You're not falling in love because you don't want to
happy valentine's day!!
When you meet whom you desire, let the world go, give it up.
—Forugh Farrokhzad
You’re not falling in love because you lack desire—deep, blood-thick, singleminded desire. You’ve armored yourself too well against the terrible, wonderful, ecstatic gift of being wholly captured by another. It’s no wonder we fall in love and have our hearts stolen, because genuine desire feels like succumbing to erotic gravity, letting our heart be robbed against our instinct of keeping it safe. You think that keeping your options open and controlling your feelings is freedom, but you’ve made yourself incapable of encountering the Other in its irreplaceable and indescribable Otherness. And so you remain forever yourself, unchanged and unchosen, wondering why no matter where you travel, there you are.
The interruption you’re looking for is in the vertigo you’re avoiding. You “fall” in love because standing still would mean remaining the same.
Love demands that we become penetrable, that we allow another person to reach into the carefully constructed fortress of our identity and rearrange things. It’s why we describe the feeling of love as being shot by Cupid’s arrow: having your flesh pierced, digging deep through all the layers of who you pretend to be. Perhaps it’s why the Crucifixion of Christ is the greatest love story; it’s saying that the invitation for union comes in the form of a wound. As communion goes, this is my body and blood, eat me and drink me, and you shall be joined to me. Gaze into my wounds and we shall be married.
But who wants to be pierced? Who wants to be torn open when you’ve worked so hard on becoming whole all on your own? You want to remain intact, autonomous. You want someone who affirms who you are and reflects your completeness back at you—what kind of a lover is that? You want love only as a project, something customizable, checking boxes: a certain profession, a certain height. Sure, we all have preferences, but what’s perfect on paper can only exist on paper, in the realm of compatibility metrics and shared values. If you speak of “emotional labor” or “meeting needs”, you’re already missing the point—true intimacy is not a service economy. You’re not falling in love because you’ve reduced the Other to a function, and love asks for surrender, not balance.
YOU SHOULD FALL,
FALL,
FALL,
FALL INTO THE INFINITE, THE RADIANT INFINITE.
Desire is a rapture that levitates you out of isolation. It should possess you, should fly and take you away with it—otherwise why would we call our beloved “angel,” that ethereal winged being who descends from heaven to rescue us from our ugliness or worldliness? Why would we make Eros an archer, Cupid a bearer of arrows instead of facts and logic? “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of,” said Pascal. Why would we speak of being struck by or sick with love as though it were an injury, a disease, we suffer rather than a choice we make? All intimacy is an encounter with a Significant Other so Significant in its Otherness that it forces you beyond the narrow confines of your own subjectivity, like catching a glimpse of eternity.
Desire isn’t caused, it is. It’s what St. Augustine meant by, “I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love. I sought what I might love, in love with loving.” Wanting is the point. “Because I prayed this word: I want,” said Sappho.
Desire should wake you violently from your long sleep, mortify you with how little you’ve made of yourself. Why else does love ignite this furious need to become better, why does the blossoming of a crush indict our laziness and smallness, and why does their arrival make our previous life seem like a timid dream, embarrassed and translucent, suddenly forced to walk among the awake?
I have a hunch that we’re all romantics pretending to be pragmatists, terrified that if we admitted how honestly we want to be swept away by love, we’d have to face what we’ve become: cowardly keepers of desires too weak to break us open. We’d have to admit that we’ve made our lives so small, our wantings so manageable, that nothing glorious could ever fit through the door.
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
You’re not letting yourself go after what you want because you’re not willing to be changed. What you’re looking for isn’t more self-help—you’re looking for beauty and courage that will save you when you’ve reached the end of your Self. You’re not falling in love, but you always could. You just have to want it more than you want to perform wanting it, you have to want the real thing more than you want the story you’ll tell about it.
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I really enjoyed this piece and it made me think about how the same walls we put up to protect us from getting hurt are the same ones keeping love out!
The quote “we’re all romantics pretending to be pragmatists” made me wonder whether we can be both romantic realists.