From a distance, most things look beautiful

musings on love and faith

I wrote a love letter the other day, for practice’s sake. I thought it’d be nice to finally write something that didn’t resemble a eulogy. It didn’t fare well, mostly, because I got caught up on one simple question: Would I ever get married? I think I’ve always known my answer.

For a long time, marriage was an economic proposition. For many, that is still the case. Marriage is an institutional kind of structure — your partner would be the first to call in an emergency aside from your family, the first to decide over your safety, his last name would be yours, etc. This is, of course, from the women’s point of view. Yet, even for men, marriage is an economic proposition. How often do you think of love and think of wealth? Holy matrimony must seemingly abide by the economic rules of our times, allocated for the scarce resources such as self development, inspiration, and support. Your partner must be the primary contender for all the above.

I’ve always wondered if it’s true that our destiny is to pick monogamy. We date one person, fall in love, and continue to supply that love for one another until the end of time. The Greeks had many words for love. So, sure, I believe in monogamy. The age-old argument that animals do not due to survival reasons is fitting and contextually important — of course a species procreates to survive. Us, humans, though — we don’t view love that way. Or at least, some of us don’t. Again, I believe in monogamy, and that might just be because of the rigid familial structures I’ve always been around, but I have often wondered if it is truly possible to love someone for the rest of your life. Many have done it, so maybe the better question is: Is that something possible for me?

Most of my fears around this timely commitment surround personal reasons, with one major one being — what if I get bored? What if I find the right person for me, and I get disinterested? Many can argue, well then, that’s not your person. I suppose I don’t want a person to belong to me. Maybe, I wish for ownership of an experience, not necessarily the person. I think I like the feeling of love more than the person.

How do you fall in love with a person? I’ve done it before. I know how it works. I know what it feels like for me to even say ‘I love myself’. You accept your qualities, your predispositions, the bad and the good, all the terrible, and the gentle, and you hold space and adapt and shape and mold, over and over again. It’s like playing God — being God. Does God ever get tired of holding love in his hands, though? To feel it all, all at once, or to feel it only a few times? Which would he prefer?

Love is seen as a spiritual thing. A spiritual partnership is now highly sought after, considering people can financially support themselves and offer themselves the emotional sustenance they need to survive. Many have moved away from believing you need one person for all of that. I’ve thought about seeing love in that way; a spiritual partnership; but it doesn’t work. We care about personal evolution and inner fulfillment. We care about inspiring and supporting another through the unfolding of life, but when the time comes, we are always deeply unprepared, even if we think otherwise. Does this fear reduce everything else to eroticism or lust? What is desire if not that? If not suspension — the moment before the fear settles. How do you move forward despite it?

Love is seen as an act. Yet. It must exist in a still state in order to magnify itself to the degrees it does. I must love you first before I begin the act of loving you, so to speak. Spiritual partnerships don’t work because personal evolution, the kind forged from struggle or cataclysm or peaceful harmony — that depends only on you. And you can have all these markers, these button-pushers who mold you and collide into you, but you are the shape. Nobody else will ever be the ‘shape’ of you other than you.

Can we ever be fully known and be immersed in another human being? Most often, we aren’t even fully known to ourselves, even if we really try. I think, when it comes down to it, I will always be keen on keeping secrets. I don’t think the change of partner changes that. Is it a creative action, then? Building something together? Implementing? Curating? The most tender love I’ve ever felt was none of that, and all of that, and yet it didn’t survive.

I was in a bounce house, once, dancing in some valley out in the middle of nowhere. He had taken my hand. In here, he said. I followed, never letting go of his hand. He moved closer, to dance, and we were all wobbly, legs trampling over one another, boots scuffing against colorful plastic. We couldn’t dance. The ground was too unstable. But we moved away and jumped, up and down, hands still enclosed together. I had an unrequited crush at that time and I thought the feeling of his love was enough to carry me everywhere. Yet, I feared it with my entire being. Looking back at the video, though, and seeing how he held me, I realize it’s much more complicated than it seems — even if I don’t want to make it so. He loves me as his friend and something more, I think. Same as I. I think I could spend my entire life at his side. I want to. I don’t think I can kiss him in the way I want. I don’t think I’d ever do that anyway. If he were to call, I’d pick up, but if he were to ask me to be his girlfriend, I would refuse. Why? I’m deeply in love — why couldn’t I just do it? Because it’s a different sort of feeling.

When he was holding my hand it felt like a blossoming, but, being his girlfriend does not awaken that, even if I think about it solely in terms of romantic love and not societal predispositions. I would say no, each and every time. And I would tell him I love him, but not the other thing. Not the other way, I don’t think. He drove all the way up here for me, and made this big empty city something it hadn’t been since I arrived. A place of memories. I can’t walk by the same building without thinking about it — how we stepped into that elevator and he held my heart in his hands. I don’t think he’s ever done that for another girl before. And I think whatever resentment he holds for me is sort of along the same vein as the grief I feel for him. They both emerge from love and twist from the root into something else entirely, to the point it’s hard to recognize.

I tried the romantic love thing too. At that time, I did envision myself as a girlfriend. As a partner. I hold your weight and you hold mine. We were completely in sync for a time. He would know what I wished to say before I said it. I would know how he felt without him saying it and yet… yet. I still held every secret in my mouth, afraid to open up for fear it might escape. I woke up every morning and thought, one day you will be gone and I will have to live with that. And I lived with it. Even then, as I gave my body up, and we tried making two bodies into one, I felt the subtle secret. I don’t think I could ever love him as I wish, and likewise. He was not my person. We parted ways. If he were to call me, I’d never even think of picking up the phone. Strange, how that happens, and I don’t know why.

Now I think about being somebody’s girlfriend and the same things come to mind. Could I do it? Could I hold on? I want to say I think I can. I’m scared to say I’m more afraid of someone else not being able to, and yet, I still hold space to be wrong. I open up, for release and trust, but still secretly hold space for the if… always the ‘if’. I don’t know if the love I want exists, and even if it did, would I be able to live with it?

Can you ever truly be in love, forever? No. I don’t think that’s something we’re capable of. Love is at the center, sure, but the feelings are different. Grief may come from love, but it is not love, just as anger. They are different, born from different things, shaping you into different things. Nothing is eternal — not even love, I think. Maybe, not even for God. This could be why the church says he loves us, and yet we feel suffering.

What does love look like, then? I return to this question frequently. It’s in all the small acts, but what are those small acts? The acting, despite? Acknowledging someone the way you would your home: safety, comfort, the urge to stay rather than run away. Like acknowledging something is meant for you, designated for you, a place no one can enter, and simultaneously, somewhere where everyone can visit. It’s a liminal space. Does it exist? Home was never a place or a person for me — always a feeling, like the color blue always, somehow, representing melancholy. Love looks like all the tender things and all the harrowing things together. A home where the lights are off and yet feels warm.

I’m not sure what to do with myself if this is the kind of love I connect to. I don’t search for love, not in an active way, but when it shows up I do think of it like a puzzle; a logical analysis. How can I ensure I refer to this notion of love rather than a harmful one? How can I trust myself to be sure? I think that’s the hardest part sometimes, when your heart and mind don’t sync. If this is the love I think is real, how do I make sure this is the love I accept?

What am I afraid of love secretly being? I used to think that the ‘bad’ kind of love was violent and loud. It came with chaos and maelstrom. All the boys in my family used to think so too, and they would warn me against it. Don’t go falling in love with boys who carry hammers. But no one told me about the kind of love that turns inhumanely cold. After experiencing it, I think, maybe, that’s what I’ll always be afraid of. At least, in a violent house, I can always run. But when you lay awake at night, sleeping beside someone you can feel drawing away, you realize there is nowhere you can go even if you run.

Can everyone tell when the person beside them doesn’t love them anymore? Can they feel when the love has fled? Kierkegaard once said, “To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.” There’s a saying: What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and suffers the loss of his own soul? That’s what I think about when reflecting upon this quote. Because, as he says, “The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly.”

I think people do so without even noticing it. When someone “cheats” themselves out of love, it’s a strange feeling. You love them, but they think they don’t deserve it, so they do everything in their power to ruin it. The cataclysm comes. You must let them be. There’s nothing you can do. If the lights were on, and that truth came to light, it’d feel like betrayal. A double-edged sword somehow striking us both in the chest – because, maybe, one day you lie awake at night and realize you didn’t love the person you thought you did, and that feels like self-deception.

So I think love is beautiful, but in truth, it’s one of the hardest challenges of our lives. Divine love looks like that too. God created the sunset and the twilight and he lets people exist in their goodness and darkness. He created shadow and sun alike. The sun exists, the moon eclipses it. From afar, it looks beautiful. It looks like the balance is much-too perfect. And then you lean closer and see the shadows on the walls and the glare of the harsh sun.

I don’t think unconditional love exists, even in friendship, or familial relationships. Love wanes, like the moon. It is not eternal – nothing is.

But in those moments when it is true and alive, it feels like it could sustain everything. I’ve always wondered what it meant when people said that sometimes, it takes more than love. I think I get it now. But, if anything, there’s merit in trying to succeed.

Would I ever get married? Maybe. In jest – just to see what it’s like. But up at the altar, I think I will face God and ask him why he made everything temporary. I will say my vows and he will know I am lying, and sometime later, he will come down and say: You don’t have long to live. What will you do?

There’s a quote by Ilya Kaminsky that I really like:

At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?

Do we have a choice in who we love? Does it ever really matter? A love that is simple, joyful, and uncomplicated is a love that doesn’t exist. No home is warm 365 days a year. No home is ever fully peaceful. I can’t accept that because it doesn’t feel real — it feels phony. Like the real things, the things that make up all the hardship in the world, don’t exist. As if they live beyond the door. And it’d be nice to have that, but what would it cost you? Does the dream outweigh the pragmatism? I think that kind of love can exist, but never absolutely. Never for too long.. That’s the human condition too, maybe.

In the end though, would we want to look back and ask why we allowed our lives to turn out the way they did? God must not detest the things he creates. I would like to be God and not detest it, too.

I don’t have any answers, just interpretations. Maybe one day those will change too. But in the dawn, in the space before something else, I keep asking myself: What will you do?

The answer is always the same, for some reason. I am not God, but I’d like to be.

And God says, that’s fine. You have to learn to accept that, though.

And I don’t think I’m there yet.