On Love
A letter about the thing we don’t talk about enough
I’ve been writing about hard things for a long time. Suffering. Fate. The gap between knowing and doing. The mechanics of how we lose ourselves to scoreboards and inheritances we never agreed to. I think the work has been worth doing. Those are the subjects where the philosophy I draw from took itself seriously without flinching.
But I want to turn the other direction for a little while.
Because love is also part of what the philosophers were trying to protect, and somewhere along the way I think we’ve started defaulting to talking about the difficulty of life as though it were the whole picture.
It isn’t. There is also this. The feeling of someone’s hand on your back when you’re tired. The quiet of a room that contains the right person. The way you can be exhausted and stressed and impatient with everything, and then someone you love walks in and your whole body decides, without consulting you, to soften a little.
That softening is one of the most ordinary and one of the most extraordinary things human beings do. We tend to walk past it without comment, because it happens so often but it’s worth pausing on.
Love is many things. We act like it is one thing, because the word is one word, but it covers far more ground than a single word should be asked to hold. The love between two people who have built something together over decades, and have to remember sometimes that they are still choosing it rather than merely inhabiting it. The love between old friends who can go six months without talking and pick up exactly where they left off, with no apology required on either side. The love a parent feels watching a child sleep, which is so complete and so undefended that it can take the wind out of a person who wasn’t expecting to feel it that strongly that night.
There is also the love that survives somebody. The kind that goes on quietly for years after the person is gone, showing up in small things. The way you reach for the phone to tell them something before remembering you can’t. The reach itself is a form of still loving them, addressed to an absence that used to be a person. It would be cruel to call that love a mistake, and we don’t, because we know better.
There is love for places too. The particular bend of a road you grew up driving on. A kitchen at a certain time of evening. A city that took you in when you needed taking in. These are the same machinery aimed at something that doesn’t move, which is its own kind of relief.
And the strange, almost invisible love for strangers. The person who held the door long enough that you didn’t have to break your stride. The driver who let you in. The colleague who covered for you on the day you couldn’t be there. Many of these people you wouldn’t recognize if you saw them again. But something passed between you, and the world was a little more bearable for it. That is also love, in a register we don’t often dignify with the word.
The reason it matters to name all of this is that we are walking around inside more love than we tend to notice. On most days, we are surrounded by some form of it. The person who texts to check in. The dog who is genuinely happy you’re home. The friend who remembers the small thing you mentioned three weeks ago and asks how it turned out. These are not nothing. They are very close to everything.
The Stoics have sometimes been read as suspicious of love, because love makes us vulnerable to what we cannot control. That reading is wrong.
Seneca, in a letter to Lucilius, writes that he who lives only for himself, and looks at everything with reference to his own interests, cannot live happily; if you wish to live for yourself, he says, you must live for another.
That isn’t the philosophy of detachment people imagine when they hear “Stoic.”
It’s closer to the opposite.
Love anyway. Knowing the cost. Knowing nothing about it is guaranteed. Knowing that the people you love will, in some form, eventually be taken from you or you from them.
Love anyway.
Choose presence over the protective armor of distance. Be there. Let it matter.
This is harder than it sounds because the protective move is always available. You can be in the room with someone and not be in the room with them. You can love someone in theory while remaining slightly absent in practice. The phone is right there. The to-do list is running underneath every conversation. The half-attention is so familiar that we mistake it for presence.
Love, properly understood, is mostly attention. The quality of it. The depth of it. The willingness to actually be where you are with the person you’re with, instead of half-present and partially elsewhere.
There is no workaround.
The love is in the attention.
Without attention you have the form of love without its substance.
Which means love, despite how the songs frame it, is mostly a practice.
Something you do, repeatedly, in the small moments most of the time, in the larger moments occasionally. The hour you stay off your phone when someone you love is talking. The question you ask that shows you remembered. The reach for them in the dark when they shift in their sleep. The willingness to sit with someone in their bad mood without trying to manage it. The work of paying attention to a person you’ve already known for years, as though you might still be surprised by them. Which, if you’re paying real attention, you usually are.
What the practice produces, over time, is something philosophy doesn’t have great language for. A texture of life that someone living without it can’t quite imagine. The quiet, persistent, often unnoticed sense that you are not alone in the world. That what you do matters to somebody. That if something terrible happened to you, certain people would actually be devastated. And conversely, that certain people would be devastated if you left, so you might as well stay, even on the bad days.
This is what the hardship posts sometimes obscure. We talk so much about how to handle what goes wrong that we can forget to register, with appropriate seriousness, how much is also going right. The fact that you have anyone at all who would miss you if you disappeared. The fact that there are people whose voices, hearing them say your name, still do something to your chest. The fact that you are capable, right now, of loving and being loved, which a person at the end of their life would likely trade almost anything to have one more day of.
The hard subjects still need addressing. They exist alongside this other thing, and the other thing is also worth giving its due. It would be strange to write hundreds of essays about how to bear what’s heavy without sometimes stopping to acknowledge what’s light. What’s good. What we are lucky to have, even on days we don’t feel particularly lucky.
So notice it today. The voice on the phone. The body next to yours in bed in the morning. The text from the friend you haven’t seen in months. The dog who follows you from room to room. The hand on your back when you’re tired. Let it land.
And if you can, today, tell someone. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Doesn’t have to be a speech. Just the small unmissable signal that they are loved by you, that you noticed they were there, that the world is more bearable because they’re in it.
The older I get, the more I think this is most of what life is actually for. The people. The presence. The small window we had to love some other tired and breakable creatures during the time we got.
Stay stoic,
SW
Continue reading:
What struck me most is the idea that love is fundamentally a form of attention.
In an age where distraction is abundant and presence is scarce, giving someone your full attention may be one of the most meaningful acts of love available to us.
The Stoic connection is deeper than many realise. Not detachment from people, but gratitude for them. Loving fully while knowing none of it is guaranteed.
That's not a contradiction, as many may assert.
It's what makes the love matter.
Beautifully written. Brought a bit of peace and love to me, so i thank you for that. ❤️🙏