Selfless love

On loving & losing, vulnerability, and the ego

We are having Introspection Hours again. But I promise the next post will be fun and silly :)

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I squat and scoop the dog into my arms. We climb the stairs together, day after day, now that the arthritis is so advanced that his back legs sometimes fail to support his weight. Joint laxity in the hips is a curse bred into golden retrievers, the unintended and excruciating side effect of humans’ centuries-long genetic meddling, our attempts at playing God. A twinge develops in my lower back, but we climb and we climb.

The last book I read was Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour, a shape-shifting kind of novel about love and loss, and I keep coming back to it. Heti writes that humans aren’t made in God’s image because we look like God, but because “we like doing the same thing God likes. Both making life and making art are pouring spirit into form.” But humans make (and remake) life too: we bend form, sometimes until the spirit breaks. It’s dangerous to play God.

I loved Jack with the ferocity of a nature-crazy child who pined for a dog for ten years before finally getting her wish. I loved him ferociously, but I loved him as an object. He was my dream, and then he was my pet, mine all mine. We don’t problematize this type of love in our relationships with our pets the same way we do in human relationships; it doesn’t make sense to, when the gulf between subject and object is so wide. Jack has had an excellent life, but I feel a pang of guilt when I think about how that life was brought into being to serve human needs (even if he doesn’t know it). That’s not to mention that we hold not only the power of life, but also the power of death—a power we may have to use soon if his pain gets much worse.

I’m worried that when that time comes, I’ll be tempted to hold on a little longer—for myself, and for my mother, who is already falling to pieces with premature grief—instead of letting go, for him, to set him free.

~

My relationship ended last month, after a short preview of what long distance would be like gave both of us a reality check. Both this time and when I first tried long distance a few years ago, it was hard to bear how quickly I found myself turning inwards—not exactly in the sense of turning away from my partner, but in the sense of becoming more preoccupied with my own needs. A person standing in front of you is solid and bright, unpredictable, and sacred; their gravitational pull works to draw you out of yourself, calling on you always to pay attention. You orbit each other like planets. It’s risky when distance turns a living, changing person into a concept that exists in your head. It’s hard to respond generously to a concept, and to devote yourself to it completely. It’s hard to give a concept space to breathe.

The consequence, for me at least, is that I start to fixate on the relationship itself, rather than attending to the other person as a whole, real, other person. I am losing my grasp on you, and so I cling to what I get out of loving you. It’s the classic substitution of I love you with I love how you make me feel. When you’re far away from someone—without their gravity right there acting on you, drawing you out—it’s easiest just to hold onto the reasons the relationship makes you happy. These are the parts of love that already exist in your head, and don’t strictly require the other person to be there contributing.

Obviously, there are several problems with this. I think the salient one when you’re trying to do long distance is that time and space tip you gradually from making each other happy towards fuelling your relationship on the memory of how you used to be happy, when you were physically in each other’s lives, and maybe also on the prospect that you could be happy again.¹ When your I love you has already become I love how you make me feel, reliance on bygone happiness is not good. Now, all you’re left with is I miss how you make me feel.

This is a self-centred kind of missing, focused on the ways the other person made your life brighter; it isn’t missing them for who they are. It’s I wish you were here to make dinner with me and watch the sun go down. It’s I wish you were here to pick the music. It’s I wish you were here to work out this knot in my back, because it hurts and I’m tired and your hands know me so well.

This is also a self-defeating kind of missing; it breeds frustration, and maybe even resentment, because it’s a promise that’s always unfulfilled. The only reason to cling to an unfulfilled promise is because you’re afraid of what will happen if you let go. I know that fear well, believe me. Especially when other parts of your life are changing or feel outside of your control—when your sense of self is unstable and security becomes precious—it feels safe to ground yourself in your relationship. Even if the relationship itself has changed, you can keep running on the idea that things could be good again if you just try. But you’ve gone, now, from loving someone to fearing the emptiness that person would leave behind if they left—and these can feel like the same thing, but God knows they aren’t.

Eventually, we were always going to have to choose between living alone in the present and suffocating together in the past.

I didn’t want to love you just for me, which is why things had to end. You’re more than the you-shaped hole in my life. I refuse to love you as an absence.

~

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been worried about loving selfishly.

The impulse to cling to love’s object is rooted in the ego: it’s about sheltering the self, both on the basic level of I love how you make me feel and on that deeper level of I don’t know who I would be without you. And it’s doubly selfish, because clinging tends to suffocate the other person.

One of my favourite songs ever is “Selfless” by The Strokes. I love this song as a song, and I don’t want to analyze the lyrics. But I’m thinking about the lyrics now as I write this, and I realize how paradoxical the title is. The song is a hymn of devotion to the speaker’s lover:

Please don’t be long, ‘cause I want you now

I don’t have love without you around

Life is too short, but I will live for you

The paradox of living for someone else is that on the one hand, it means giving yourself to them completely, and on the other hand, it’s devotion because you need them. It’s selfless, but it’s selfish. The same tension is expressed in the idea that your significant other “completes you,” which implies self-abnegation and self-seeking at the same time. On top of this, when you feel that you’re living for someone else, your concept of who they are is filtered through the lens of how much you need them, and so it becomes distorted. They become your “other half,” and so neither of you is allowed to be a whole person.

I suspect that romantic love is especially at risk of becoming selfish, because it requires such vulnerability and is so closely tied to both our deep psychological needs and our mundane everyday needs.² There are ways to mitigate this, sure. As individuals, we can strive for balanced personal lives with broad social support networks. As a society, we can build a culture where the pressure isn’t on one monogamous romantic partner to be everything to us—our emotional and intellectual soulmate, sexual partner, coparent, the person we make all our big life and financial decisions with, and the person we come home to at the end of each day. But regardless, I think it’ll probably always be true that romantic love has a delicate relationship with the self, and is more prone to clinging than friendship and familial love are.

And what if it gets worse over time? I’m still pretty young and idealistic, but I’ve already started to see how experience and the practicalities of real life can lead out of pure absorption in another person and into a greater tendency to focus on your own needs. I can’t imagine how much worse it gets once you’ve gone through repeated heartbreaks and had to rebuild over and over again, and once you have to think about marriage and homeownership and doing your taxes with someone. We’ve debunked the myth that people get more politically conservative as they age, but couldn’t the underlying premise—that getting older makes us more self-centred—still be true?

But let’s go back to love and clinging. There’s a tension here, because love, although it invites the ego in, also seeks the annihilation of the self. Love can be about contributing to something bigger than yourself, and about doing service for or giving care to others. Love can be about the simple pleasure of being absorbed in a friend’s mental universe when you’re deep in conversation with them. Although sex can be used as a tool for affirming our sense of self-importance and status, and although it has a performative element that can turn easily into self-consciousness and maybe also narcissism, I really believe the deeper sexual desire is a desire to lose ourselves. That’s why climax is la petite mort, and why people draw parallels between sex and spiritual or religious experience. It’s why a lot of the best love songs have spiritual/religious themes, and why spiritual/religious writing often feels erotic.³ Because losing yourself in another person is like losing yourself in God.

The difference, of course, is that God isn’t the person we have to buy groceries with, or the person we need to remind us we’re special when we feel insecure, and we don’t expect God to be a good communicator or to spend quality time with us or to stay loyal. We don’t need anything from God the way we need things from the people we love, and God can’t leave us or let us down.

There’s an idea expressed in various traditions that love exists as a hierarchy, or as a kind of progression, depending on whether you wander further east or west. The Greeks—I know we know this, just bear with me—distinguished eros (passionate love) from philia (friendship) and agape (universal love for humanity). Christian thinkers later interpreted agape as godly love and tended to place it above the two other types. Kierkegaard argued that eros and philia are lower because they’re preferential loves, whereas agape is higher because it’s egalitarian and self-abnegating. The Buddhist practice of loving-kindness begins with tapping into the love you feel for specific people in your life, like your family members. You then turn that love inwards and develop a compassionate relationship with yourself, and finally you turn your love outwards again, this time to extend it universally.

While talking through the breakup, I said I felt confident that we’d be able to be friends, and that it felt as though we’d already started growing into a more platonic kind of love. The next step, I joked, was for us to just transcend physical reality and surrender completely to the divine mystery. She laughed and I said I was funny, and I laughed and said I’m really not. Anyway, the obvious problem is that maintaining a relationship with the divine mystery alone isn’t going to satisfy most people. We’re always going to need each other, and that needing is always going to come with the baggage of two fragile, fallible human selves.

I’m not Kierkegaard, and I don’t think we have to strive to trade our human loves for divine love. (No shade to Kierkegaard, he had an extremely depressing childhood and an epic heartbreak as a young adult, and I guess his philosophy of love reflects that.) Also, caring for yourself and making your own needs heard in your relationships is so important, and striving for complete self-abnegation isn’t healthy. And even though I think the outcome of clinging in love tends to be painful, the roots of that impulse are legitimate; clinging is maybe the most profoundly human urge I can think of. Doesn’t pretty much everything we do contain some echo of this persistent need to hold on, to find safety and permanence in world that spins so terrifyingly fast? And what better anchor than the people we love, when humans need love like we need air to breathe and when love is often our most powerful source of affirmation?

I’m trying to question this nagging feeling I’ve had that selfishness in love is dangerous and selfless love is an ideal. I realize that things aren’t so black and white.

First, the line between selfishness and selflessness is blurry. There are moments when I’m overwhelmed by the completely unconditional way my dog seems to love me; his devotion doesn’t waver no matter what I do. At the same time, he depends on me quite literally for all his needs, and he also has no concept of me as a person—so does he love me only as food-giver? In this sense, his love seems perfectly and necessarily selfish. Which is it really? And when we can’t even pull apart selfless and selfish love, how can we elevate one as an ideal and denigrate the other?

Second, I really believe that caring for ourselves builds our capacity to care for others, and vice versa—the same way that spiritual or religious love educates the heart in ways that benefit our personal relationships, and vice versa. Part of the beauty of the concept of loving-kindness is that it recognizes that different types of love are mutually reinforcing, not exclusive or conflicting. Loving is a transferrable skill, and self-love builds that skill. I am learning this again and again. I am learning it as I tend to my back, working my thumbs in gentle circles until the tension in my muscles starts to ease, and as I get up again to climb the stairs with Jack. I am learning it as I work to be happy outside of a relationship, and in the process rediscover a deep capacity to devote myself to my friendships.

Lastly, I think it’s unproductive to criticize ourselves for stumbling as we navigate the paradoxes of love and try to find the right balance between clinging and letting go, or for searching for something to hold onto. It’s hard to trust another person with your heart, while also resisting the egotistical kind of anxiety and the impulse to hold on too tight that vulnerability triggers. It’s hard to know how to open yourself to needing someone without needing them to complete you, and without confining them to being your other half. In love, we can be vigilant against destructive forms of selfishness while at the same time pushing back against the idea that we can or should be completely selfless.

And if all else fails, we can be gentle. I want to observe without criticizing, and to strive for a love that’s elevated within the bounds of my human-ness. Because, in Heti’s words, “the last thing that’s needed is to judge your own heart.” True.

My sweet boy

1. I know this isn’t true for everyone. Some people can have their needs mostly met through conversation and don’t have to have physical touch or the chance to do everyday life alongside their partner. But it’s true for me, and that’s what I have to go off of here.

2. There are gender dynamics here that I really want to talk about but won’t, because this is supposed to be a reasonable-length Substack post and not a dissertation. But maybe I’ll do another one about dependence/desire/the idea of feminine narcissism.

3. I was thinking about this last week when I decided to spend a random weeknight watching ContraPoints’ three-hour video essay on Twilight (because why not I guess?). She talks about a lot of these ideas in part 6. I think I recommend the video? Although there’s definitely a lot of unnecessary content and the arguments don’t feel as tight as in some of her other stuff.