An Existential Guide to: Love
In 3 parts (like my heart after my first girlfriend left me) xD
Alright since everyone liked friendship so much, try this on for size!
(I am going to take a short break after this post (like 2 weeks) as I’ve been writing like a demon recently and have burnt myself out a bit. But I will return, that is a promise!
Part I
First, a modest proposal. Every country should issue you a Love License at birth, laminated, with your tiny yawning face on it, and a list of authorized uses. You are permitted to hold hands on public transport. You are permitted to stare at the back of someone’s neck and feel like a saint and an axe-murderer at the same time. You are not permitted to draft constitutions for the other person’s soul, run fiscal policy on their moods, or nationalize their Sunday afternoons. The card expires the moment you start speaking in the voice of a TED Talk. When it does, a nice bureaucrat comes and cuts it in half while you nod bravely and pretend not to cry.
That’s the administrative view. The metaphysical one is worse. If you listen to the philosophers, love is either the velvet mask on a biological snarl or a ladder up which your shabby little heart may scramble toward God. Augustine thought we were made of desire like candles are made of tallow: we burn with it, we drip it, we stain the tablecloth. Plato kept sending us to the gym of the beautiful, where you lift each other until you can bench-press the Good. Kierkegaard drove a carriage at midnight and left a note in the mailbox: “Sorry, I couldn’t possibly.” Schopenhauer wrote that love is the species tricking us into reproduction; then fell in love with his own gloom and never recovered. Pascal knelt before the abyss and tried to flirt with it, whispering that infinity should at least buy him dinner first. Meanwhile, your phone is telling you that love is 500k likes, a couples’ ab workout, and a recipe video for Two-Ingredient Soulmate Fudge.
It’s not. Love is when two spiders in a jar decide to knit.
Here’s the practical bit. (All guides lie when they say “practical,” but we’re trying to be good people, right?)
First things first: Fail to define it.
Do not attempt the sentence that starts, “Love is when…” You will end like a child explaining clouds to a pilot. It is a weather system, not a concept. The moment you say “always,” some damp Tuesday appears at your window holding a dead pigeon and asking, “Even now? Even now?”
Next things next: Learn its smell.
Love smells like a tshirt that forgot to be washed and decided that this was, in fact, its best self. It smells like toast at 1:10 a.m. after a party you both left too early because you were suddenly shy of everyone except each other. It smells like the inside of a winter glove, and the shampoo you’ll never buy for yourself because “they” used to use it and you don’t even have hair like that.
Last things last: Accept the stupidities.
You will say things like “little egg” to a grown mammal with a driver’s license. You will announce that a certain lamp is “hosting anxiety.” You will argue about the moral status of a spoon. You will laugh so hard in a supermarket aisle that a woman in a visor decides to hate both of you FOREVER. This is the curricullum. Now take the class.
A confession: I used to think love was a kind of tasteful ruin - Greek columns, laurel, a flattering melancholy for clever people - until I met a person who eats clementines like a raccoon and leaves the peels in a small, tragic spiral, the citrus equivalent of an unspooled cassette. And apparently my whole life I had been waiting to rescue those peels, to carry them to the bin like a priest carries a relic. Something in me unclenched. The world did not become better; it became particular.
Love is not healing. It is worse. It is triage. It is waking up at 3:41 a.m. because the other person rolled over and sighed and for an instant your heart thought the moon had stopped. It is sending a “made you a sandwich” text across a civil war of tiny grievances. It is letting the other person be wrong about your favorite film because you love them more than you love the third act of anything. It is, at intervals, catastrophe in a cardigan.
And yet: tenderness keeps happening. Against your will. Like moss on a tomb. (Sorry, I love moss for some reason xD). Like a miracle, only smaller and snack-sized. You find yourself making a cup of tea with the concentration of a neurosurgeon because their day was bad and the angle of the teabag string suddenly feels like destiny. You discover the holy sacrements of the domestic: the half-joke shoulder-bump in a doorway; the sacrilegious worship of a ridiculous sock; the appointment you both keep with a very ugly mug. Whole empires have fallen trying to shape men; a chipped ceramic hedgehog on the windowsill will do it in a week.
People will tell you that love is choosing each other every day. Fine. But some days you do not choose; you are chosen by the small animal that lives in your chest and keeps head-butting your ribs whenever they enter a room. This animal is not wise. It wants to drag shiny objects into a cave and sleep on their stomach like a dragon. Your job is to feed it fruit and teach it not to bite the postal worker.
There are rules you can try, if you are the kind of person who enjoys building furniture without instructions:
->Never joke about leaving while you’re both near a door. Time hears you. It is petty.
-<Keep a running list titled “Evidence.” Add to it at once: the way they say “oh?” like a cat discovering philosophy; the time they saved you from the headline “Local Fool Forgets Stove Exists”; the bruise you both got from laughing on a staircase.
-?When rage arrives, seat it at the table, give it water, and ask it to use indoor voice. Rage, like everyone else, becomes nervous around napkins.
-+Do not try to be a universe for someone. Be a district, a neighborhood with one very good bakery and an odd museum where the docent is overexcited and keeps losing her keys.
If you need a cosmology: love is a scandal in physics. You are one finite sack of borowed atoms; they are another. Two accidents of carbon happen to pass through the same weather and, briefly, refuse annihilation. The cosmos does not care. Your toast does. The cosmos will become empty black, then colder black, then something so uncolorful no human word will fit it. Meanwhile, you have learned how they like their eggs. Which is the bigger fact?
I will not pretend it is safe. Nothing worth a guide ever is. There will be days when you resemble two diplomats exchanging rehearsed statements while a plant dies between you. Love keeps a tiny legislature in your little ribcage and sometimes it filibusters, on and on. There will be mornings you wake and feel like a lightbulb that forgot its purpose. There will be nights when one of you is a submarine and the other is a lighthouse and both are tired of the sea.
And then one of you will say, very quietly, “Do you want the last piece of toast?” and the history of the world will be divided into before and after.
Part II
On promises without handcuffs
Vows are risky technology. In the old world they were forged like swords; you swung them around on a church lawn and hoped nobody lost a limb. Try this instead: build your promises like a garden fence. Low enough to step over for a kiss, sturdy enough to keep out wandering goats. Paint it once a year. You promise not because you control the weather, but because you’ll carry umbrellas.
Say things like: I will not narrate you to yourself when you are sad.
Or: I will not use your childhood as a court exhibit.
Or: If we fight in a supermarket, I will still buy the pasta we came for.
Leave your promises open at the top for birds to fly through. There is a kind of love that wears a sheriff’s star and writes citations; it ends up arresting both of you!!!
The other kind keeps baked potatoes ready for after the drama. Marry the potato.
Some days you will need a grand declaration, a flag run up a mast in a storm. More often you will need the minor pledge: I will put your charger back where I found it. The tiny faithful acts are the city maintenance that keeps the lights on. Don’t be ashamed to be municipal and boring.
How to store sorrow correctly
Your house will accumulate sadness the way books accumulate dust and men accumulate cables we INSIST are important. Don’t shove sorrow in the airing cupboard. For moisture breeds.
Label your containers clearly:
Grief, sharp: for the day their friend disappears into the past tense. This jar should have air holes to let you in. Visit it together and say the person’s name out loud until it stops sounding like the echo of time’s first promise.
Grief, slow-cooking: for the life neither of you got. Stir occasionally. Add music. Serve with long walks and stupid hats.
Irritations, recyclable: the spoon thing, the towel thing, the oxygen thing. Take them to the curb every Tuesday. Watch the truck lift the bin with priestly dignity and heave your pettiness into its steel belly. Applaud.
Beware of hoarding secret sorrow because you want the drama. Drama is a very charismatic squatter; it teaches your sadness to do cartwheels for applause. Evict it kindly. Offer it soup. Give it a hug. Then tell it to leave.
Your love will learn the art of triage. Who bleeds most, now? Some nights, one of you is the emergency and the other is the corridor nurse, handing over gauze and bad jokes. Switch roles often. Practice the sentence: This hurts me less, I can wait. Practice its twin: I cannot wait; help me now. Both are holy.
Also, celebrate convalescence. People talk about falling in love; no one mentions recovery in love, the way certain pains set like clay and somehow make a bowl you both drink from. Remember to wash it.
What to do when the apocalypse rings the doorbell
It will. Sometimes it wears a suit and holds a clipboard that says Economy. Sometimes it is a fox in your bins. Sometimes it’s the phone call that folds your life into a new map with unfamiliar borders. Do not panic. Or, rather, panic together.
Make a kit.
Matches and recipes: The end of the world is just dinner without shops. You can transform a turnip with enough butter and lies.
A doctrine: We do not turn on each other to turn on the world.
Three jokes: One slapstick, one philosophical, one very private. Rotate them like crops. Comedy is the last renewable.
A map of the tiny country: Mark where the good mugs live, where the sun hits the sofa at 3:17 p.m., where someone cried and didn’t break. In catastrophe, sovereignty returns to the domestic; you govern it with ladles.
When the sirens test themselves like anxious flutes and the sky changes fonts, go into the hallway and conduct an audit of the real. We have: one shared ridiculous hat, a debt to the library, a bruise that looks like Sicily, an argument paused at comma, five pears, a spider we call Treasurer. The apocalypse respects inventory. It will wait at least until you finish counting. If we lose the grid, you will discover that love pre-dates utilities. Our ancestors said vows under stars. You can say yours under a battery-powered lantern shaped like a raccoon. Romance is stubborn that way.
And if the apocalypse is smaller - an email, a lab result, a rented room you can no longer afford - practice the sacrament of repartition. Move the furniture of your expectations until the room fits again. Lovers are amateur urban planners of fate: reroute traffic, add benches, plant a tree in the sentence you thought was over.
The secret economies
