Despite my best efforts, I think probably too often about the November 2021 Ethicist column in NYT Magazine. This particular column addressed a query from a retired woman who learned that her lover had been lying to her. When the two, our narrator and the man she loved, began seeing each other romantically, he told her he had just ended a long-term relationship. In truth, our narrator would ultimately learn, not only had he not ended his relationship, he “never stopped loving” that original woman. It was long-distance, and she had no idea he was seeing other people. Our narrator laments: “When we became lovers, I believed we had found a deep connection, on many levels. I fell in love…He admitted he likes but does not love me, that he cares for me deeply as a friend and loves our physical intimacy.” I remember being so struck by this last line, by the way that our narrator and her then-partner stand like and love against each other, not quite oppositional but distinct. She never fleshes out this distinction for us, leaving a huge semantic gap to be filled in, at will, by the reader.
When I first read this line, I wondered, sincerely, what love could possibly mean if not caring deeply for someone and loving physical intimacy with them? What was so lacking in his feelings that he had relegated them to like? We can pretend, as we often do, that the distinction is intuitive. (To fill in the gap, of course, would be to say less about the narrator’s understanding of love and everything about our own.)
In the first chapter of her infamous All About Love, bell hooks writes:
The men in my life have always been the folks who are wary of using the word "love" lightly. They are wary because they believe women make too much of love. And they know that what we think love means is not always what they believe it means. Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word "love" is the source of our difficulty in loving. If our society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying.
I had a similar experience on dating apps, where my bio read: “looking for romance or w**d” (and it also got me banned because even though it was a GOOD FAITH JOKE! it apparently qualifies as soliciting drugs). Suffice to say, it was the word “romance” that scared the men most. One conversation went like this:
him: kinda scary tbh
me: what’s scary
him: the romance part
him: because when were talking romance what do you mean
The word romance is positioned similar to love insofar as it is constituted by its instability. That’s why I’m writing about love and romance, still, after centuries of other people doing the exact same thing, raising the same questions — to define love or romance is to draw a line between what exists in romance, what makes it up, and what exists outside of it, what does not count.
Hooks provides M. Scott Peck’s definition as her preference: “the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth…Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” This definition starkly contrasts the common and colloquial framing of love as something we fall into, a trope indulged by the narrator of the Ethicist query: I fell in love, she writes. She hopes, later, that “in time he would grow to love [her] in return.” Her love was incidental, but that isn’t to suggest that all love is, or that it need be. Love can grow and be grown. Love can be a choice, and we can choose it or we can choose something else or we can make no choices at all.
Maybe the assertion that you “like” someone but do not love them is to mark a relation by its failure. After all, the man in the query doesn’t say that there isn’t love in his relation to the narrator; only that it isn’t love. So love is distilled; it is a way of relating to another person or it is the relation to that person. This can make it even more confusing to talk about love; how can we say with certainty whether what we have or feel is love, and how can we know if someone else knows what we mean?
Central to the issue of love and its discontents is the gap between the language of love and the experience of love. I’ll invoke Judith Butler’s distinctions between linguistics and materiality in Bodies That Matter: “Always already implicated in each other, always already exceeding one another, language and materiality are never fully identical nor full different.” The language we use to describe love / romance and the experience of love / romance may not align; the gap between them is where incongruence manifests in one direction or another, so that the lover in love can never find the words or has the words but lacks the body onto which they can be projected.
I wish I could ask the man discussed in the query what he means when he says he loves the “original” woman, the originary woman, but simply likes the narrator of the query, the “other” woman, particularly given his blatant deceit of the object of his love, despite or in spite of his claims to it. hooks claims that love cannot exist where there is also abuse; she would probably suggest that what this man actually feels is cathexis, or attachment predicated on comfort and relational care. “We all know how often individuals feeling connected to someone through the process of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting or neglecting them,” writes hooks. “Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love.”
I once said to someone I thought I loved that he didn’t love me, because you don’t speak like that to someone you love. I’ve thought about that a lot, too. Saying “I love you” is a milestone in romantic relationships, particularly those that are monogramous/hetero. The invocation of love connotes gravity, commitment. I have often wondered if this association stems from a scarcity framing of love, wherein love and especially romantic love is reserved for one person, to be doled out to them alone. To use love capaciously would bely or even disfigure love’s gravity through this lens of lack. It threatens to make love unserious, giving it away too easily and too often and to too many people. Could we seriously love all of that in all of those people? Or, could we broaden our understanding and use of love without belying its import? Like, the way a guy I’ve dated calls his dad “my pops” and my dad, “your pops,” or the way my friend gets excited about swamp cabbage and upset about love professions carved into birch trees, two espressos and a tiramisu or a weighted blanket and an open window. I have love notes, manuals, drafted. So I ask again, could we seriously love all of that in all of those people, wherein “seriously” means that the love is serious as in not casual? In all of these people? Why should abundance destabilize love’s seriousness, or, if it shouldn’t, then why don’t we stop and say I love you more? I love you as promise or confession or profession. The tree grows over the initials, wrinkled and creased so that they stay but also change.