She has been using the word for twenty-three years. She is forty-four. She used it at twenty-one, when she said it for the first time to a man who said it back and then disappeared six weeks later. She used it again at twenty-seven, when she meant something calmer, more reliable, more like the word home than the word fire. She has used it in arguments as accusation: but I love you. She has used it as reminder, as claim, as plea. She is not certain she has ever used it twice in exactly the same way.
In the consulting room, the word love is frequently the last thing that gets said clearly. It arrives late, or it arrives too early — weaponised before trust is established, or withheld long after it has been felt. Couples who have been together for decades often discover they have stopped using the word altogether. Not because they no longer feel it, but because they have stopped knowing what they mean by it. The word has become too large, or too worn, or too dangerous. One person means attachment. The other means passion. One means I choose you daily. The other means you are the one I cannot live without. These are not the same statement, and they do not always coexist in the same person at the same time.
Contemporary relational theory, following Benjamin, Mitchell, and their inheritors, has insisted that love is always intersubjective — that to love is not simply to feel something toward another but to be constituted in relation to them, to be shaped by the act of loving and being loved. This is not a romantic idea. It is, if anything, an unsettling one. Because it means that love does not happen to us; we happen in it. And what we happen into depends very much on what the other person is doing, wanting, fearing, defending. To love is to be permeable in a direction.
What neither of them says — and what the room holds anyway, in the quality of the air between them — is that they are frightened. Not of unlove. Of the discovery that they have loved in different languages all along.
This is perhaps love's most exacting feature: it refuses to be a fixed quantity. It changes as the people in it change. It does not require only the finding; it requires the continual refinding, in a person who is also continually becoming someone else. The couples who survive this — not easily, not without cost — are the ones who manage, somehow, to find the refinding bearable. Who can tolerate discovering, again, that they are with someone who is not quite who they thought, and choose to be curious rather than betrayed by that fact. The word offers no guarantee. It never did.
