constellations #85: on love

Hi again.

• In five days from now (as I send this), I’ll be getting married. But I don’t want to write about marriage. I want to write about love.

• (I’ve been in this relationship for a long time, but we only decided to get married relatively recently, after a long time of me swearing I never would; I just felt — still feel — ambivalent about the institution. Still, though, here I am, doing it! And I do hope one day, in a different newsletter, to write about why.)

• A few years ago, I was at a friend’s party in New York. A group of us were talking about dating — the drama of it, the bad first dates, the way everyone knows everyone in a niche dating scene, etc. — and one woman mentioned that okay, yes, sure, dating around Brooklyn could be rough, but she actually had a girlfriend out in California. And we’re in love, she said, earnestly, gleefully, and it’s so great. For some reason her glee caught me off guard. I feel like I never hear people my age say, I’m in love! like that — especially about something longterm, something past the crush phase. It didn’t feel like bragging or one-upping or anything; she just seemed happy, uncontainably happy. I found it so sweet. I hardly knew her but right then I felt so happy for her. I thought, Well, I’m in love, but I never talk about it like that. I resolved to start doing so.

• But I hardly ever wrote about it — not here, not really anywhere. “Writing about love is impossible and pointless,” Helena Fitzgerald wrote in a newsletter last year. “Putting it in language immediately deadens it and turns it into a fiction. ...  Love is unknowable, and embarrassing, and stupid, and sometimes it’s nothing — putting all the fanciest vocabulary words you know up against a feeling in your stomach.” I get it. It feels too corny, too personal; my own story feels so strange and unique, and I always feel like I have to caveat it. (And then: Who doesn’t think her own love story is unique?) Plus, those who have written about love well have written about it so well, and those who have written about it badly have written about it so badly.

• But really, if I’m being honest, I disagree that even the attempt to write about love “deadens it and turns it into a fiction.” In the opening pages of The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson argues with her lover about this exact idea. She cites “the passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase ‘I love you’ is like ‘the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.’ ” She goes on: “Just as the Argo's parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase ‘I love you,’ its meaning must be renewed by each use, as ‘the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.’ ” This means language is not a deadening, but a window — everything we say lets in a small slice of light, a possible meaning. And each time we say it, it’s a new slice of light. Always a new window; forever a perspective getting wider. Earlier in the book, Nelson states plainly, “Words are good enough.” I think so, too.

• I don’t consider myself a romantic, really, but then I think maybe I’m misunderstanding that word. I think about this old “Dear Fuck-Up” column on Gawker (RIP) from Brandy Jensen, where she says she identifies as a “die-hard romantic,” and she means it seriously: “Sometimes I will meet people who describe themselves as real romantics and I’m so relieved to think yes, here is a person who will understand,” she writes. “But eventually it becomes clear that they mean ‘I wrote long, overwrought emails to a college girlfriend’ or ‘I cry a lot at movies’ and not ‘I believe in the redeeming power of romantic love.’ That is what I mean though, and what I believe in.”

• This, I think, is how Mitski writes about love on her new album, The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We. She’s been making videos explaining her thoughts behind some of these songs, and in the video where she breaks down “My Love Mine All Mine,” she talks about love in the light of impermanence. “Every material thing goes away eventually,” she says. “They can get lost, broken, stolen, or just deteriorate — including my body. Once I die, this will all” — she gestures to herself — “become nothing.” So what does she have that really, truly belongs to her? “I know this is corny,” she says, but “it’s this love I feel in me.” She goes on: “I really do believe love is the best thing I ever did in my life. … To love is truly the best and most beautiful thing I ever did.” The song, she says, is about how — in the face of her inevitable death — she wishes that she’d be able to leave behind all that love after she’s gone.

• (As I’ve been writing this I’ve been thinking about other love songs that consider the end of everything. I keep coming back to Julia Jacklin singing, “I’m too in love to die / God couldn't take me now,” an absurdly romantic vision.)

• I, too, believe in “the redeeming power of romantic love”; I, too, think it’s maybe the “best and most beautiful thing I ever did.” This is especially true of the last couple years, in which I’ve felt a surge of new love — a new kind of giddiness and joy, a new kind of tenderness and gratitude — for the person I’ve loved consistently for many, many, many years. Our feelings about each other have grown and changed and shifted over time, and I have always expected that. But the sweetness of this latest turn has shocked me. Most days I feel certain I am the most fortunate person alive, to love and be loved like this, and to believe I can have this forever. And I can’t remember ever not feeling this way, though I know that’s not quite accurate.

• And it does feel redeeming. Lately I’ve heard a couple friends make self-effacing jokes about embarking on self-improvement efforts inspired by their lovers — trying to be less confrontational, less arrogant. I find it so sweet — the way love makes us want to be good: to ourselves and our lovers and everyone else.

• (I think this is true of lots of kinds of love, too — my friendships make me want to be better, as do my relationships with my family, etc. I feel grateful for all of them, all of these “best and most beautiful” things.)

• Jensen wrote her column about being a die-hard romantic from the other side of a fresh heartbreak — but of course, she writes, it was worth it. Because “for some brief, however misguided few weeks there was nothing in the world that was boring to me,” she writes. “I started looking at the things that mean the most to me, things I often take for granted, in the new light of wanting to explain them to someone else. I felt present and eventful, flush with the unfolding thrill of revelation (this is how I see things, do you see them this way also?), alive to the gentle pleasure of knowing and becoming known.” I love this as an explanation of a crush, but I think it can be true of longterm love, too. My sister used to always express surprise that my partner and I didn’t run out of things to talk about after so many years together. But I am never running out of things I once took for granted that can look exciting in the light of his perspective. (What I actually tell my sister is that life just keeps happening — and thank goodness — so there is always more to discuss, more to know.) When I first read Barthes say that the “very task of love” is to keep generating these “inflections which will be forever new,” it sounded like hard work. And I suppose sometimes it is; I don’t mean to imply that I think romantic love is, or ought to be, synonymous with total ease. (It hasn’t been for me.) But sometimes those meanings come from just remaining “alive to the gentle pleasure of knowing and becoming known.”

• Part of my gratitude for my love is a gratitude for my former self: for believing, over years and years and years, that this was possible, would keep being possible — despite the seeming impossibility of it all. “It’s the possibility of total loss that gives gambling its thrill,” Fitzgerald says in that newsletter; “love and sports and roller-coasters and fast cars are exciting because they might crash and kill you. Long odds and high risks make each next day into a miracle. It shouldn’t work out, so if it does, it feels like proof of magic in the world.” And yet, even when the odds are long, when the chances are slim, I remember that we are not captive to the whims of the universe: We can still choose love, over and over, and I’m grateful that we did.

• (And yet, yes, it still feels like magic. Here’s to the magic.)

Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: Sorry I Haven’t Called by Vagabon; The Window by Ratboys; so much Joanna Newsom; so much Sex and the City; this sweet interview with all four members of Talking Heads; this moving article about a safe-use hotline for people who use drugs; a “bachelorex” party (aka a combined bachelor/bachelorette celebration) for me and Matt, which included karaoke and custom koozies and DC’s finest museums and lots of french fries and quality time with friends; the final Palm show in New York — what a band!; a really nice birthday dinner at Water Street Kitchen in Falmouth for Matt; this conversation I had with Kelsey McKinney for The Creative Independent, which recently published

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This time last year I was: spiraling out; and before that I was lacking intuition; and before that I was getting lonely & looking at wall drawings

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Thanks for reading. I love you! I hope you feel loved this month.

xo,
M