Something That Can Still Surprise You

Love is difficult to hold still.

The moment I try to define it precisely, I start thinking of exceptions.

People love each other and leave.

People love each other and stay too long.

Someone can love another person and still hurt them badly.

Sometimes the loving thing is to remain present.

Sometimes it's to go.

So I've become suspicious of definitions that make love too easy to recognize from the inside.

"I love you" tells us something important about the person saying it.

It doesn't settle everything that follows.

Maybe love is easier to observe over time.

You learn another person.

Then they change.

You learn them again.

Something happens that neither of you expected. One of you becomes frightened, successful, sick, exhausted, interested in something new or simply older.

Now the relationship contains information it didn't contain before.

What happens next matters.

There is a temptation in close relationships to convert knowing someone into having finished knowing them.

I know how you are.

I know what you meant.

I know what you're going to say.

Sometimes we're right.

Long relationships produce real knowledge. You recognize the sound of someone walking into a room. You know which silence means they're angry and which one means they're tired. You can order for them at a restaurant and probably get it right.

That's part of intimacy.

It can also become a strange kind of blindness.

The person you know keeps having experiences when you're not looking.

They notice things. Change their mind. Develop capacities. Lose interests. Reconsider memories you thought the two of you had already settled.

They're still becoming someone.

So are you.

A relationship has to somehow accommodate both familiarity and surprise.

Too little familiarity and there's nothing much holding it together.

Too little surprise and eventually you may stop encountering the person who's actually there.

You encounter your accumulated model of them instead.

I've done that.

I suspect most people have.

It can even feel like love because the model contains so much care. You remember what they like. You anticipate what they need. You protect them from things that hurt them before.

Then one day they tell you they don't need that protection anymore.

Now you have a choice.

You can keep loving the person you learned.

Or you can become curious about the person speaking to you now.

Ideally those aren't opposites.

In practice, the transition can hurt.

This may be one reason vulnerability remains part of love even after people have known each other for decades.

The risk isn't only that someone will reject us.

It's that the relationship will change us.

If I remain genuinely interested in what you're becoming, I can't completely decide in advance what our relationship will become.

That's uncomfortable.

We like guarantees for understandable reasons.

We want to know that someone will never leave, never change their mind, never become somebody incompatible with us, never discover something about themselves that rearranges everything.

People make promises partly because uncertainty is difficult to live with.

Some promises are worth making.

They create enough stability for people to build a life together.

The trouble begins when stability requires us to stop reporting what is actually happening.

A relationship can look remarkably peaceful once nobody is allowed to introduce disruptive information.

No arguments.

No surprises.

No difficult questions.

Also, eventually, not much contact.

That isn't the only way relationships fail.

Some relationships contain far too much disruption and nowhere near enough safety. Some fractures shouldn't be repaired. Some doors should remain closed.

I think that's important to say because "stay open" can become terrible advice very quickly.

There are people we shouldn't remain available to.

There are situations where leaving is not a failure of love.

Sometimes distance is what allows something worth preserving to survive.

This is where I've found the idea of grace more useful than certainty.

Grace doesn't require pretending nothing happened.

It doesn't require reconciliation.

It certainly doesn't require allowing someone back into a place where they've repeatedly caused harm.

Sometimes grace is much smaller.

Not needing the other person to become a monster in order to justify leaving.

Allowing a good memory to remain good even though the relationship ended badly.

Sending a message years later because anger has finally become something else.

Accepting an apology without restoring the relationship.

Or restoring one slowly, without pretending the fracture never happened.

None of those outcomes is guaranteed.

That's what makes them different from a formula.

We often want pain to produce a clean lesson.

Never trust someone like that again.

Never let yourself need another person that much.

Never make that mistake again.

The lesson may protect us.

It may also keep protecting us after the danger has passed.

Love creates a particularly difficult version of this problem because loving someone gives them access to places where they can hurt us.

Afterward, closing those places can feel like learning.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes we're still learning what the lesson actually was.

I don't think there's a universal test.

Time helps.

Other people help.

Watching what happens helps.

So does noticing whether our protection is allowing us to live differently or merely preventing the original experience from ever being possible again.

Perhaps this is why love has never felt much like possession to me.

You can possess an object without asking what it wants to become.

People are inconvenient that way.

To love someone is to encounter another center of experience that remains partly inaccessible to you no matter how close you become.

You can know them deeply.

You can't finish them.

And if the relationship remains alive long enough, they'll eventually show you something you didn't know.

Maybe something beautiful.

Maybe something difficult.

Probably both.

The same is true in the other direction.

There are versions of you that another person may notice before you do.

There are things you'll become that neither of you can predict.

Love doesn't guarantee that two changing people will always be able to remain together.

I don't think it needs to.

Perhaps it's enough that, while we're together, we don't require one another to stop changing in order to remain recognizable.

That leaves some uncertainty.

It also leaves somewhere for the next thing we don't know about each other to arrive.