There are two kinds of love —
Once upon a time I had a fridge magnet. I don’t remember where I bought this fridge magnet (maybe in Victoria while I was going to college for the first time?) but I remember how excited I was to happen upon it, and how it made me feel seen.
A list of wisdom from Marion Winik, this magnet, black with white text, covered all the bases.
The path is not straight.
Mistakes need not be fatal.
People are more important than achievements or possessions.
Be gentle with your parents.
Never stop doing what you care about most.
Learn to use a semi-colon.
You will find love.
Hopeful, inspiring, softening, reinforcing, relieving, and just a little bit irreverent: everything you need to be reminded of when you reach for a snack.
I loved this fridge magnet until one day I went traveling—I don’t remember where—and I left the magnet behind with my mother. I wanted it to be appreciated while I was gone, you know?
She obliged my request to keep it out of a box and in her line of sight, placing it on the side of her fridge. But when I came back she’d edited the text.
I returned to my beloved fridge magnet to find that she’d scratched out most of the bottom line. What once said You will find love now read You are love.
Huh. There are two kinds of love.
It is through love and lack of love that we will understand the true nature of reality. For love is simply a metaphor for wholeness, an entire completeness, a sense of one’s meaning in the Universe.
Love does not exist. Not the story we’ve been told. Love is the biggest word in the smallest cage. We do not fall in love. We do not fall out of love. Love does not exist, the story we’ve been told. Love is a lie. Love is a hoax, an illusion. Love is not magic. Love is not a many splendored thing. Love is the underlying reality of all things.
Love is the underlying reality of all things.
There are two kinds of love.
The first kind of love is the fabric.
—the agent of universal synthesis, “the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world,” as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it so elegantly.
The first kind of love is unconditional. This is the fabric of all things. It just is. This love is what knits our conscious experiences together. It is the space between, the relationality between all things.
In The Book of Joan, Lidia Yuknavitch writes about the first kind of love,
Love was never meant to be less than electrical impulse and the energy of matter, but that was no small thing. The Earth's heartbeat or pulse or telluric current, no small thing. The stuff of life itself. Life in the universe, cosmic or as small as an atom.
But we wanted it to be ours. Between us. For us. We made it small and private so that we'd be above all other living things. We made it a word, and then a story, and then a reason to care more about ourselves than anything else on the planet.
There are two kinds of love.
The second kind of love is the story.
The second kind of love is the kind you can have and hold, or at least that you try to. It is a tall tale, this notion that we can contain the fabric, that we can categorize it and keep it—that it can belong to us.
This kind of love has borders and rules. It is conditional and built out of boundaries—beginnings and endings.
This is the embodied human experience of love: meta-love, socialized love, capitalized love, motherly love, brotherly love, love with rules, love with caveats, love in condos, love as crushed carbon in crushed velvet boxes.
All of these stories are separate, boundaried. That is the second kind of love. Not the fabric. Not really love.
If the first kind of love is the space between, the second kind of love is love that grasps—the story of love that wishes to close the gap.
You might argue, and I might agree with you, that certain kinds of love are closer to the fabric than others. The love of mother for her child. Agape. Universal love. Love of nature. Love for God. The love shared between lifelong friends.
There are so many ways to love with minimal conditions—so many places where the line between the first kind of love and the second kind of love is blurred.
But I might argue, and you might not agree, that the most celebrated kind of “love” in our society is not a blurry kind of love. I might argue that that which we often refer to as love, above all else, is really not love at all.
Erotic love is by its very nature exclusive and not universal; it is also perhaps the most deceptive form of love there is.
- Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
You will find love and You are love are incompatible statements.
You can’t find that which you are never separate from. This is why Erich Fromm, author of The Art of Loving, a book originally published in 1956 (which I discovered through the work of bell hooks), argues that romantic love, or “erotic” love, is the most conditional kind love and therefore the furthest love from the fabric of truth.
All the time we hear people say it, “Love is the answer,” but how often do they question the ways in which they participate in love, the ways in which their performance of love keeps them separate from others?
What if it our seeking of romantic love is exactly the act that keeps us from connecting to the fabric of love?
What if our performance of romantic love—specifically, the containment and the separation of love as something that belongs to two above all else—is part of what’s keeping us stuck in the matrix of oppression and separation?
To be continued…
Note: in last week’s newsletter, when referring to the islet in The Real Lord of the Flies, I mistakenly wrote “inhabitable” instead of “uninhabitable.” Thanks for reading.
Very thought-provoking ❤️
Love the piece. It is such a fresh perspective into one of the most complex topics!