story. Is it true, or is it the armor talking? Armor doesn’t only keep pain out.
If you are young and love looks like a marketplace, the question no app can answer is am I willing to be seen?
I don’t know what is behind the door for you. I know what was behind it for me: a kitchen, and a floor I had been told for forty years I couldn’t stand on. I would have missed it if I hadn’t been willing to be bad at it in front of somebody.
So take the armor off a little. Dance badly, in front of someone, for as long as there is music.