There is a particular kind of sadness that comes from loving someone knowing you might not tomorrow.
Love is not a constant. It is a variable. And we pretend it is not. (I mean I know I do and for the life of me I do not know why)
We say “I love you” like it is a contract, a guarantee, a thing carved in stone. But love is more like weather. It shifts. It changes direction. It can be sunny in the morning and storming by night. And we stand there, bewildered, wondering what happened to the promise we made.
The truth is, we do not love people. We love conditions. We love the way someone makes us feel at a particular moment, in a particular light, under particular circumstances. When those conditions change, so does the love. Not because we are shallow. Because we are human.
The Inversion
Here is the thing nobody tells you about love: it can reverse itself completely.
The person you loved yesterday, you might hate tomorrow. Not because they changed. Because you changed. Or because the conditions that made the love possible have shifted. A betrayal, a disappointment, a slow erosion of trust that happens so gradually you do not notice until it is too late.
And the person you hated? The one who irritated you, who challenged you, who made your skin crawl? Sometimes that hate is just love wearing a mask it does not know how to take off. Give it time. Give it the right conditions. Watch it transform.
(this is not romantic, i know. but it is true)
The Conditions
What makes love stay? Nothing. That is the brutal answer.
Love stays only as long as the conditions that created it remain intact. And conditions are fickle things. They depend on mood, on circumstance, on the chemical soup inside our brains, on whether we slept well last night, on whether the world feels safe enough to let our guard down.
Consider:
- You love someone when they are vulnerable. You hate them when that vulnerability becomes neediness.
- You love someone when they challenge you. You hate them when that challenge becomes criticism.
- You love someone when they are present. You hate them when that presence becomes suffocation.
The love and the hate are not opposites. They are the same thing, seen from different angles.
I think I should quote Rick from Rick and Morty
“I hate to break it to you, but what people call “love” is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed. It hits hard Morty then it slowly fades leaving you stranded in a failing marriage. I did it. Your parents are going to do it. Break the cycle Morty, rise above, focus on science.”
The Melancholy
There is a melancholy that comes with understanding this. Not the dramatic, cinematic kind. The quiet kind. The kind that sits in your chest like a stone and whispers: nothing lasts.
You look at someone sleeping beside you and you think: I love you now. But I do not know if I will love you tomorrow. I do not know if you will love me. I do not know what tomorrow will bring, what conditions will shift, what quiet betrayals will accumulate until the whole thing collapses.
(and that is not cynicism. that is clarity.)
The romantic ideal says love conquers all. The truth says love conquers nothing. It simply is, for as long as it is, and then it is not. And we are left standing in the wreckage, wondering what we did wrong, when in fact we did nothing. We simply existed in a world where conditions change.
The Paradox
And yet.
And yet we keep loving. Knowing it is temporary. Knowing the conditions will shift. Knowing that the person we love today might be a stranger tomorrow.
Why?
Because love, even temporary love, even love that might reverse itself, is better than the alternative. A life without love is not a life. It is an existence and existential one. A waiting room. A holding pattern.
So we love, knowing it might not last. We love, knowing we might hate. We love, knowing the conditions will change. And we do it anyway.
(because what the fuck else can we do?)
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
- Albert Camus
(man I really love that quote, my first gateway to philosophy at grade seven, I don’t even think I understood what It meant properly back then)
And perhaps love is that act of rebellion. Loving despite knowing. Loving despite the impermanence. Loving not because it will last, but because it exists, right now, in this moment, under these conditions.
For today, I love you.
That is all any of us can promise.
But for tomorrow, I do not know.
it’s interesting that I am re-watching the tv series “You” and something that I am thinking about right now is what if Joe Golberg wasn’t able to accept the impermanence of love, is what what this is, or is he just a creep. I guess we will never know….