When you’re enmeshed with someone, both their flaws and their positive qualities become your whole life. This is, I guess you could say, the downside of intimacy. Seen from afar, someone might look like a house you’d like to promptly move into—pretty, spacious, great wood floors. But when you’re actually living inside them the sound of construction coming from the upstairs window and the leaky ceiling make you crazy.

some people prefer to be bored in intimate relationships, and others prefer to be annoyed. I was noodling on it this morning, wondering why I'd always rather prefer to be annoyed.

would you rather be far enough away from someone to feel peace, or would you like to have your psyche entwined with theirs, with the downside of constantly being exposed to all their flaws?

In relationships, there’s some kind of balance you have to strike that’s personal to you—you want to be able to tolerate significant annoyance, because every person you can be truly intimate with is going to come with their own particular set of downsides, but you don’t want to end up in a state of permanent exasperation.

But people who are more organized and structured have a far greater number of internal partitions. It can hard for them to be as present, as soft and consuming and close.

Generally, the people who are most capable of expressing love are soupy, gushy, and disorganized. Their structurelessness can be unsettling—when I’m around them, I feel like I’m submerged in a warm and comforting swamp. But nevertheless a swamp!

When I was younger, I thought that love occurred as a result of comprehensible, desirable qualities. Like, I fell in love with him because he’s tall and beautiful and kind. In reality, I find that there’s some of that, but mostly we fall in love for reasons that have little to do with our partner’s virtue. It’s more that something about their way of being hooks onto us—their attachment style is similar to our mother’s, or the way they listen makes us feel deeply understood.

Romance is annoying. It exposes our vulnerabilities, our worst qualities, the patterns we like to pretend we’ve outgrown. Romance teaches you that what you claim to value is not what you actually value.

Their bad habits disturb any semblance of peace you once had. It’s relatively easy to remain calm around a pet or a child, because we don’t expect them to know better. But an adult knows better! How can it be that they are intelligent, capable, fully possessed of free will… and yet they use their free will to be annoying?

We are given aphorisms like “No one is perfect” and “relationships are hard.” We are given diagnoses like codependent and avoidantly attached and “the day-to-day entanglement of marriage is fundamentally opposed to the mystery that sustains sexual attraction.” Well, in trying to come up with my own theory of love, I’d like to submit: closeness is fundamentally annoying.

Closeness is annoying because it’s about the surrender of control.

It’s Kali Uchis describing falling in love like melting like ice cream. It’s St. Teresa’s ecstasy. It’s why 18th-century German poet Ludwig Uhland said that waking up buried in his lover’s arms is like dying from love’s bliss because he “saw Heaven in her eyes.” Heaven is commonly used to describe this feeling because falling in love is like dying: Both death and falling in love are about losing a grip on reality, leaving this world and entering the ethereal. Like death, we describe a soul in love as being escorted away by angels to a better place. It’s why Cupid has wings—so he can take us from over here to over there.

Yet, when you try to articulate the deepest of your desires, you can’t find a name for it. It’s like that marvellous ache you feel when you see the Milky Way spilled across the sky—it draws you in and makes you long for more of it. This longing has the shape of the infinite. I know a love song is good when I don’t know if they’re singing about a lover or God.

Love, in its purest form, feels like mysticism, like being absorbed into something that wants you to be part of it as much as you want to join it. Some might call it a longing for happiness, but it is so much deeper. Here’s what I mean by mysticism: it’s something that grows your wonder instead of trying to solve it. “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

It’s like watching fire—something that constantly moves without going anywhere. It’s “alive” in its own way. Like how God speaks through a bush that burns but is not consumed, something ineffable about music—the way it decorates time like art decorates space—speaks to us.