You'd surely say I haven't written about love at all, but rather about its undoing—about how people separate, about the inverse of love, which isn't hatred but parting. Strange, isn't it? The reverse of a feeling ought itself to be a feeling. Perhaps it is, in fact, something else altogether: a tangle of states—indifference, exasperation, tedium, regrets of every shade, regret itself. When love departs, it evaporates. We don't even trouble ourselves to name what remains, to give a definition—even a contemptible one—to the feeling that supplants love, to know what's left of it beyond the divorce decree. We sometimes recognize the helplessness, the frustration, the suffocation we feel when love dies. We are prisoners who have tasted freedom; we crave it. Some of us obtain it through great suffering, and that's because we have loved so long, made this feeling our highest aspiration, our most secret desire, our brightest hope—we cannot accept that it isn't eternal as it promises us, as we feel it in those first moments. All our energies pour into seeking love, into living it, leaving no space for thought about what comes after. We carry this vast disability of the mind: everything seems immortal to us—our lives, our loves, our happiness—and no weight of evidence can sway us otherwise. For some, love becomes a drug they need to live; for others, a passing drink. None of the solutions captures the miraculous intensity of the beginning. Some become a kind of frantic race to stay together at any cost; others, a hangover flavored with life itself, a thirst for fresh air and peace. Stop—you'll protest indignantly again—but there are so many who remain together, couples who live side by side each day without such intensity, such hunger. Without enthusiasm or expectation, it might seem nothing survives but a bleak and monotonous existence, yet paradoxically they are the quietest of all. They've managed to transmute intensity into domestic joy, metaphysical longing into the practicalities of shared life. And they fare well—they at least have found something, they're together, they've discovered another way. Perhaps a different love altogether, a feeling where friendship has become the essential element, then habit, the togetherness, the understanding that solitude is worse—if and only if, after thirty years of marriage, you return home with pleasure. This is the measure, the barometer: if you cannot tear yourself from your computer to leave work, though the day is done and everyone has gone, then surely love has fled, and in its place remains only the hunger to be free, and the immense anguish that you are not.
And I can’t help but think, pressed close to despair, about how we can probe our universe far and wide, search, explore its outer reaches and yet never think to seek a solution to these troubles that are precisely what make us whole. Why do we wrestle with impossible problems in physics, mathematics, chemistry, and remain blind to the fact that we need a solution to love—real or imaginary, it matters not—but a solution so that we can live in happiness together as two, as one, in any form, if any form exists at all.