On the Phenomenon Known as Love
Prologue
“And he has, that is exactly what he has done, whatever he wanted. As if attempting to reach the end of his desires, to find out what is there at the end. Discovering instead with horror that his desires even when instantly and gorgeously gratified only make him increasingly unhappy and insane.” —Intermezzo, Sally Rooney, 2024, p. 411.
As of writing this, I have been married for nearly seven years, and within that time, I have thought about sleeping with an unquantifiable number of people who are not my spouse: men, women, non-binary, otherkin—whatever. I am not picky. Pretty much anyone I see that I find even remotely attractive, I end up thinking: “What do they look like without clothes on? How do they kiss, I wonder? Are they wearing a wedding band? Would they be receptive if I made an advance? Do they have a boyfriend? Would they prefer top or bottom? Do they have a girlfriend? Have they ever thought about having sex with me? Are they thinking about having sex with me right now?” and so on.
And in face-to-face situations with these people, there’s always this subtle psychosexual tension coursing through me, as if I’m expecting that, at some point later in the night, I will end up bent over in a bathroom stall or splayed out on a hotel bed. And while listening to these beautiful people talk, watching them, pretending to pay full attention to whatever they happen to be saying, I wonder: “Do they feel it too—the tension? Or am I just sex-obsessed? Self-absorbed? Delusional? No—surely there’s something there. Surely no one goes out drinking with coworkers without thinking, on some level, about getting laid. Surely the animal urge to mate, that basic instinctual desire to reproduce, is sparking around inside them somewhere; surely they must feel it, as I do. What is this whole performative song and dance, if not to fuck? Do we really care about the game on TV or the books we're into or the nightmare customers at work or any of the other things we happen to be talking in the moment—or are we actually thinking about running our hands all over each other’s bodies, licking every inch of each other’s skin, and making each other wiggle and moan in pleasure?” and so on.
And then we continue the performative song and dance, acting like the coolest possible versions of ourselves, pretending as if sex is the furthest thing from our minds.
And, of course, nothing happens.
1, On Intermezzo
Nothing ever happens.
And maybe that’s why we read romance novels in the first place—because nothing ever happens; so we retreat into titillating tomes, live vicariously through fictitious femme fatales and carnal Casanovas, shivering with surrogate pleasure with each turn of the page. And who can blame us? After all, we’re only human: the desire for romance, power, sex, drugs, violence, rock and roll—it’s always there, somewhere, in the background, flowing quick through our blood. So why do the words “romance novel” garner such scorn from the high-brow literati? Are romance novels really so different from the laser-gun, magic-ring, spice-Jesus power fantasies of science fiction and fantasy? When we get down to it, it’s all wish fulfillment on some level. So, with that in mind (and I realize that this whole thing is starting to feel like me justifying my own reading of a romance novel, but that’s definitely not what’s going on here), I can’t blame anyone who chooses to curl up with a nice hot cup of tea and a romance novel every now and then. So, in this way, while I have never been drawn to romance novels myself (and, again, I realize this feels like some sort of post-hoc covering of my ass for reading a romance novel, but that’s definitely not what’s going on here), I can certainly understand their appeal, especially after having read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, which sometimes sparks with such tasteful sexual tension that the book itself practically hums electric.
I’m exaggerating somewhat, as Intermezzo isn’t all about fucking (it's not even all about romance, really)—out of its 464 pages, there are probably about 10 pages’ worth of full-on sex scenes, all of which are better described as “beautiful” instead of “raunchy.” And if the novel were rated on a movie scale, it would be rated R, but only because it briefly flashes a vagina once and shows some nipples sometimes—otherwise, it’s basically just people talking and thinking about stuff. To put it simply, you won’t find Intermezzo in your grandma’s poorly hidden erotica collection.
And contrary to what I may have insinuated earlier, this carnal desire for fictitious sexual fulfillment was not what drew me to the novel. In fact, I wasn't even aware the novel was considered a romance novel until after having purchased it. I was coming off the back of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King (which I purchased used and, later on, found $40 within the pages—this is relevant because I used that $40 to buy Intermezzo), and I wanted to read more earthly fiction about everyday people that combined elements of humor and existentialism; basically, I wanted something intellectual. And, at the time—roughly between September and November 2024—every literary publication was raving over Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, and the most common adjectives these publications used to describe the novel included (but were not limited to): “introspective,” “sensual,” “existential,” “intimate,” “relatable,” “Wittgensteinian,” “perceptive,” “contemplative,” “transitionary,” “reflective,” “philosophic,” “contemporary,” “millennial,” “sharp,” “witty,” and one article even used the word “Marxist” (I’m choosing to ignore the fact that the book itself is/was sold pretty much exclusively at huge corporate book chains for $29.99, and, on the day of the book’s release—September 24, 2024—it even came with a fancy Intermezzo tote for those lucky few who pushed through the massive crowds of millennial white women holding 15-shot venti almond milk caramel mochas with extra caramel drizzle and 5 pumps of pistachio [this is a low blow, I know, but I don’t take all the credit, as this is actually the common stereotype for Rooney’s readers, and is even a running joke in journals, videos, reviews, &c. &c.; Rooney herself has even been called “the first great millennial author” by The Times]). And on top of all those adjectives up there—which don’t really tell us anything about the novel—Intermezzo was (is) being hailed as one of the best books of 2024, which is what really piqued my interest, not because I believed the publications, per se, but because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. And, if I’m being honest, every contrarian bone in my body (which is all of them—all the bones) wanted to prove these publications wrong; I wanted to be able to say: “I read Intermezzo and, despite what everyone says, the book is actually in fact total garbage.” I wanted to proclaim the book the worst possible thing ever written because—as a pathological contrarian—I equate popularity with mediocrity on a pretty much one-to-one scale (while also simultaneously holding the opinion that qualitative concepts such as “good writing” and “bad writing” don’t actually exist out there in the ether, which, as you can imagine, puts me in a very weird, almost perpetual state of cognitive dissonance that I don’t want to analyze too closely here, for the sake of time), indeed. (And, before you ask: I don’t know why I’m like this; I just am—I guess I never got over being fifteen years old or something.)
Unfortunately for my contrarian bones, after reading Intermezzo, I was not, in good faith, able to say that the novel was “actually in fact total garbage.” Actually, in fact, Intermezzo was one of the fastest novels I’ve ever read, and that was not due to the length of the novel—which is just over 450 pages with standard font size, spacing, and margins (OK, top margins were pretty wide)—but instead due to some weird albeit pleasurable force that compelled me to obsessively follow the fairly mundane lives of the main characters, who are two privileged Irish brothers grieving for their recently deceased father while getting into all sorts of tricky romantic weirdness. It doesn’t hurt that Sally Rooney has an incredible grasp of written English but chooses to write in such a way that almost forgoes standard written English entirely in favor of what can only be described as thought-bubbles and vibes, which is something that piqued my interest from the very first chapter, wherein Rooney is starting sentences with verbs and adjectives and placing nouns and pronouns (if she even uses them at all) in unconventional places that somehow end up feeling totally natural, only feeling weird when you happen to reexamine what you just read, which often results in an audible “what the fuck?” Sometimes Rooney’s prose borders on Yoda from Star Wars, with stuff like: “sore his eyes and hot he felt” and “closes for a moment his eyes” (actual quotes from the novel); often forgoing the use of commas, and—like Cormac McCarthy before her—totally forgoing the use of quotation marks, instead just slipping dialogue totally unmarked between clauses as if it’s totally OK—and somehow it is, in fact, totally OK; actually, it’s more than OK, because, often, I found myself preferring her style of writing over the traditional break-paragraph-use-quotation-marks dialogue stuff that most fiction authors employ, because somehow Rooney’s comma-less dialogue-slippage flows tranquil, as if mirroring how sentences are formed in the brain, despite the words on paper appearing jerky and spastic. And, unlike your humble author here, Rooney is not overly wordy, either; there’s a lot of stuff happening between the words, a lot of stuff left unsaid yet strongly felt. Rooney’s prose reads like what thinking feels like; that’s the best way I can describe it. Often, you feel like you’re right there inside the character’s head, romantically involved with them by virtue of fully understanding their desires and weird little quirks. But not only that, but Rooney is able to cleverly ascribe character to pretty much anything—clothes, scenery, smells, kitchen appliances, whatever—ensuring that every scene is fully felt; such as: “Fragrance of perfume, sweat and cannabis. In whose blent air all our compulsions meet.” And: “With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent.” Nothing is missed and nothing is without purpose.
But I would be lying if I said that I was impressed with Intermezzo from the beginning. In fact, I took a note early on that reads as follows: “has the same kinda I-don’t-care-about-written-English feel as typing in all lowercase on social media, kinda haughty and could be interpreted as pretentious, almost as if Rooney herself can’t write properly at all and self-consciously tries to hide it behind unconventional grammar,” but then, almost immediately after writing this note, I got to chapter two, and her written English was suddenly perfect; and that’s when it dawned on me: Rooney is not being pretentious, she’s bending the rules of written English to evoke a certain emotional landscape and, importantly, to emphasize her characters—because each chapter follows a different brother, usually back and forth, and the prose style is different for each brother, mirroring how they think; the older brother, Peter, is chaotic, unfocused, always on the verge of a mental breakdown, obsessed with sex, and his chapters are written in this jerky, spastic Yoda-like prose; whereas the younger brother, Ivan, is focused, traditional, introspective, autistically interested in chess (Peter’s words), romantic, and his chapters are written in near-perfect English. And when I realized this—that Rooney was using grammar itself to emphasize the personalities of her characters—I kinda fell in love with Rooney’s prose; it’s not wacky and weird just to be wacky and weird, it’s intentional, deliberate, and serves a thematic purpose, almost as if the grammar itself transcends the page it’s written on, becoming less of a set of rules and more an extension of the emotional landscape of the novel.
So yeah, in this wannabe writer’s opinion (whatever that’s worth), Sally Rooney is a really good writer.
The novel itself takes place in Dublin, Ireland, in 2022, and it starts shortly after the funeral of the father of the two main characters—Peter and Ivan—brothers both overeducated and opposite who barely get along due to a ten-year age gap, differing political views, and a number of other little standard-sibling things. The story follows these brothers during this transitionary time in their lives, wherein a loved one was once there but is no longer, wherein they are forced to come to grips with this reality or otherwise go insane: also known as the grieving period, or the intermezzo (in music, the “intermezzo” is the musical accompaniment that plays between two acts in a play; and in chess, an “intermezzo” is a surprising move that forces the player to swiftly act, thus potentially breaking strategy and creating chaos [also note that this word “intermezzo” does not appear even once in the novel, and I, being neither a composer nor a chess wizard, had to look it up myself]). And it follows that, considering the whole father-dying thing, both brothers are pretty much emotional wrecks—and that’s the crux of Intermezzo: an exploration of the wreckage; an analysis of grieving, what it does to people.
We follow the brothers as they go about their normal day-to-day lives, which ebb and flow between the mundane and the romantic and the anxious and the angry—a.k.a normal, everyday stuff. And, considering some of the stuff that happens—like characters just walking down the street thinking about things or sending text messages (emojis included; even the eggplant makes an appearance) or playing virtual chess on a laptop—much of the novel would be boring if not for Rooney’s deft weaving of philosophical concepts into the everyday happenings, often presented as her characters’ wandering thoughts, such as in the event of a phone call between Peter and Ivan, in which both brothers awkwardly communicate using very vague, evasive language, and Peter thinks to himself:
“Never really know what he’s talking about, do you. Pointless even to try. No idea what he makes of it all, what he thinks you’re talking about, what he’s trying to say, never have any idea. Like talking to a dog. Big intelligent eyes looking back at you, uncomprehending. If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” —Intermezzo, Sally Rooney, 2024, p. 63–64
Intermezzo is filled with these bite-sized philosophical candies, always served in such a way that they are never forced down your throat; it never feels as if Rooney thinks she’s, like, super smart and wants you to know it, or whatever. Instead, she slips in all the heavy stuff in such a casual stream-of-consciousness kind of way that it—again—reads like what thinking feels like; as if, while talking to someone on the phone, your thoughts are drifting to all sorts of other things—as they often do—and one of those things just happens to be Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language.
Reading Intermezzo often felt like being inside a post-modern soap opera in which all the characters are just psychoanalyzing themselves and each other while a lot of normal stuff happens. And, since the stuff happening is so mundane and down-to-earth, it feels like nothing really happens at all, and everything that does happen never resolves, instead just kinda fizzling out—much like those countless first-world problems we believe to be so important in the moment that end up being irrelevant in a week’s time. All the while, the third-person omniscient narrator—Rooney herself; her unique analytical mind intimately seeping through the porous pages—reminds us that, while life may seem kinda mundane and pointless sometimes, philosophy does indeed help us come to grips with this mundanity, ourselves, and the world around us—despite my conservative father’s insistence that “philosophy is and always has been useless solipsism.”
2, On Limerence & Lust
At this point, you’re probably wondering why this essay’s prologue exists at all—you might even be thinking that you’ve been emotionally manipulated or bait-and-switched. But I assure you, the prologue is relevant because, despite the 2,227 words up there outlining my thoughts on Intermezzo, I didn’t really intend for this essay to be a review or critique of Intermezzo at all (in fact, the words “review” and “critique” make me throw up a little bit in my mouth); nor did I want to write about Intermezzo from this dry, this-is-what-I-like-about-the-novel perspective (because everyone absorbs things differently, and thus everyone should make their own determinations by experiencing the thing in question themselves). What I really wanted to write about was how Intermezzo made me feel, and I intend to do just that.
But first, you’ll have to bear with me, because I have to provide some additional context to fully explain how Intermezzo made me feel; and that additional context is:
The brothers.
Let’s start with Ivan, the mild-mannered, somewhat meek, somewhat awkward, twenty-something chess genius. After dominating a local chess tournament, he meets a woman in her thirties named Margaret, and they fall for each other immediately. This leads to copious amounts of lovemaking, but also copious amounts of angst, as the pair constantly question whether their relationship will last due to the age gap or whether Ivan is only into Margaret because he’s grieving and “not himself” or whether they could ever raise a family together, considering the whole childbirth-after-thirty-five thing. There’s also this whole “what will our families think!” aspect to the relationship. It’s all very first-world, faux-scandalous. But despite all their doubts, they are obsessed with each other and content simply to see and hold one another. In short, Ivan and Margaret are a textbook case of limerence.
noun: limerence the state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person, typically experienced involuntarily and characterized by a strong desire for reciprocation of one's feelings but not primarily for a sexual relationship. —Oxford English Dictionary
Peter, the older brother, disapproves of Ivan’s relationship with Margaret, believing it will end in despair due to the age gap. It should be noted, however, that Peter is in his thirties himself and is dating a woman in her early twenties named Naomi, making his criticism of Ivan deeply hypocritical. In addition to being a hypocrite, Peter is also a lawyer (redundant) who self-admittedly derives pleasure from “being correct” (which we all do on some level; however, those with even moderate social and/or emotional intelligence can temper it—Peter can’t, hence the “being a lawyer” thing). He also desires people to look up to him as an intellectual authority on all matters, which ties into the “being correct” thing, which ties into the whole disapproving-of-Ivan’s-relationship thing. And while he’s outwardly caring of the people around him, he admittedly does this only to be loved by others. In short, Peter is a narcissist. And, internally, Peter recognizes that he’s a narcissist, so at least he’s aware of it (although awareness of one’s narcissism does not excuse behavior downstream from that narcissism [in this writer’s opinion]). However, Peter, being a lawyer, justifies much of his own narcissistic bullshit through delusions of “love” (“I’m only looking out for you!”) and a “realist” philosophy that equates humans with their carnal desires for sex and power. It’s not surprising, then, that Peter has a storied history of sexual overindulgence, giving in to the whims of self-gratification whenever the opportunity arises. Although, by the time the novel takes place, he has somewhat calmed down and now only pursues two women, whom—as we’ll get into—he views more as objects than real human people.
To put it simply, Peter is on an unending grail quest for self-gratification, leaving a trail of used-up people in his wake. He is a self-obsessed, lustful dude who uses his big brain to rationalize an endless pursuit of pussy, which only ends up making him feel unhappy and insane. Peter is both a limerence junkie and a lust junkie—he just can’t get enough of either.
noun: lust lust (for somebody) very strong sexual desire, especially when love is not involved —Oxford English Dictionary
And, supposedly—according to Peter’s innermost private thoughts (of which Sally Rooney excels at expressing)—he’s still quote-unquote “IN LOVE” (double quotes and caps) with his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, who, after a traffic accident, can no longer have sex without experiencing severe pain (the “why?” of this is never fully explained; instead, her inability to have sex is just kinda a thing that seems to exist only as a literary device to drive Peter’s character growth [spoiler: of which there is very little]). Sylvia, while still claiming to love Peter herself, broke up with him to spare him what she believed would be a sexless, despair-filled relationship; yet the two remain close friends, spending a lot of time together, and sometimes even sleeping in the same bed and cuddling.
As a quick aside, the whole Sylvia-can’t-have-sex-therefore-can’t-have-meaningful-romantic-relationships thing is kinda hard to swallow. Sylvia’s justification for this is that she won’t be able to fully satisfy her partner, which could lead to her partner becoming unhappy, which could harm the relationship long-term, but this implies that the crux of all romantic relationships is sexual gratification, which is an implication I take some issue with (which is relevant foreshadowing for the real main topic of this essay, which I will be getting to eventually [I promise—just a little longer]).
Considering the amount of time they spend together, the whole sleeping-in-the-same-bed thing, and their level of what I’ll call “spiritual intimacy,” Peter and Sylvia are pretty much still a couple—Sylvia just refuses to acknowledge it (and this drives Peter crazy). They are so close, in fact, that Peter tells Sylvia everything about his life, including details about his other girlfriend, Naomi. And Sylvia just grins and bears it, even occasionally offering romantic advice and support. One gets the impression that Sylvia is, indeed, still in love with Peter—but not in this “I need him” kind of way, more in this “I just want him to be happy” kind of way; a type of love that is unconditional; a type of love that disregards her own happiness for the happiness of others, hence her encouraging Peter to see other people so that he can gratify himself sexually in ways that she cannot provide him.
If there is an embodiment of love in Intermezzo, it is Slyvia.
noun: love a very strong feeling of liking and caring for somebody/something, especially a member of your family or a friend —Oxford English Dictionary
It follows that Peter’s chapters are full of repressed sexual frustration and confusion because he can’t fuck Sylvia. (Note that I use crude and loveless sexual language like “fuck” and “pussy” for Peter’s sections because Peter’s lust for these things is itself crude and loveless.) And, on top of not being able to fuck Sylvia, he can’t figure out if he truly “loves” Naomi or is just using her as a rebound for Sylvia, whom he supposedly still “loves,” or if he “loves” both Sylvia and Naomi simultaneously, or if he doesn’t “love” anyone at all except himself (ding ding). And this two-girlfriend dynamic, combined with his grieving over his deceased father, keeps him in a perpetual state of manic despair for the entire novel. And when he’s not binge drinking or numbing himself with prescription medication, he’s either fucking Naomi or trying to get back into Sylvia’s pants, all the while going on and on about how much he “needs” Sylvia and how she “makes me a better person” and all this other me-centric stuff. And between all this self-pity masquerading as “true love,” he’s wiring money to his sex-worker girlfriend, Naomi, while fantasizing about getting her pregnant and simultaneously considering killing himself due to what he must sometimes perceive to be some sort of Shakespearean tragedy with himself as the main character, when really the totality of his life is simply a culmination of his own dumb penis-motivated decisions.
“Find myself fantasizing sometimes about getting her pregnant. How pretty she would look and happy. Take her around town buying things for the nursery. Idea of running into people we know somehow erotic: look what I did to her, kind of thing. As sexual fantasies go, it’s not the most unnatural, is it. Used to have the same one, once before. Differently. Long time ago. Yeah, when I think too hard about my life, I do start feeling suicidal, funny you should ask.” —Intermezzo, Sally Rooney, 2024, p. 319.
The passage you just read made me detest Peter not just as a fictional character, but as if he were a real person. Sally Rooney has a talent for putting you in the head of her characters, and this has the nasty side effect of turning what would normally be just theoretical dislike of a fictional character into full-blown “fuck this guy”—as if the character is right there in the room with you, being a grotesque vulgar perverted sex pest lech. So, I am not just virtue signaling when I say that, upon reading the previously quoted passage, I felt real disgust for Peter as a person; and it was around that time that I realized that Peter had never really loved anyone in his fictional life, and that, instead, he was simply using both Naomi and Sylvia for self-gratification. He was using Naomi in two ways: 1) sexual gratification, and 2) to get over Sylvia; while, at the same time, using Sylvia to make himself happy, without care for Sylvia’s own happiness, and practically admitting this outright by claiming that he “needs her”—like an infant needs their mother—for his own well-being, all while slyly trying to worm his way into her pants despite the fact that she had expressed—multiple times—that she didn’t want to be romantically involved with him. And my disgust of Peter only heightened when, at one point, he subtly manipulates Sylvia into giving him a hand job after finding her splayed out on her apartment floor vomiting and shaking due to her condition (the same condition that is never fully explained and seems to exist purely to drive some sort of character growth for Peter, which means that Intermezzo fails the Bechdel test in multiple ways: not only do two women never have a conversation that is not in some way about Peter or Ivan, but even the diseases and/or physical ailments in the novel only exist to serve men in some way—and, if I had to pick a flaw with the book, this androcentrism would be it).
Peter is a selfish asshole sex-pest goon. He’s basically a cautionary tale of what happens when you give in to your desires without a care for anyone except yourself, thinking that by doing so, you will be made happy, only to discover instead, with horror, that your desires, even when instantly and gorgeously gratified, only make you increasingly unhappy and insane. But not only does this make you yourself unhappy and insane, it also makes the people around you unhappy and insane.
But then I started to think—is Peter’s behavior really so unique?
Don’t we all want to be gratified on some level? Don't we all want our romantic feelings returned in kind? Don’t we all want our advances reciprocated? And, if that’s true, then what is love, really? Selfishness? A fairy tale? Does love even exist at all? I know the Oxford definitions, but those are just words; what is the feeling—really—of love? Is it the uncontrollable desire to be near someone else—like limerence? Or is it just manipulative word games to get into other people’s pants—like lust? Is love just selfishness dressed up in some pretty, palatable way?
And that’s how Intermezzo made me feel—weird about love—and that’s what I really wanted to explore with this essay:
What the hell is love, actually?
3, On Limerence & Lust Circa 2005
Once, back in high school, I knew limerence. I was obsessed with a girl named after a Bob Dylan song. And, for a time, she was obsessed with me too.
My dad would drop me off at her house—because neither of us bothered to learn how to drive, despite being of age—and we would just hang out in her basement, the two of us, sometimes watching FLCL and Cowboy Bebop and Family Guy on the big mounted CRT, sometimes playing Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts and Dynasty Warriors on the PlayStation 2, sometimes listening to The Cure and My Bloody Valentine and Prince on her older brother’s hi-fi stereo system, but most of the time just holding and kissing each other in silence. Much was left unsaid but strongly felt. She never talked much. Our language was the static electricity between us, and our noisy hearts charged the air all around, and when our eyes met, sparks caught beautiful fire to our souls. And in those moments, we believed in true love absolutely. She learned how to play “Computer Blue” on her viola just to impress me. It did. She was so talented. We had the same wry, morose outlook on life, as if we were already jaded adults just in adolescent bodies—or wanted to be. We both wore those Hot Topic Tripp pants before it became fashionable, at which point we dressed ourselves in shoegaze and grunge, trying to find ourselves in decades to which we did not belong. We shared a contrarian edge: two sides of the same rebel sword. I remember one Thanksgiving break, during a family party at her house, she softly stepped down her big wooden staircase wearing a light blue kimono dotted with pink blossoms, and her auburn hair was all gathered up in chopsticks, with stray little autumnal wisps falling down all around her ears, and her fair skin was all rosy in the cold. I remember thinking she looked so beautiful. She was always so beautiful. And when our time was up, when I had to go home, we would hold each other and weep as if it were the end of some Shakespearean tragedy, as if we were one person being ripped in twain by the cruel hands of time.
I thought myself to be in love with her.
When we were apart, we would text each other on our little Nokia phones and type up shy little “I love you”s on AOL Instant Messenger and call each other late at night and just fall asleep listening to the sound of each other’s breathing over the phone. And every second leading up to seeing her again felt as if butterflies were battling it out in my belly.
I guess you could say she was my high school sweetheart, but to me, she was more than that; she was my everything. She was all I ever wanted, all I ever needed—and I needed her badly, for my own well-being, almost like an infant needs their mother. Eventually, I needed more than just to see her; I needed everything she had to give and then some; and eventually, I even needed her to be someone she wasn’t.
She was shy. She expressed her love like a daylily—a transient bloom, all the more precious because of its very transience. And this was OK at first. But at a certain point, I wanted more. I wanted her to express her love to me on demand. And it became more than just saying “I love you.” It was deeper than that—it was about the way she acted. She often acted in ways that didn’t align with how I expected someone “in love” to act: she wouldn’t constantly call or text me; I usually had to call or text her first. And if I didn’t call or text her, she wouldn’t even get upset, and I would think, “Don’t you need to hear from me always? Am I not the love of your life?” And she would associate with other guys in a friendly way that I always perceived as some sort of emotional betrayal because, in my mind, if I were associating with other girls myself, it would only be because I was interested in them; I didn’t trust her because I didn’t trust myself. I remember I would make her block people on AOL Instant Messenger and then make her send me proof that she actually did it—and she would send me the proof every time, “I’ll do anything you ask, because I love you.” And then she would get shy again, as was her beautiful way.
I was, as John Lennon might put it, a jealous guy. And, of course, in hindsight, it’s easy to see that these expectations were all projections on my part—things I would do, ways I would act, emotions I would feel—superimposed onto her, and when she didn’t act exactly that way, I would become confused and upset and needy. I thought that if she didn’t express herself to me in the same way that I might express myself, then her love wasn’t genuine. But I didn’t realize, in that very awkward stage of my life, that everyone thinks and feels differently, and this failure to appreciate her differences eventually destroyed us.
She was so shy, and I was so needy that it got to the point where I would start ignoring her completely in an effort to get some sort of emotional reaction out of her, expecting something like, “Please talk to me! I can’t live without hearing from you! I love you so much!” or whatever. And when she wouldn’t respond in the way I wanted her to respond, I would escalate; I would break up with her, which did get an emotional response out of her—crying, pleading, an endearing clinginess for a time—and then, a day later, I would apologize and get back together with her; and, upon this reunion, it would feel as if our relationship was renewed, like we were starting from the very beginning, the limerence refreshed, but this would only last so long before I started to feel starved for her attention once more, and then the whole emotional-abuse process (which is absolutely how I would describe my behavior) would repeat itself. And she continue to put up with this abuse.
Perhaps she really did love me—loved me for who I was on a good day, maybe. Who knows. It’s hard to understand because I was a fairly horrible person to her back then. And it was especially hard to understand at the time because I clearly did not know what “love” actually was (and, as evidenced by this essay, am still trying to figure it out). But in hindsight, she must have felt something like love for me; otherwise, why would she put up with me at all?
Yet love has its limits, I suppose.
When I wanted to take our relationship further—physically—she was hesitant and nervous and afraid, so I didn’t push it (I like to think, in hindsight, that I wasn’t that bad), so we continued to just hold and kiss each other in that basement, never going any further than that. But, of course, I wanted more from her. I wanted to attempt to reach the end of my desires, to find out what was there at the end. But nothing ever happened; my lusty teenage urges went unsatisfied, and eventually I was so starved for physical attention that I sought gratification from other people. And when she inevitably found out that I had been cheating on her—because at times I felt guilty and told her (and other times, I just wanted to get a reaction out of her)—she would go nova with jealousy. And because she was normally so shy, this explosion of emotion satisfied my twisted desire for her to express herself emotionally to me—which, in a dark way, gratified me on some level and validated my own worth, which, at the time, was intrinsically tied to my perception of how much she loved me. Yet, despite her jealousy, she was still hesitant and nervous and afraid, and I didn’t push her—I never pushed her—and so my desire continued to go unsatisfied, and so, I cheated on her again and again and again and so on and so forth.
She forgave me the first few times, but eventually, that forgiveness turned into resentment, and that resentment turned into disgust and maybe even hatred, and eventually, she left me for good.
To this day, I still remember her voice quavering over the phone, as if her pain-filled tears poured through the earpiece itself: “I don’t love you anymore, Forrest. Just leave me alone.”
It turned out that in attempting to reach the end of my desires, I had discovered instead, with horror, that my desires, even when instantly and gorgeously gratified (by whomever would gratify them), only led to unhappiness and insanity—not only for myself but also for her.
Especially for her.
I remember, the next day, when she was still willing to talk to me, I asked her what her favorite flower was. “Baby’s breath,” she said. So I went to the flower shop, picked up some baby’s breath, arranged it all nice and elegant, and left it on her front porch with some sappy handwritten love letter attached. At the time, I thought, “Surely these flowers will make her understand that I am truly sorry, that I do really love her, and that I do really care.”
But did I, really?
I didn’t even know what her favorite flower was until the very end of our relationship.
I had to ask her—the quote-unquote love of my life—what her favorite flower was, and I only bothered to ask after she had left me, which means I only bothered to outwardly care about her on a deeper level than “please devote all your attention to me” when she no longer wanted to devote any attention to me at all. And, considering this, it makes sense why she never spoke to me again after that day, because with my final act, the veil had lifted for her; she realized the truth about me, and that truth was:
“He doesn’t give a damn about anyone other than himself.”
And at that moment, it must have been so obvious for you.
If you were my Sylvia, then I was your Peter—i.e., a fucking asshole, obsessed only with myself. And I’m sorry. I really am. And I would tell you if I didn’t think it would be weird.
I know you’ve grown up. You’ve moved on. You got married. And that’s OK.
4, On the Difference Between Love, Lust, & Limerence
I got married too.
To a different woman, of course—and we have two kids together, both of whom provide joy and irritation in equal measure.
How I came to be married with two children and a big-kid job and utility bills and a mortgage and all that normal cookie-cutter adult stuff is a story for another time—but the short story is kinda like 10 Things I Hate About You with the roles reversed, and the long story is too long to get into here, and it’s not really relevant to the point of this essay.
What is relevant to the point of the essay, however, is this: Marriage can be a tedious, boring thing.
In some ways, the reality of marriage is totally opposite of how our modern society portrays “love” in fiction and reality television, which is full of stuff like couples tearing each other’s clothes off every moment that they’re alone together or sharing a single plate of spaghetti as if they’re living in a Disney film or leaving Post-it notes with cute little messages written on them like “Don’t forget: I love you! <3” all over the house every morning or proposing at the airport terminal right before one of them gets on a plane to move to another state for work or passionately kissing in the pouring rain every other week or holding hands on the beach for hours as if they have no other responsibilities or coming home from work to a house full of lit candles and rose petals, and so on and so forth, all of which seven-years-of-marriage is most certainly not.
Don’t get me wrong, some of this stuff happens early on in the relationship—during the lust and limerence phases—but this Disney stuff never lasts. Not only does life get in the way, but the initial feeling of limerence dulls, as do all things that are experienced over and over again. It follows that limerence isn’t the only thing that fades; lust fades too. That intense physical attraction becomes less and less intense, as once that lust is satisfied over and over again, it too becomes samey and boring—like all things—and thus your mind wanders to the flesh of others. This is the human way. It is nothing to be ashamed of.
In short, romance fizzles out and, when it comes back, it comes back weaker each time, until eventually the most romantic thing you and your partner do is reminisce about the romantic things you used to do while watching some serialized television show between 8 p.m. and 12 a.m., as is part of your nightly relationship routine, which you’ve performed like clockwork for the last five years. And eventually, you find yourself trying to recapture that old flame by forcing scheduled date nights between watching the kids or grocery shopping or fixing up the house or going to parent-teacher conferences or taking care of the in-laws or working five days a week so that your family doesn’t end up living on the streets or whatever, because now there are things in life that are just far more important than rolling around naked in a meadow while reciting sonnets and whatnot. And other times you just want to play video games or read a book or write or paint or whatever, because sometimes you just don’t want to be around your partner at all and would rather be left alone to your own devices—and that’s totally OK, too.
Perhaps our whole modern depiction of love—this Disney-esque, poetry-perfect fantasy of star-crossed lovers forever lusting after each other every minute of the day—exists purely as a form of escapism to deal with the reality that romance is spurred by temporary feelings of lust and limerence that fade over time, just like all things.
And I recognize that the paragraphs above may not accurately describe everyone’s relationships (despite frequently using “you” pronouns up there [mostly because it was easier, structurally]); it seems to be generally understood that romance fades for people who have been in a relationship for more than a few years. I, personally, have seen this happen with nearly everyone around me, and it has happened with all my own personal relationships as well—friendly, romantic, or otherwise. And if you’re reading this thinking something like, “I’m with a person right now whom I love very much and want to be around all the time, and it will always be like this forever and ever and ever,” then my response would be: “give it time.” And while this all might sound kinda depressing and dreadful—it’s really not, because if you love your partner, the dulling of lust and limerence doesn’t really matter all that much, because the love is still there.
But what is love exactly? I realize that I still haven’t really answered this question; so, in my signature long-winded way, I will use the remainder of this essay to do just that.
The important bit is: While love, lust, and limerence can all be felt simultaneously, they are all different emotions and thus can be felt independently of one another. So, in explaining what the hell love is, actually, I’ll start by explaining what love actually is not.
First: love is not limerence.
Every romantic relationship starts with a limerence phase—a phase of uncontrollable obsession; a phase in which one needs to be around a certain person every waking moment of the day, or else they feel kinda sick and miserable. This limerence phase can be short or long, depending on the person. For example, my limerence phase with the girl named after a Bob Dylan song lasted for over a year; Peter’s limerence phase lasted several years. But, regardless of length, this limerence is not “love”—as “love” is not selfishness—because limerence is more akin to selfishness than compassion, as it’s a me-centric obsession that seeks to satisfy the self rather than someone else. Someone experiencing limerence may feel like they “need” a certain person, but this “need” can exist with or without compassion for that person. Someone experiencing limerence may, when their romantic gestures are not reciprocated by the other person, throw a tantrum, emotionally manipulate, kidnap, or do a number of other harmful things to the other person, all to satisfy their obsessive desire to be around that person. Consider my high school obsession or Peter’s obsession with Sylvia. People experiencing limerence cede their happiness to their obsession, thus demanding that their obsession satisfy them, which, if not reciprocated, is an unfair burden to place on another person. However, if two people experience limerence for one another simultaneously, this may resemble love to some degree, as they will both do things to satisfy each other—but this is still not love, this is mutual selfishness.
Second: love is not lust.
Somewhere in this romance cycle—typically near the beginning—lust enters the equation. And lust, in many ways, is similar to limerence because it is also a selfish desire: a desire to gratify oneself by using the body of another. And, just like limerence, if two people lust after each other, then the feeling is obviously mutual, and both people may feel satisfied—but this too is just mutual selfishness and should not be confused with love.
In some ways, the limerence-lust phase of a relationship is like a test; a test in which completion determines if you truly care about the person you find yourself with. In a loveless relationship, once the limerence-lust phase fades, the relationship crashes and burns, but in a love-filled relationship, the relationship persists even beyond limerence and lust.
When limerence and lust have dulled, but you still deeply care for the person, that's how you know you truly love them.
And now to answer the big question.
5, On the Phenomenon Known as Love
At this point, you’re probably thinking something like: “So, what the hell is love, actually? And how is it related to the prologue? And how is it related to romance becoming dull?” And, if nothing else, you’re most certainly thinking, “Gee, this essay sure is a fucking mess”—and you’d probably be right about that, but you also need to hold your horses, because we’re almost over the finish line.
So, what the hell is love, actually?
“Love” is a strong feeling of care for another person, a care that exists outside of the realm of lust and limerence; a care so deep that you would do anything to make the other person happy—and not in a tit-for-tat kind of way, either, but in go-out-of-your-way-to-make-the-other-person-happy-without-ulterior-motives-such-as-making-yourself-happy-by-making-them-happy kind of way. To put it poorly: Love is like doing someone a favor without expecting anything in return, on a grand scale; Love is like going to an opera when you hate opera because your partner loves opera, all the while not complaining or expecting your partner to sleep with you afterwards because you did a selfless thing by going to the opera despite hating opera; Love is like donating to a charity because you genuinely care about the cause, not because you want to feel good about yourself or be seen as some great person for making a donation.
In short, love is deep care for another person without expecting anything in return. And I like this definition of love, because if it were anything else—like the Disney fantasies so pounded into our heads from childhood—then love would be more akin to selfish desires like lust and limerence. This definition of love also means there is no confusing concepts like “romantic love” as opposed to “familial love”; instead, there’s just “love”—hard stop—and any notion of “romantic love” is simply love mixed with lust and limerence. I also believe that words ought to be non-redundant and useful for describing both the world around us and the human condition. Therefore, it’s important to separate the three L’s—love, lust, and limerence—not only because they are indeed unique sensations, but also so that we can analyze and understand our own emotions accurately, which may help us determine if we truly care about other people or, instead, if we are just using other people in an effort to satisfy our own selfish desires. And, importantly, this self-analysis using precise definitions may prevent us from becoming like Peter or myself circa 2005; it may also help us recognize when the people in our lives are like Peter or myself circa 2005.
But, of course, relationships can’t be condensed down into a single sentence or even a few paragraphs in an essay—nothing is that simple. Relationships are complicated. For example, relationships can contain lust but no limerence (think one-night stands, sex work, that beautiful idiot you think about naked sometimes, &c.) or limerence but no lust (think a workplace crush or someone you admire from afar) or love but nothing else (think a parent’s relationship with their child, or vice versa). And some relationships can contain all three L’s, which are what I call “romantic relationships,” and these romantic relationships get very complicated indeed, because love is always competing with lust and limerence, as lust and limerence (selfish desires) are the polar opposite of love (selflessness). Meaning, there is always some element of selfishness in a romantic relationship; both people in the romantic relationship are always expecting something from each other—sex, attention, devotion, &c. &c.—which can cause love to conflict with lust and limerence or vice versa.
And, since we’ve established that lust, limerence, and love can be felt separately from each other, it’s clear that one may lust after someone other than their current romantic partner, which creates tricky romantic problems indeed, like: “if I lust for someone who is not my partner, should I give into that lustful desire? Surely, if my partner truly loves me (i.e., they deeply care about me on a selfless level), then they should want me to be happy, and satisfying my lustful urges for other people would make me happy,” and other such weird circles of lust logic—but would someone “in love” even entertain these thoughts of lust at all? Would someone “in love” be willing to potentially hurt their partner emotionally by sleeping with someone else?
Consider the prologue of this essay, in which I outright admitted to wanting to sleep with people who were not my wife. This desire isn’t unique to just this relationship—it’s existed in every romantic relationship I’ve ever been in, kinda just there in the background of my psyche. To me, this is just the normal human condition—thinking about sex with people sometimes—and it seems laughable to believe that sexual thoughts about others suddenly vanish the moment you get hitched; it’s more realistic to say that human beings are intellectually monogamous as opposed to emotionally monogamous, meaning that one makes themselves monogamous through force of will (usually out of love for another person) despite the urge to sleep around with other people. (Basically, what I’m trying to get at is: I suspect I am not the only person in the world who has lustful thoughts about people who are not their current partner; I also suspect that many people lie about having these thoughts [“you’re the only person I think about, darling!”] due to some false understanding of what “love” actually is [i.e., “if I love someone, I shouldn’t have lustful feelings for anyone else, and if I do have lustful feelings for someone else, then I am not truly ‘in love’ with my partner, thus my whole relationship is a sham and my life is a lie and I am horrible person” &c. &c.], which seems like a pretty harmful belief that could lead to a lifetime of guilt and cognitive dissonance due to the forced repression of a biological urge that can’t really be repressed to begin with. [Note: This makes that one Bible verse—“But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” Matthew 5:28-38—questionable at best and incredibly harmful at worst, even though it seems to come from a place of good intentions.])
I could give in to my lustful thoughts for people who are not my partner every time they bubble up—sleep with anyone who would be willing to go to bed with me—but, ultimately, if my wife found out, it would kill her emotionally, so I don’t do it for that reason. I temper my behavior. And it’s true that my wife wanting me to be monogamous is, in a way, a selfish desire on her part, but since I love her, I am willing to let her selfish desire (i.e., possess me on some level, thereby limiting my sexual partners) influence my behavior (i.e., stop me from sleeping with other people). And, besides, I’m guilty of the same selfish desire myself: I don’t want my wife to sleep with other people, either; therefore, I would hope that she cares about me enough not to give in to whatever lustful urges she has for other people, too (urges I know she has, because we’ve already talked about this whole thing).
In this way, we both practice a form of temperance, inspired by our mutual love for each other. This temperance goes beyond not sleeping with other people—it extends to every little thing in our lives, such as moderating the time we spend pursuing our own hobbies to give attention to each other, or controlling our annoyance when visiting each other’s parents' house for the holidays despite not wanting to be there at all, and much, much more. In short, because we love each other, we gladly make these sacrifices.
And yes, the romance might have dulled somewhat, and I might sometimes think, “I could leave my wife and find another person to shack up with,” thereby starting the whole limerence phase all over again with someone else. But I know that the limerence phase with that other person will eventually dull as well, and I will be right back in the same position I am now: in a relationship where the romance has dulled somewhat, and I am sometimes thinking about finding a new person to start the limerence phase with again. As if, like Peter in Intermezzo, I am attempting to reach the end of my desires (i.e., chasing limerence for that ultimate, forever-lasting limerence), only to discover, with horror, that my desires—even when instantly and gorgeously gratified—only make me increasingly unhappy and insane, because I would be cycling through people endlessly, from limerence to dullness, leaving a trail of heartbroken bodies in my wake. And while I’m sure I could recapture the limerence phase with someone else for a little while, I know deep down that limerence never lasts, and I also know it would destroy my wife. And I don’t want to destroy my wife because I place her happiness above even my own, because I love her.
All this is to say that romantic relationships are very complicated indeed, and it’s true that there is a selfishness underneath all of them: the desire to possess another person to satisfy yourself. And this desire restricts the other person’s freedom in some ways. But, if two people are in love, they will happily make that sacrifice for each other—because they care about each other on a deeper level than just “I want to fuck you” or “I need to see you all the time, or else I will go insane.”
So, to answer the question: “What the hell is love, actually?”
Love is a sacrifice one makes, gladly.
If this essay made you feel something, please let me know via email at f0rrest@pm.me.