The treasure you seek is what becomes of you when you seek it

Just married!

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Yesterday afternoon, I found myself on the second floor of the Natural History Museum in London staring at a giant meteorite that dates back 5 billion years. A rock that has travelled millions of miles from deep space, beyond the asteroid belt, was now inches away from my face across nothing but a layer of glass. We closed a gap so galactic that the word “distance” felt inadequate.

I felt the collapse of time, distance, and physical material. The iron in this rock and the iron in my blood are both downstream of the same ancient stellar explosion; we are two different arrangements of the same nebular dust. One of us will live for an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the other—a number so boggling that it puts biological lifespans into entirely new perspectives, like, when we complain that life is short I wonder if we’re just complaining that life is finite.

A week earlier, I got married. Two very different people with very different stories found that their souls were made out of the same stuff (whatever souls are made out of), and decided to close a galactic gap and merge into one.

What makes a union, a union? Do we bond with people by chasing them, by attracting them, or by a third more mysterious way? What is desire anyway?

Desire is the awareness of something’s absence.

It literally means to be far away from the stars: desiderare, de- (“away from”) and sidus (“star”). Desire is the ache that reveals that something matters, and you are distant from it, like feeling homesick for what is beyond you. To desire is to recognize a separation.

Where have you been all my life? —Rihanna

Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad. —Carly Rae Jepsen

Most importantly, the Latin infinitive ending -are means that “desire” is a verb: Desire is not the push at the top of the hill but the velocity itself as you fall towards the gravity of your heart. Desire, in its truest form, is relation. I used to think of desire as a motivation for relation (“I move towards xyz because I want it”)—turns out, desire isn’t a reason for human relationship, desire IS the relationship, because it’s the perpetual will to encounter something that remains Other. What we’re all looking for is a thing that exists not to be used but to be with, the thing that sparks wonder and invites us to revel in it. Wanting is always in motion!

When you wish to have something, you expect a return on investment. When you wish to be with something, you enjoy it experientially (in all its pleasures and pains). Paradoxically, the transformation you undergo by diving into the unknowable IS the reward. Coelho’s The Alchemist is my favorite parable for this phenomenon: the treasure you seek is what becomes of you when you seek it. The treasure hunter ends up where she started because she can’t escape her own existence, therefore all transformation is embodied. Time yields treasures when there’s momentum, hence the alchemist: someone who transmutes ordinary material into gold by being in motion—by seeking, wanting, and paying attention.

I find that all good relationships—romantic, platonic, professional—work like a smooth zipper. The two halves of a zipper join not because they’re fixated on each other, but they’re both fixated on a common telos, accompanying each other step by step on the way up and down. For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do them part. From the backpacks of schoolchildren to the suits of astronauts, the zipper is a small but mighty technology that advances human civilization when assembled properly.

A good zipper is a wife and a husband; two movers hoisting a sofa up a flight of stairs; a writer and an editor; a pair of co-founders; a robber and a getaway driver. It’s the image of two equally yoked oxen ploughing a field in straight lines that St. Paul invokes when writing to the Corinthians about partnerships, from matrimony to business.

All happy families meet at the top

Anyone who has ever tried to impress a crush by picking up a new hobby or becoming a subject matter expert overnight knows that all efforts dedicated to forcibly chasing or attracting someone often dwindle into asymptotes: you try to become someone you’re not, and due to your inauthenticity, you can only get closer and closer but you can never touch. But, when two people aim for a common joy, independent of the other’s efforts, they inevitably merge:

Two people genuinely oriented toward the same thing will, by the logic of geometry, inevitably arrive at the same place. It’s why Maya Angelou advised, “A woman’s heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her.”

Think of it this way: two people standing on opposite sides of a pyramid get closer when both climb towards the top, but will never meet if they loiter on ground level. Distance is closed by aiming for the same truth; the same ideal; the same utopia. Go on the journey and the people looking for you will find you en route to heaven. This is what Tolstoy meant by “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—there is only one heaven but there are as many hells as there are couples. The pyramid has only one tip, but a myriad of spots at the bottom. There’s one way to rise and a millions ways to fall.

When mirrors turn into portals

All true desires are portals into the deep, not reflections of what you think you deserve.

All encounters—a conversation, a relationship—are ultimately a moment of entering each other’s universe and being awed by its infinite depth, not an interface for the analysis of any one specific dimension of so-called compatibility.

The magical thing about convergence is that it recreates paradise: when two people look up together at the same star (a common desiderare) instead of looking sideways, they transcend the alien distance between them by existing in a state glorified by an ultimate concern, something that makes all other concerns—from folding laundry to disputing parking tickets to arranging a parent’s funeral—feel like child’s play.

Dishes still pile. Death is still as unavoidable as taxes. But when something ultimate is present, the highs and lows of ordinary life fall into their places. Perhaps that’s why love feels like heaven, like the plot makes sense, and that everything is, on the whole, going to be alright.

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