trails of snails

meaninglessmagical:

“Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you’re intelligent, because you’re decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don’t chase women, because you do the dishes, then I’m disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I’m crazy about you even though you’re neither intelligent nor decent, even though you’re a liar, an egotist, a bastard.” - Milan Kundera, Slowness

I was talking to someone about the differences between friendship and romantic love, and he asked me to explain the difference between the two and to show when you made that jump from one to the other. I sat there for awhile thinking and realizing that, even though there was a distinct difference, that I could not explain it. I just didn’t have the words to even try and attempt to recreate the ideas my head. So he just laughed and said that no one had ever been able to tell the difference. It was clearly a laugh of defeat.

I was frustrated and thought that it was in that inexplicable stage of caring for something that you really could love someone. I just didn’t occur to me to simply leave it at that—that love just is. I thought I needed words to express the inexpressible, which I realize is silly now as I write it out.

But I couldn’t stop thinking that if someone asked me to list out why I loved someone, I would write and write and write and then… I would have nothing left to say. But I would know, with absolute assurance, that there was more and that I hadn’t even begun to get at why I really loved them. My words would only hint at my feelings for them.

And that must be romantic love. It has to be those things that you don’t notice are present in a person, but you would recognize that they were lacking in another person. You would be unable to pinpoint what was lacking, just like you were unable to pinpoint its presence in the one you loved, but you would feel its absence. And that absence is what reduces a relationship to friendship. The explainable things are all accounted for, the empirical love is there, but that missing ingredient just hinders it from moving any further.

The idea of love being unmerited in the Kundera quote is what solidified my idea. Merit is defined as a feature or fact that is deserving of praise. But if we don’t know exactly why we love someone, then we lack the certainty in the cause of our love. We know that we love them; we don’t know why they deserve our love. There are no facts in love. Love just is.

Facts and features can show us why to dislike a person, like the last line of the quote, but nothing points at love. And that’s really mind-blowing and beautiful and magnificent.

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