1. Why "falling"?
We come into love the same way we leave it - by falling. First, into the arms of our beloved. Then, to our knees. The language of falling isn’t accidental. We fall, quite literally, and in many ways. We fall into the other and become part of them. We also fall into ourselves, into the depths in our hearts that hold the longing for someone else. If love feels otherworldly, it’s because it is. It comes from the darkness inside us, which is in fact most of us, and which we are estranged from because we spent our lives denying it.
José Ortega y Gassett has an understanding of love that explains why we fall. “Love,” he writes, “is a gravitation toward that which is loved.” We are pulled irresistibly toward love:
Love...is the exact reverse of desire, for love is all activity. Instead of the object coming to me, it is I who go to the object and become part of it. In the act of love, the person goes out of himself. Love is perhaps the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward something else. It does not gravitate toward me, but I toward it.
Jose Ortega y Gassett, On Love
We fall in love, in rapture and chaos, because we are pulled into a gravitational field that isn’t our own. This is why we stumble our way into love. It’s also why we struggle to withhold expressions of love, the words are being pulled out of our mouths begging to be expressed. Falls are a loss of bearings and we only catch ourselves once we’ve fallen. So that, when those words leave our lips, love is a confession and not a declaration.
The desire to devour someone we love begins at the moment we realise the deepest hug isn’t intimate enough. Gravity pulls us into the other perpetually and we demand ever closer closeness. The desire to devour someone attests to the gravitational strength of love, it is ultimately the expression of a frustrated wish - we can never get close enough. This why even confessions of love are insufficient. The words "I love you" fail to communicate the strength of that love.
We, ourselves, are being devoured too. By our own gravitational force that needs the other. Andre Gorz describes this in one of the most remarkable love letters to ever be written:
I carry in myself a devouring emptiness within the hollow of my chest, which can only be filled by the warmth of your body against mine.
Andre Gorz, Letter to D
2. Modern Assaults on Love
Fallling. You see, we don't say rising into love. There is in it the idea of the fall. And it goes back, as a matter of fact, to extremely fundamental things. That there is a curious tie between the fall and creation. Taking this ghastly risk is the condition of there being life. You see, for all of life is an act of faith and an act of gamble.
The moment you take a step, you do so on an act of faith because you don't really know that the floor is not going to give under your feet. The moment you take a journey, what an act of faith. The moment you enter into any kind of human relation, you've given yourself up. But this is the most powerful thing that can be done - surrender. And love is an act of surrender to another person. Total abandonment. "I give myself. Take me, do anything you like with me." That's quite mad
Alan Watts
Falling is the only way into love. Falling in love is a dramatic and radical act. In the many modern assaults on love, it’s precisely this falling, and the risk it implies, that people are trying to avoid. Alain Badiou writes that “love cannot be a gift given on the basis of a complete lack of risk.” He argues that the modern understanding of love is a “safety-first” concept of love and that this threatens the possibility of real love:
It is love comprehensively insured against all risks: you will have love, but will have assessed the prospective relationship so thoroughly, will have selected your partner by searching online - by obtaining, of course, a photo, details of his or her tastes, date of birth, horoscope sign, etc. - and putting it all in the mix you can tell yourself: "This is a risk-free option."
Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love
The moment we can say why we love someone, specifically, we are no longer talking about love. If we love someone because they have particular qualities then we haven’t fallen for anything unique and, therefore, we haven’t fallen in love with a person, who is always irreplaceable. The point of love is that we fall for them.
The other major modern threat to love is to see it as belonging to one amongst many goods as if it could be substituted by something else, especially something that gives pleasure more easily:
The second threat love faces is to deny that it is at all important. The counterpoint to the safety threat is the idea that love is only a variant of rampant hedonism and the wide range of possible enjoyment. The aim is to avoid any immediate challenge, any deep and genuine experience of the otherness from which love is woven.
Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love
Sometimes, when we think we have fallen in love, we have actually fallen in to love. That is, we are not positioned in love, we have crashed in to it. In this case, love is a miracle and a curse. It is a miracle because it saves us. It is a curse because it wasn’t supposed to. Love like this ends in disaster, if it can even be called love at all.
Essentially, this was Erich Fromm’s concern about love. For Fromm, we confuse “the experience of ‘falling’ in love and the permanent state of being in love” what he calls standing in love. Love catches you and breaks your fall. It should also provide the foundation for standing up again. Falling, he believes, reveals not love but lack. It is precisely this miraculous quality that makes this love inappropriate:
If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love...However, this type of love is by its very nature not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning they do not know all this: in fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being "crazy" about each other, as proof of intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
For Fromm, “love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is standing in, not a ‘falling for’…the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving not receiving.” Giving is not “a deprivation…because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.” We are made to give and “not to give would be painful”:
Giving implies to make the other person a giver also and they both share in the joy of what they have brought to life. In the act of giving something is born, and both persons involved are grateful for the life that is born for both of them. Specifically with regard to love this means: love is a power which produces love.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Just as it is with individuals, a society oriented around having and keeping is not generous and humble enough to develop love within it. Giving, a requirement for love, is interpreted in terms of a loss. You have to risk your heart . This is another modern concern and, subsequently, an obstacle to love. This fear is captured by Rilke who claimed that:
Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another...it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself...
But young people err so often and so grievously in this: that they (in whose nature it lies to have no patience) fling themselves at each other, when loves takes possession of them, scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder, confusion...And then what?...each loses himself for the sake of the other and loses the other.
R.M. Rilke
3. Who We Are in Love
All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighbouring solitudes, whereas everything that one is wont to call giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to come close to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling.
R.M. Rilke
Our reverence for independence and individuality has intensified our fear of falling (in love). Love comes after the fall (and it must, otherwise, as Rilke says, there is an endless falling and we cannot fall forever). But what have we become once we have landed in love? What’s left of ourselves?
Love exists between solitude and singularity, between separateness and oneness. Rilke believed that we are ultimately and irredeemably strangers to one another. He thought that love failed so often because we are incomplete and that our task is to go into ourselves and become something:
But just think, can that be anything beautiful, to give oneself away not as something whole and ordered, but haphazard rather, bit by bit, as it comes?
R.M. Rilke
The idea that we are only ever two independent solitudes who must be complete by ourselves can only go so far and is likely a fantasy that operates against love. When you love someone, when you open yourself to them, you cannot help but become part of one another:
When you love, you open your life to an Other. All your barriers are down. Your protective distances collapse. This person is given absolute permission to come into the deepest temple of your spirit. Your presence and life can become this person's ground. It takes great courage to let someone so close. Since the body is in the soul, when you let someone so near, you let the person become part of you. In the sacred kinship of real love two souls are twinned. The outer shell and contour of identity become porous. You suffuse each other.
John O'Donohue, Anam Cara
Not only will we never be complete, but even if we were, this completeness would still reach out to someone else. We were made to find love. We are not individuals that add to each other, we compound and create something new. John O’Donohue describes each of us as “a language that the other seeks”:
Huge differences may separate us, yet they are exactly what draw us to each other. It is as though forged together we form one presence, for each of us has half a language that the other seeks. When we approach each other and become one, a new fluency comes alive. A lost world retrieves itself when our words build a new circle.
John O'Donohue, Divine Beauty
We wrongly think of love in terms of a death of possibility, independence, and a former self. But it is a birth. Of two people and communion. And eventually, life. Which is the whole point. Humans are born to grow themselves. In giving to each other we we make new worlds.