In which I actually write a love song

There's a paragraph in The Biographies of Ordinary People in which Meredith realizes that she does not know how to write two characters in love, and since I happen to have a copy of BOOP within reach I might as well look it up, and when I did it turned out to be not a paragraph but a sentence:

She didn't mention the novel she had been working on, the one she stopped when she couldn't figure out how to make her love interest seem interested.

(Also, wow, BOOP is still good, I should re-read it.)

But the thing is that I was also not particularly good at writing about love; I punted it in The Larkin Day Mysteries by having Larkin do the typical thirtysomething thing, picking a partner based on proximity and then realizing two years later that you aren't going to build a future with this person because the two of you barely have a present.

I used to write about this, in some of my other blogs, and I've thought often that one of the purposes of keeping blogs and diaries – perhaps the only purpose – is to draw a map of your own experiences so you can both remember and understand them, and since the majority of what happens to us is quotidian the majority of our maps may be banal (or, at best, an accurate representation of a path that is repeatedly walked [the hero with the thousand faces and so on]), but every once in a while you discover something that is new, at least to you, and so I discovered that "being a girlfriend" meant:

1. Accompanying your boyfriend to parties (but not sticking too closely to him when you're there)
2. Sharing one (1) activity such as rock climbing, tabletop gaming, social dancing, etc. (and remaining separate in all other activities)
3. The obvious third thing

And you can do that for almost two years before you break up, and you can run consecutive sequences of eighteen-month boyfriends before you realize, as Meredith did, that you have no idea how to write a love interest who seems interested.

This, by the way, is not the fault of the boyfriends. They don't know what they're doing any more than you do, and so they're doing what they think they're supposed to do, same as you, and both of you suspect there should be something more to all of this, and so (using general gendered stereotypes) you push for more by asking for it and he pulls away by refusing to accept less.

But! The point!

I started to understand love a few years ago, when I wrote the philosophy book, but I may have gotten the cause-and-effect wrong. Here's how I phrased it in 2022:

All problems are ultimately solved by love. They are penultimately solved by the process of going from guessing to knowing. 

And last week I wrote a love duet for my musical, and for the first time it felt like these characters were actually falling in love, and as soon as I was done I told Larry that love, between two people, was the result of solving each other's problems.

(Sidebar, and I'll try to keep it short – it's clear that many of us understand this instinctually, if not practically. That's how we get "Milady" and "I can fix him!" [Wow, I did in fact keep that short.])

And of course Larry immediately got it, and he was clever enough to expand it to the place we always take our ideas, integration, zero-to-one, justice (if you're Socrates), and so on.

Because love isn't really about "well, I see that you've been put under a magic spell and I know how to remove the spell," except that it also is, in the metaphorical sense. "I see that you are less than whom you might become," except that sounds pejorative, really it comes down to "I see you," which is what I always tell Larry when he asks me why I fell in love with him, except I flip it around and answer "because you took me seriously."

And then he says "and you took me seriously."

And then we joke about how we were both the smartest people each of us had ever met, but that's only the joke part, because to take somebody seriously means to see them as both zero and one simultaneously, love is a superpositional state, and to want them to get to one.

And I'll be honest, most of us want certain people to stay at zero, especially if we view the world as zero-sum –

and perhaps the challenge then becomes to take the entire world seriously, which –

well –

do you know what, I think I'm going to stop here, throw up the paywall, and give you the lyrics to the love song.

Also, since I have to put something in this spot because Ghost always includes a few lines of blurry text before the paywall (for those of you who are viewing in browser, not in email), I'll tell you that when I was a very young child I took the phrase "threw up the sash" in A Visit from St. Nicholas (The Night Before Christmas) literally.

In other words, I thought the narrator was so astonished to see Santa that he puked.

Anyway, here's a love song: