Chapter 5 – what is love?

I have said I love you and meant it entirely, and I could not have told you, even as the words were leaving me, what it was I thought I was promising. This is the embarrassing place I have to start. Of all the words I know, the one I reach for at the highest moments of my life — the one I have spent on people I would step in front of a car for, and, in the same thoughtless breath, on a song, on a particular sandwich, on a good afternoon — is the single word whose meaning I have never once managed to hold still long enough to look at. I am twenty-three. I have been trying to understand love for about as long as I have understood anything at all, and the strange, slightly humiliating truth is that I am further from it now than I was as a child, when I was quite certain I had the whole thing worked out. Because as a child I did. Love was the simplest fact in the world. It was the thing at the end of the stories, the kiss that woke the princess, the music swelling as two people finally turned to face each other; it was obvious and total and permanent, and you would know it the moment it arrived, and once it arrived it stayed. I believed this without the faintest tremor of doubt, and I want to be honest that this — age seven, knowing nothing — was the surest about love I have ever been or, I suspect, ever will be. Everything since has been a slow subtraction.

The first thing taken from me was the permanence. Somewhere around sixteen the real thing seemed at last to arrive, or something I was prepared to swear was the real thing — the sleeplessness, the helpless circling of one face in my mind, the conviction so absolute it felt less like an opinion than like weather, that this is it, this is the thing the stories meant. And then, in its own time, it went. It faded, or it was not returned, or it simply thinned into something ordinary and then into nothing, and I was left with a problem I have never since put down. If that was love, then love ends; and if it ends, then the stories had lied to me about the one thing they had been most sure of. And if it was not love — if that overwhelming, sleepless, weather-like certainty was only chemistry and youth wearing love's clothes — then I had no way of knowing whether I had ever felt the real thing at all, or whether I would recognise it if I did. I have still not solved this. I am not sure, to this day, whether I have ever been in love or only ever in its vicinity, mistaking the heat for the fire.

So I did what I think a lot of people do in their twenties, faced with a thing that keeps refusing to behave: I got cynical, and I mistook the cynicism for growing up. I read more, and what I read seemed to confirm it. Love, the clever people explained, was not a mystery at all but a mechanism — a wash of dopamine and oxytocin, a piece of evolutionary stagecraft designed to make two animals stay in one place long enough to raise a third. Schopenhauer had said it most coldly and, I thought, most honestly: the grand passion that the lovers experience as the meaning of their lives is in fact nothing of the kind, only the will of the species speaking through them, the next generation insisting on its own existence and dressing the insistence up as romance so that we will not notice we are being used. And there were the others, the great disillusioners, who pointed out that what we call love is so often only need with better manners — the terror of being alone, the hunger to be chosen, plain self-interest in a costume it has learned to wear convincingly. For a year or two this felt like clarity. It felt, I am a little ashamed to say, like winning — the cool relief of the person who has seen the wires behind the magic trick and can no longer be fooled. I was almost proud of how little I now believed.

And then I watched something the theory could not hold, and the cynicism came apart in my hands as completely as everything before it had. I will not pretend it was a single thunderclap; it was more an accumulation. But it gathered, for me, around the simple observation that the cold story explained the wrong things. If love is the species using us to reproduce, then it should spend itself on the young and the fertile and the useful — and instead I kept seeing it poured out, without calculation and without any possible return, on exactly the people who could give nothing back. On the very old. On the dying. On the ones long past any conceivable use to anybody's genes. I watched people sit for months by beds, performing small unglamorous acts of devotion for someone who would never recover and could no longer even reliably remember their name, and there was no story I had read that could make sense of it as self-interest, or as biology being clever, without the story simply sounding like a lie. I could not go back to the fairy tale; I had lost that for good. But I could not stay in the cynicism either, because it did not fit what was in front of me. And that left me with nothing — no theory at all, just the thing itself, larger and stranger and more stubborn than any of the explanations I had tried to fit over it, and me more genuinely confused than I had been at any earlier stage of being confused.

I went looking, then, for help from the people who had thought about this longer and harder than I ever would, and I found my best comfort in their failure. The most famous conversation ever held about love — Plato's, the one everyone quotes — is, when you actually read it, a room of half-drunk men taking turns to explain what love is, and every one of them says something different, and beautiful, and incompatible with the man before him, and nobody wins. Two and a half thousand years of the cleverest people who have ever lived have written about love without arriving at anything you could honestly call a definition, an agreement, a settled account. And I found this oddly steadying. Because if they could not pin it down — if all that brilliance produced not an answer but a long and gorgeous argument that is still going — then my own inability to is perhaps not stupidity after all. It may be the only honest response the thing permits.

So here I am, twenty-three years old, understanding love measurably less than I did at seven, when I knew everything. Every account of it I have ever held was sincere at the time, and every one of them came apart. And I have started to wonder whether love is simply not the sort of thing you can understand by thinking about it harder — whether trying to is like trying to see better in the dark by staring, where the staring is itself the thing going wrong. Maybe it is meant to be lived and not solved. Maybe the people who seem to understand it are only the ones who stopped asking. I cannot tell. What I can feel, and what frightens me a little, is that the question is not getting smaller as I get older; it is getting larger, opening out ahead of me, and I have the distinct sense that I could live to be eighty and find I have only travelled further into the not-knowing, not out of it.

But I have not stopped saying the word. That is the part I keep coming back to. I still say I love you, to the people I would step in front of the car for, and I notice that I say it differently now than I once did — not with the child's flat certainty, and not with the cynic's quiet quotation marks, and not even with the lover's sixteen-year-old conviction that it is weather. I say it more the way you might say the name of a country you have heard about your whole life and never managed to visit — with longing, and a kind of faith, and no real idea what it is actually like to be there. I do not know what the word means. I have told you honestly that I never have. And maybe — though this too might be just one more theory that comes apart in a few years, like all the others before it — maybe the not-knowing is not the failure I keep taking it for. Maybe the things we genuinely understand are the things we have finished with, and love is simply the one thing I cannot seem to finish with, cannot get to the bottom of, cannot make resolve and go quiet. It keeps moving ahead of me. And perhaps that is the closest I will ever come to it, at twenty-three or at eighty: not to understand the word, but to keep walking toward it anyway, still baffled, still saying it to people I would die for, and trusting — without any proof, the way you trust most of the things that matter — that the saying is itself a small and stubborn kind of knowing, even if it turns out to be the only kind I am ever going to get.