On love, limerence, and other-significant-others

There’s a real tension in love — at the beginning of love, particularly — between the desire to be honest about who one is and the desire to win the affection of another person. Of course, ideally, we can both be honest and loved for being honest. That’s the dream.

I think about the relationships I’ve outgrown—because of my personal or political evolution—and how living in cities has meant I could let go of those relationships and form new ones. Whitney makes me wonder if that was the easy way out. I don’t think relationships need to be held on to forever just because they exist. Plenty of us have rightly... See more

We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream… But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.

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There is almost no path a human being... See more

Romantic love has taken on excessive significance in modern times because it is supposed to fill the void left by other social bonds. Family, religion, community—all of these have lost their footing. So we charge love with meaning.

It is supposed to offer intimacy, belonging, identity, and even moral fulfillment. In a world where work and... See more

Our care has become privatized and systematized, hirable, exportable, industrialized, and depersonalized. In this reality, our romantic partner, our nuclear system, has become a gateway towards what care we can afford, participate in, and access.

It makes sense to me that, the gravity of finding, “my person,” is the one holdout against the... See more

Both partners taking accountability for having an outside support network (no attempt to make each other everything)

I can’t do better than Kurt Vonnegut on this subject:

Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a

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Ultimately what both sexes need, I think, is a cultural message that it’s okay to depend on each other. We should depend on our partners—to stay, to be faithful, to give support. And from that we can be more independent. Long-term relationships shouldn’t be about losing yourself, but becoming more of who you are.