Highlights
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Real love shirks the constraints of logic, compatibility, and convenience.
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To love a person, thing, or activity is to desire to experience them for their own sake.
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Love is when the presence of something or someone is the prize.
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If it could be reduced to a reason, it wouldn’t be love.
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As they chipped away at these layers and grieved the loss of the love they’d had before, they found new love for the people they had each become. Years later, their relationship is one of the strongest I know.
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There are plenty of dependable ways to foster attachment with someone. Texting them when they cross your mind, buying them their favorite cereal, sharing about a moment from middle school that felt too silly and heavy to tell anyone else
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We often choose to attach to people because we love them, and with careful pruning and maintenance, these attachments can help love flourish. But attachment is not love. You can have one without the other. Overgrown attachments can exhaust our capacity for love, leaving us with nothing but obligation toward maintaining the attachment itself.
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I thought I had been investing in love, but have now found a harsher reality: I had been investing in identity as a moral, “godly” person.
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e form attachments that satiate these needs, and then, with a shrug and a glance around to make sure this is what everyone else is doing, we call it love.
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This experience feels valuable to me for no reason. It is the prize.
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Predictably, the love dissipated
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It’s been healing to stop using activities I love as a balm for my insecurities and start experiencing their shape and flavor again
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Instead, listening for when the pilot light catches, and saying “this.” Then holding my hands around the flame—close enough so life doesn’t snuff it out, but far enough so that it has air.
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Regardless, I hope to build a life that protects love, instead of attempting to reshape it into something I can control.
Clean Copy
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
I recently went down a YouTube rabbit hole watching old videos of Bob Dylan performances, and found this clip of him singing with Joan Baez (a scene that was recreated in A Complete Unknown, and a relationship that was commemorated in Baez’s most popular song, Diamonds and Rust.)
Their elation in singing together is one of the purest encapsulations of love I’ve ever seen. It visibly strains the muscles in their faces, anticipating the relief of a smile.
That love wasn’t convenient or particularly healthy; Baez wanted to change Dylan to be more of an activist, and he had his sights on other people. They sang “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” But it didn’t matter.
Their expressions point uncomfortably towards a lesson I’ve been learning lately in my own life.
Real love shirks the constraints of logic, compatibility, and convenience. It’s an axiom—a truth we can’t arrive at through reasoning, but that can’t be denied. To love a person, thing, or activity is to desire to experience them for their own sake. Not because of the validation they bring, not because of what they do for us, not because of the future we could have with them. Love is when the presence of something or someone is the prize.
Why are they the prize? Because they’re the prize.
If it could be reduced to a reason, it wouldn’t be love.
I had two friends whose relationship began to deteriorate several years ago. I watched as life’s demands took precedence over their connection and teased away at its seams until it suddenly began to fold. Both of them talked to me about this in separate conversations, unsure if what they had could be salvaged.
“Do you love them?” I asked both.
One of them softened at the question, affirmatively. Their eyes welled up with earnest tears.
The other sighed deeply. “When things are good, they’re really good. Just watching a movie with them, without all this noise, is everything I could want.”
They decided to lean in one more time. They went to counseling and learned aspects of each other that had quietly calcified under the pressures of their lives—how one of them doesn’t feel connected to their city anymore, how the other feels deeply alone sometimes at night. As they chipped away at these layers and grieved the loss of the love they’d had before, they found new love for the people they had each become. Years later, their relationship is one of the strongest I know.
I thought I understood love in my early twenties, because I conflated it with other concepts that are more predictable—mostly with attachment.
There are plenty of dependable ways to foster attachment with someone. Texting them when they cross your mind, buying them their favorite cereal, sharing about a moment from middle school that felt too silly and heavy to tell anyone else.
We often choose to attach to people because we love them, and with careful pruning and maintenance, these attachments can help love flourish. But attachment is not love. You can have one without the other. Overgrown attachments can exhaust our capacity for love, leaving us with nothing but obligation toward maintaining the attachment itself.
This type of obligation was at the heart of how I was taught to connect with others, growing up highly religious. Adults in my life talked about loving each other with “God’s love” instead of “fallible human love.” I learned that the most sacred form of love was that which is not dependent on the specific characteristics of the person being loved. I internalized this so deeply that when my parents once told me they were proud of me for the artist I was becoming, it felt a little dirty. That sounds too fallible—what if I were different? Would God still make you love me?
Until a few months ago, I hadn’t realized that this view of love had followed me into my more secular adulthood. Several deep relationships in my life were uprooted at once. With those root systems exposed, I could see what I’d fostered in each relationship, and what I had drowned out.
I re-heard the long conversations with my ex-partner about committing to choose love in the face of whatever we might feel, and how we should feel secure in that commitment, even though we didn’t.
I felt the acidic twinge in my stomach from realizing that a friend had started to show up for me in a way that I wouldn’t be eager to show up for them, and that I was allowing it.
I flinched with the hesitation of confirming that I’d “love to grab lunch” with a person whose presence has always zapped away my bodily awareness and sense of self.
These moments had been expressions of “God’s love”—the unconditional love that makes someone a good and worthy person. I grieved as I closed my fists and felt everything that had once been genuine about these relationships evaporating in my hands.
I thought I had been investing in love, but have now found a harsher reality: I had been investing in identity as a moral, “godly” person.
It’s funny how these suppressed sides show up, without notice or invitation, when we try to love others. We begin to make a space for connection, but as soon as our egos notice love’s soft, ambiguous nature, they reclaim that space to pursue whatever “unacceptable” need we’ve subconsciously denied ourselves—a need for validation, or superiority, or escape. We form attachments that satiate these needs, and then, with a shrug and a glance around to make sure this is what everyone else is doing, we call it love.
In untangling my connections over the last few months, I’ve found it easier to accept love’s autonomous nature by looking at my love for things rather than people. I’ve begun to ask: what experiences in my life do I find undeniable, wonky levels of intrinsic value in?
I noticed that, right now, I love to sing. Not the satisfaction of having sung well —the experience of sensing the vibrations I can create with my vocal cords, flirting with the abilities and limitations of my voice on that particular day, exploring new sounds, and entertaining myself with the outcome. This experience feels valuable to me for no reason. It is the prize.
I’ve also noticed I love to create, more generally. I love finding a grip on an idea that has been teasing my mind for weeks. I love coaxing out its nuances, entranced by the possibility that it could still hold some meaningful shape when I’m finished pulling it into the concrete plane of a song, drawing, or essay.
Reflecting on my history with these interests, it’s clear to me that even love for an activity or experience can be smothered through attachment. As I improved my songwriting skills as a teenager, I began to imbue my songwriting experience with expectations. I identified with the outcome: Mariah, here is something that you could be good at—you’d better prove that you are.
Predictably, the love dissipated. Each new lyric that sprang into my head was met with a dismissive internal sigh, heavy with doubts about whether I could turn the line into a satisfactory song. I stopped writing songs for the next ten years.
It’s been healing to stop using activities I love as a balm for my insecurities and start experiencing their shape and flavor again. This has led me to drop some hobbies. But it’s also allowed me to love what I do a hell of a lot more.
Now, I just need to learn how to do this with people: to stop holding love hostage to my ego’s needs, drowning all of my relationships in the gasoline of “God’s love.” Instead, listening for when the pilot light catches, and saying “this.” Then holding my hands around the flame—close enough so life doesn’t snuff it out, but far enough so that it has air.
Setting boundaries during an increasingly personal text conversation with a friend I don’t desire emotional closeness with, despite being knee-deep in an episode of loneliness.
Pausing to assess whether I felt lit up by a new date’s presence, or only by their validation.
Reaching out to a friend from college who I lost touch with, just because part of me smiles inside when I think about the eager look on her face whenever she was lost in an impassioned conversation.
We won’t ever know what it would have cost for Dylan and Baez’s story to have ended differently. If they had found healthier ways to attach, could they have been folk’s greatest couple to this day? Or did their differences make their long-term partnership contingent on self-abandonment? Maybe they both still wonder. If these answers were simple, we’d live in a very different world.
Regardless, I hope to build a life that protects love, instead of attempting to reshape it into something I can control. I hope to stop subjecting it to the servitude of my needs and insecurities. And if I ever find myself singing at a folk festival with someone whose presence has the power to break me, I hope I’m ready to sing the fuck out of that song.
Annotated Copy
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
I recently went down a YouTube rabbit hole watching old videos of Bob Dylan performances, and found this clip of him singing with Joan Baez (a scene that was recreated in A Complete Unknown, and a relationship that was commemorated in Baez’s most popular song, Diamonds and Rust.)
Their elation in singing together is one of the purest encapsulations of love I’ve ever seen. It visibly strains the muscles in their faces, anticipating the relief of a smile.
That love wasn’t convenient or particularly healthy; Baez wanted to change Dylan to be more of an activist, and he had his sights on other people. They sang “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” But it didn’t matter.
Their expressions point uncomfortably towards a lesson I’ve been learning lately in my own life.
Real love shirks the constraints of logic, compatibility, and convenience. It’s an axiom—a truth we can’t arrive at through reasoning, but that can’t be denied. To love a person, thing, or activity is to desire to experience them for their own sake. Not because of the validation they bring, not because of what they do for us, not because of the future we could have with them. Love is when the presence of something or someone is the prize.
Why are they the prize? Because they’re the prize.
If it could be reduced to a reason, it wouldn't be love.
I had two friends whose relationship began to deteriorate several years ago. I watched as life’s demands took precedence over their connection and teased away at its seams until it suddenly began to fold. Both of them talked to me about this in separate conversations, unsure if what they had could be salvaged.
“Do you love them?” I asked both.
One of them softened at the question, affirmatively. Their eyes welled up with earnest tears.
The other sighed deeply. “When things are good, they’re really good. Just watching a movie with them, without all this noise, is everything I could want.”
They decided to lean in one more time. They went to counseling and learned aspects of each other that had quietly calcified under the pressures of their lives—how one of them doesn’t feel connected to their city anymore, how the other feels deeply alone sometimes at night. As they chipped away at these layers and grieved the loss of the love they’d had before, they found new love for the people they had each become. Years later, their relationship is one of the strongest I know.
I thought I understood love in my early twenties, because I conflated it with other concepts that are more predictable—mostly with attachment.
There are plenty of dependable ways to foster attachment with someone. Texting them when they cross your mind, buying them their favorite cereal, sharing about a moment from middle school that felt too silly and heavy to tell anyone else.
==We often choose to attach to people because we love them, and with careful pruning and maintenance, these attachments can help love flourish. But attachment is not love. You can have one without the other. Overgrown attachments can exhaust our capacity for love, leaving us with nothing but obligation toward maintaining the attachment itself.==
This type of obligation was at the heart of how I was taught to connect with others, growing up highly religious. Adults in my life talked about loving each other with “God’s love” instead of “fallible human love.” I learned that the most sacred form of love was that which is not dependent on the specific characteristics of the person being loved. I internalized this so deeply that when my parents once told me they were proud of me for the artist I was becoming, it felt a little dirty. That sounds too fallible—what if I were different? Would God still make you love me?
Until a few months ago, I hadn’t realized that this view of love had followed me into my more secular adulthood. Several deep relationships in my life were uprooted at once. With those root systems exposed, I could see what I’d fostered in each relationship, and what I had drowned out.
I re-heard the long conversations with my ex-partner about committing to choose love in the face of whatever we might feel, and how we should feel secure in that commitment, even though we didn’t.
I felt the acidic twinge in my stomach from realizing that a friend had started to show up for me in a way that I wouldn’t be eager to show up for them, and that I was allowing it.
I flinched with the hesitation of confirming that I’d “love to grab lunch” with a person whose presence has always zapped away my bodily awareness and sense of self.
These moments had been expressions of “God’s love”—the unconditional love that makes someone a good and worthy person. I grieved as I closed my fists and felt everything that had once been genuine about these relationships evaporating in my hands.
I thought I had been investing in love, but have now found a harsher reality: I had been investing in identity as a moral, “godly” person.
It’s funny how these suppressed sides show up, without notice or invitation, when we try to love others. We begin to make a space for connection, but as soon as our egos notice love’s soft, ambiguous nature, they reclaim that space to pursue whatever “unacceptable” need we’ve subconsciously denied ourselves—a need for validation, or superiority, or escape. We form attachments that satiate these needs, and then, with a shrug and a glance around to make sure this is what everyone else is doing, we call it love.
In untangling my connections over the last few months, I’ve found it easier to accept love’s autonomous nature by looking at my love for things rather than people. I’ve begun to ask: what experiences in my life do I find undeniable, wonky levels of intrinsic value in?
I noticed that, right now, I love to sing. Not the satisfaction of having sung well —the experience of sensing the vibrations I can create with my vocal cords, flirting with the abilities and limitations of my voice on that particular day, exploring new sounds, and entertaining myself with the outcome. This experience feels valuable to me for no reason. It is the prize.
I’ve also noticed I love to create, more generally. I love finding a grip on an idea that has been teasing my mind for weeks. I love coaxing out its nuances, entranced by the possibility that it could still hold some meaningful shape when I’m finished pulling it into the concrete plane of a song, drawing, or essay.
Reflecting on my history with these interests, it’s clear to me that even love for an activity or experience can be smothered through attachment. As I improved my songwriting skills as a teenager, I began to imbue my songwriting experience with expectations. I identified with the outcome: Mariah, here is something that you could be good at—you’d better prove that you are.
Predictably, the love dissipated. Each new lyric that sprang into my head was met with a dismissive internal sigh, heavy with doubts about whether I could turn the line into a satisfactory song. I stopped writing songs for the next ten years.
It’s been healing to stop using activities I love as a balm for my insecurities and start experiencing their shape and flavor again. This has led me to drop some hobbies. But it’s also allowed me to love what I do a hell of a lot more.
Now, I just need to learn how to do this with people: to stop holding love hostage to my ego’s needs, drowning all of my relationships in the gasoline of “God’s love.” Instead, listening for when the pilot light catches, and saying "this.” Then holding my hands around the flame—close enough so life doesn't snuff it out, but far enough so that it has air.
Setting boundaries during an increasingly personal text conversation with a friend I don’t desire emotional closeness with, despite being knee-deep in an episode of loneliness.
Pausing to assess whether I felt lit up by a new date’s presence, or only by their validation.
Reaching out to a friend from college who I lost touch with, just because part of me smiles inside when I think about the eager look on her face whenever she was lost in an impassioned conversation.
We won’t ever know what it would have cost for Dylan and Baez’s story to have ended differently. If they had found healthier ways to attach, could they have been folk’s greatest couple to this day? Or did their differences make their long-term partnership contingent on self-abandonment? Maybe they both still wonder. If these answers were simple, we’d live in a very different world.
Regardless, I hope to build a life that protects love, instead of attempting to reshape it into something I can control. I hope to stop subjecting it to the servitude of my needs and insecurities. And if I ever find myself singing at a folk festival with someone whose presence has the power to break me, I hope I’m ready to sing the fuck out of that song.