In her most recent Brainpickings newsletter, Maria Popova reviewed Rebecca Solnit’s latest release, Cinderalla Liberator. In it, she talks about love that is free of romantic tropes and expectations, where two people can love each other without valuing it by how Instagram-worthy the pictures are. Where love can be a less formal endeavor and, in turn, a less loaded one. Where you can fall in love without having to justify it to your friends over drinks or your family over the holidays.
While I am not at all opposed to the molten and sticky sweet qualities of a passionate love that burns out of control over the course of a few hours, I’m also convinced that it’s a characteristic of learning how to love, rather than a requirement for it.
We grow up (hopefully) learning familial love, and the possibilities surrounding this sort of unconditional, comfortable, and subtle feeling. But familiar love is only one end of the pendulum, and passionate love sits at its opposite station. As such, it is more fleeting, less stable, and sharper in contrast.
When our bodies and minds bloom into reproductive beings, the various gradients of the love spectrum are opened up for exploration. Which is why, when we are younger, passionate love feels so exhilarating and unreal. It’s a newly-created, wild, ephemeral thing, unfurling inside and outside of our bodies. It’s immediately at home yet totally unfamiliar, a foreign entity that suddenly becomes part of you. It’s like tasting, for the first time, something so wonderful you could have never imagined it existing. Only instead of just lingering for a second on your tongue, it’s suddenly inhabiting every cell of your body, and simultaneously bursting from you like a thousand pricks of fiery light.
Replicating this feeling becomes less and less frequent as you age, whether or not you are with the same person or you’ve gone it alone. It’s not necessarily an indication that love is growing stale, or that you are growing bitter, but that your body has simply become accustomed to the fire. You’ve spent all that time swinging back and forth across the pendulum; learning people, feelings, conditions, stupid mistakes, ego trips, and lovely peace. Eventually, your sense for what love means begins to settle like pudding in a chocolate cream pie, slowly becoming level at the surface. Even new sparks, though they still light you up, feel more like licking the spoon than devouring the whole thing.
The quality of the jolt isn’t what matters, though. What matters is that it continues to shake you out of your blank stare into space, or your seething anger at standstill traffic, or your general apathy about life overall. When someone can continue to bring you down to earth — and, yet, every once in awhile allow you to escape it through a tunnel of shared looks and private jokes — to look at a horizon with you and somehow naturally also find the school of dolphins playing in the ocean — to have the same craving for margaritas at the same time on a Wednesday evening — to assign seats on the couch without formal discussion — to fall asleep without having to apologize for every little thing first — to just sit in the same space without fucking saying anything.
What matters is that its your flavor of love, and that you truly enjoy it.
