Stop Trying To Narrativize Love
Why Subjecting Love To Our Self-Constructed Narratives Misses The Point
When we love, we operate under the illusion that we are the architects of this sublime state. Whether it is a friend providing a shoulder to cry on, a new father showering his newborn with care, or a couple leaving romantic post-it notes on the refrigerator door, it is commonly held that we are the sole proprietors of the love we dole out to others.
Love surely requires the presence of at least two people to bring about its genesis. One cannot love another person if they have no conception of their existence in any form or fashion. However, once this brainchild of overflowing human passion comes to pass, it exists as a separate entity from the people involved. It exists externally and subjects its wounded to its whims.
The notion that love is a state impermeable to our inclinations is certainly not a novel one. In fact, one of love’s most prominent appearances in our cultural lexicon is the phrase: “falling in love.” Falling implies a lack of control—an act dictated by its lack of permission. Therefore, should it not be understood by love’s practitioners that the love we unknowingly create exists outside of our general control?
Although we can acknowledge this phenomenon in the abstract, accepting this notion in our actual lives is all too terrifying. To operate with the knowledge that the love we possess for others operates independently of our will relinquishes a sense of control from our lives that many simply cannot accept. Moreover, it isn’t merely the relinquishing of control that makes people so uncomfortable, but rather what it is they are relinquishing.
To love fully and wholeheartedly necessitates the complete surrender of one’s being. Anything short of unnerving vulnerability can only result in a performative presentation of self, distorting the love shared. To love is to grant someone access to an armory meticulously designed to decimate the defenses we’ve erected to protect ourselves from emotional ruin. We cannot bear the possibility of something existing outside of us that could utterly ruin us on a whim. That is a relinquishing of control many can’t stomach.
In turn, we tell stories. For the events in our lives to fit neatly into the shifting puzzle of our minds, we narrate, shave off irregularities, embellish, and include a snappy hook and a satisfying end. Within the confines of our minds, we are regular Hemingways. Every event must be told neatly, with recognizable character development and causal reasoning—why I did that and why he said that. Good stories have some semblance of order and structure, and we recruit this practice to explain our lives away.
Our refusal to permit the possibility of being utterly devastated without our permission renders love the chief recipient of this practice. Yet, most frustratingly, love remains impervious to our cogitations. Love sifts through our fingers that grasp the pen aimed at constructing our love stories.
Therefore, love feels nonsensical. When it leaves us wide awake all night, airbrushes the brightest palette of colors across our lens, and reduces us to pieces, it feels irrational and cruel. Yet, love never asked for our futile defenses of rationalization. In fact, love seems nonsensical only in that it refuses to abide by the narratives we shamelessly try to constrict it to.
Love was never meant to be in our control or subject to our constructed ends. Love is an intrinsic good—a good in and of itself. It need not be embellished and is better served when understood as it is: something utterly outside of our control.
Consequently, when our personal fables of love fail to come to fruition, we lash out against love. We curse it, drag its name through the mud, and swear never to find ourselves in its grasp again (as if it were a choice). Yet, love was never meant to exist as a conduit for our proclivity for storytelling. Whether our experiences with love follow the path we envisioned for ourselves or not (they never do), love still happens. To distract ourselves from the love we gave, received, and basked in by focusing on the detours reality may have taken from our constructed fantasies is to miss the point entirely.
Our beings are amalgamations of the various sources of love we receive, and we are irreparably changed by the love we experience. Certain jokes, metaphors, lines of thought, movies, laughter, and restaurants are enshrined forever in the pantheon of love stories we’ve courageously taken part in. Love was never in our control and was never meant to follow our direction. The possibility of loss is the price we pay to love, and to denigrate such a concept by attempting to narrativize its throes serves no one.
Our self-constructed love stories may go awry, but it should only be a comfort to us that no matter what befalls us, the love we shared exists outside our dominion, radiating throughout our very beings.
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