# How Women Love There is a peculiar depth to how women love—a depth that does not announce itself loudly, nor does it seek witnesses. It moves quietly through the chambers of the heart, like water finding its own course through stone. A woman's love is often an act of translation. She takes the rough grammar of desire and renders it into the syntax of care. She learns the language of another person—their silences, their small gestures, the particular way they turn away when they are afraid—and she speaks it back to them as tenderness. This is not weakness masquerading as strength. It is, rather, a form of strength so complete that it need not assert itself. There is something in the architecture of women's loving that accepts incompleteness. A woman loves not for the promise of return, not for the certainty of being loved equally, but because the act of loving itself has become a kind of breath—necessary, continuous, alive. She can hold two contradictory truths at once: that she is diminished by her love, and that she has never been more whole. The world often mistakes this for sacrifice. But a woman who loves does not experience it as loss. She experiences it as expansion. Her boundaries soften not because they were weak, but because she chose to dissolve them. There is a difference—vast and immeasurable—between being broken and being open. Women love with their hands. They arrange the world into smaller, more bearable shapes. They remember the small things—the way he takes his tea, the scar on her shoulder, the fear that hides behind an angry word. They build meaning from fragments. They make homes not just of houses, but of moments, of glances, of the space between two people that is somehow both empty and entirely full. And perhaps this is what we have not yet understood: that women's love is not a response to being loved. It is a way of being. It is how they move through the world, how they see, how they touch, how they endure. It is not dependent on reciprocation because it is not, at its root, about the other person at all. It is about the woman herself—her capacity to love, her refusal to let the world's coldness freeze her heart, her stubborn, defiant tenderness in a time of brutality. This is why women's love is so often tragic. Not because it fails, but because the world is too small to contain it.

Before I call someone "heartless," I stop and think it through at least ten times. Just because my presence fails to kindle love in her heart doesn't mean love doesn't live there at all. Just because she keeps herself veiled before me, guards her depths, doesn't mean she's made a home in that concealment. I've seen it—the very girl who stands guarded in front of me lays herself bare before someone else. Again and again, it strikes me: she's a hypocrite, she must be! I begin to believe it, to convince myself that she's wrong and I'm right. Or perhaps she's simply choosing the wrong person, the wrong place to feel safe. But is that truly it? And even if it were, could I make her understand? I don't think so. Women, at their core, are a different species altogether. Their thoughts follow their own logic. What a woman wants, what she loves, what moves her—there's no way to speak with certainty about any of it. While men tend toward the stereotypical, women rarely do. Boys are more or less alike; each girl is utterly her own. You could read *Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus*—that world-famous tome on masculine and feminine nature—and still struggle to comprehend women. Take a girl who seems perfectly placid, gentle, domestic, studious. She might well turn to you one day and ask, "You don't smoke cigars? Really? What kind of man are you?" Don't believe me? They really do say such things! I know because I've heard it myself. I've watched a sweet-faced girl blow smoke into the air. You cannot predict her, no matter how hard you try. Then there's the extroverted girl, loud and carefree, the don't-care type, and she loves you—truly loves you—yet feels deep discomfort at your kiss simply because you're a smoker. How you perceive a girl when you see her, what you make of her—that's your business. But she, fundamentally, simply is what she is.

Getting a girl's love is quite difficult. That doesn't mean you have to go to her, though boys often make that mistake at this very point. A girl's mind lives in her heart; a boy's lives elsewhere. The path into a girl's inner chambers runs through emotion; the path into a boy's runs through the body. Everything in the world revolves in a girl's mind. A girl might spend all day with one person yet love another entirely—this happens countless times. Or she loves but cannot bring herself to draw near. Or she loves but maintains the relationship as a friend would. Or she loves but asks nothing in return, asking only to love. Or, loving someone, she clings to another's arms hoping to stir jealousy in the beloved's heart, dreaming that even jealousy might birth a whisper of love. Many girls entangle themselves in love affairs with someone else as "revenge" for some boundless grievance with another. Usually, such love is nothing more than an unwritten blunder or a pleasure-contract and nothing besides. Love without the meeting of minds is not love at all—it's mere habit. Yet even in such hollow love comes real danger if, one day, the heart finds its way into that house and claims a room.

These days, people in love don't think much about marriage. Try asking them: "You're going around together, eating together, staying together—will you get married?" They'll stare at you, mouth hanging open in bewilderment. Even after marriage, whether two people stay together or drift apart often comes down to habit alone. They don't necessarily stay together because they love each other. They stay because that habit—living together—has already taken root in both their minds within the first two years of marriage or thereabouts, and now it simply persists.

# On Habit and Love

It was never made clear—what the person under the same roof prefers, what he dislikes, how he perceives love—and yet the years have been slipping away, quite contentedly. So many couples make their marriages work on habit alone. People generally cannot—or will not—break free from old habits. I have even seen it: a man keeps house with one woman while living inside another. The easiest way to pull the wool over people’s eyes is simple: to engage in physical intimacy, whether or not the heart is truly present. The biggest lie in the world is a relationship masquerading as love when it is rooted only in the body. By nature’s own law, the house grows larger and the distance between two minds grows with it. Both know everything, understand everything, yet say nothing. Love gets defined within the narrow confines of routine domesticity, the trivial rituals of household life. This too is merely a form of habituation.

It happens even before marriage. One loves quietly, sometimes even speaks it aloud; one watches over the beloved in every way, prays for their welfare; when someone speaks ill of them, one protests fiercely even knowing the words are true; though the entire world may fall away, one stands alone beside them; even in their worst qualities, one finds something beautiful, simply because love has made one into a discoverer; one waits day after day without marrying, as though she were worth the endless postponement, though she seems utterly indifferent to it; one wakes to a gentle “good morning” text and goes to sleep waiting for a soft, love-drenched “good night”—knowing no reply will come, yet staring into the inbox with longing until sleep finally comes, clinging to that thin hope: “Even if it’s a mistake, even if it’s just the slip of a finger, if only a ‘yes’ could come through!”—such hopes are almost always dashed to pieces. Some, in wounded indignation, coax from others what they desperately crave from their beloved but cannot obtain. Yet all of this is nothing but habit. Love strikes suddenly; but love itself is fundamentally habit. Alas! Some grow accustomed to expressing love, while others grow accustomed to its mockery.

When a woman comes close, if she once makes up her mind—that she will come no closer, that she will step away—then bringing her back becomes nearly impossible. So very difficult that even pouring out all one’s love may not bring her back. To draw near a distant woman is easier than to bring back one who has truly withdrawn. If a woman decides, truly decides in her heart, *I will not stay anymore*—then she cannot be retrieved. What seems most right to a woman is whatever she has decided is right. In that moment, a new way of seeing life awakens in her. She loves to think of herself as free. She can move forward, casting off everything from before as a mistaken chapter, moving smoothly ahead without much external discomfort. If a woman ever truly settles into the thought that she will not forgive him for something—any one thing—then she will not return. This is, more or less, fate. I have seen such women return, only to withdraw again. Women’s minds have many small chambers. A few of them are labeled: *I do not care for him*. Whether for reason or for none, once you slip into any one of these chambers, it is almost certain you will keep slipping back into it. If a woman’s mind has once conceived the idea of stepping away, the wisest thing is not to try to bring her back.

# When Someone Departs, Then Departs Again

When someone returns only to leave once more, accepting it becomes a sorrow without measure. The agony of loss far exceeds the sting of never having possessed at all.

Yet there are times when, despite everything, the girl loves the boy, stays with him, refuses to let him go (unless her family binds her and marries her off to another). When a girl loves a boy, she attends to only one thing: whether love is awakening within her heart for him. Love has but one law in its genesis—it simply awakens of its own accord! External circumstances scarcely govern this at all. Once she has fallen in love, she begins performing such deeds for him that one need not resort to fiction to understand that “love is blind”—one need only look at the girl. The whole world on one side, and that boy on the other. A girl who falls into such love requires no gallows, no executioner’s rope from the world to inflict the cruelest punishment upon her—that love alone suffices. If the engine of love does not run smoothly, the girl becomes utterly helpless and alone. To love him even knowing he does not love her in return—only the sufferer knows the magnitude of that anguish. Yet even in such suffering, the girl eventually becomes accustomed. She continues to love, continues to love. Sometimes she forgets what it is to live without infinite torment. In this very torment lies her happiness. His most terrible cruelties she learns to endure. *Whatever the man desires, I shall accept it, only let him remain in my life*—this becomes her sole prayer. The girl wishes only that whatever he does, he remains safe and well. In the fierce pain of love, she accepts all things with ease. Even when she learns of another girl’s existence in his life, she learns—through what strange enchantment!—to master her jealousy and accept her too. Whatever he does, she will construct some logic to defend it, some justification. This too is a form of habit. Alas! Her profound humanity prevents her from ever cursing even her greatest enemy with: “Fall in love!” There is no greater punishment than to fall in love. If you wish revenge on someone, cast them into love for another. That is all! Then simply sit and watch what comes to pass. What Blue Whale Game could be more terrible than love?

Whatever the girl says, the boy hears. It is not that the girl can love the boy in the way he loves her. But the boy calls everything she does beautiful, he is entranced by her every action, he can stand for hours in sun or rain awaiting her—and she enjoys this immensely. She does not wish to lose the boy, yet neither can she truly love him. She feels no responsibility for his well-being—and he has grown so accustomed to this that his happiness depends only on her not abandoning him. And she, too, can keep him in such a state of happiness with great ease, almost always! She spends time with him, they are together, and apart from one love, whatever the boy desires, she gives. But once he is out of sight, no love awakens within her for him any longer. A love that vanishes when removed from view, that disappears, is not love at all—it is desire, at best it is habit. The boy’s character displeases her precisely because he says “yes” to everything she does, because he has no opinions of his own. Yet this very thing is what she secretly desires, even though she cannot openly admit it.

Women fall in love with the kind of man who says ‘yes’ to everything about her, and women marry the kind of man she can say ‘yes’ to in everything.
I’m loveless, so for now I’m getting by on substitute-love. But the trouble is, lately I can’t tell the difference between real love and substitute-love. The times themselves are full of substitutes! What fault is mine! (I mean, what do I have to do with it?!)