The Disasterous Liberating Encounters of Love

This is a brief story of a boy and his encounters with love 

All quotes used are by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek


Love as an event 

 "Love is a disturbance of the existing order, the intrusion of the impossible into the possible, the subversion of the symbolic order. It disturbs the reality we take for granted, and reveals that reality is not all there is, that there is always something more."

Isn't it true that many of us fall in love and it is a complete disaster? You are moving along enjoying your life, hanging out with friends, playing sports, reading questionable books, and wondering where exactly your life is going but you are too busy enjoying the ride to ruin it with questions. 

For the boy, it was in the way he was coming into his own, from nerdy to well still nerdy but able to fool most of the people some of the time that he had some cool aspects!! Women were starting to pay attention to this lad who'd just survived puberty but retained the earnestness that comes with it. 

He's excited about growing up but was still too hesitant to make serious moves. Crushes, dates, and the rest of juvenile exploration happened but all without a serious encounter. 

Then all of a sudden it happens.

A totally continent-accidental day when someone sat next to me n a random bus ride, and we spoke, and a spark was felt. This spark doesn't fade away easily but continues to burn as an ember. Someone he once saw as just a friend suddenly commands all his attention. Her laugh fills the air with music, except when she's laughing at some other guy's jokes and then he wonders if you can still hire a hitman online like in the movies!!

This love seems easy. It sort of carries him. He is young at heart as well as in body and open to adventure. He is not married to the way life is going when the force of the disruption -when the fact that he can't eat, that he often leaves parties to go lay down on his belly to speak to her on the phone, that he's completely smitten and his boys mercilessly tease him doesn't bother him. He's got it bad and it was not anything he could have planned. 

Looking back at this years later it seems like a movie - and while it was unprecedented to feel this way- it was something he could place in culture. He could find answers to what was happening to him

"You're in love you dwanzy " his friends would say.

The very exuberance that came so easily from the feeling of love is ripe for culture to tell us about in songs sitcoms and soap operas. This is the love that makes you not only feel that anything is possible, but that you can be the kind of person whose entire life up until this point had been leading up to this. 

Love means a completely contingent encounter, but after the fact seems necessary. As if all your days leading up to this moment were to lead you here!!

But this sweeping dramatic force of love doesn't mean there aren't difficulties. Life intrudes and you realize the feeling isn't enough..that it takes "something more than love" to sustain love. Where shall you guys live, do your families get along, do your visions of life adhere or are you going to jettison the person you think you want to be for the love without which all that would just seem empty. 

It's in this that the first aspect of the lack of our ability to control love, when it comes to you and if it will last became clear. 

That love alone isn't enough. That encounter brings love to you, what you do with it then depends on how brave you are ready to be. And this bravery doesn't always mean success. The love is there but the tiffs are now becoming fights, there's the silent treatment, and misrecognition of each other that long letters of effusive love, grand gestures, and dramatic proclamations can't fix. 

Two people are slowly realizing that intention isn't enough. Love is a skill that must be practiced and not just a result of naturally following feelings. Life intrudes, options come in the form of chances to travel, to work in lavish laces and well, they both owe it to themselves to maximize their opportunities. Even if they take them further away from each other 

Heartbreak hits and he wishes he'd never opened himself up to this contingency 


Love as liberation 

The true miracle of love is not the mutually exclusive choice of two individuals, but the 'transcendental' choice of the loving agent who is ready to stake everything on one particular object. The miracle of love is to perceive ourselves in the other, to identify with the other, without obliterating our own identity."

The second love of his life finds the boy a man, a man on the way up. a man focused on standing on his own, On being strong. He wants and indeed finds love as liberation. 

The more firmly he knew who he is, the deeper he feels he needs his connection with his partner should be.

Encounters happen and often he overthinks them- always finding some reason to say well this doesn't really work for me...As though my own taste was the final arbitration of the matter. In some quote moments, he wonders why it's so much harder than it was before. Was it him? No. no ...It's the people he's meeting. 

He needs to find " better matches". 

Love had become like a commodity that could be purchased on the market of dating. This logic lines up well with the times he lived in. Leaving the church for the world, and coming to reason turned what should be a God-ordained meeting into a chance encounter for which he had to be well prepared. 

To be picked in this market, you need to be of high value.   

"Be funny, read the right things, smell good, go to the gym..make yourself someone worth the attention of others. Oh but also make sure you are yourself. It can't be forced..but also make sure that being yourself is done the right way. " His thoughts subconsciously revolve around this. 

Encounters grow in the meantime. Some purely to pass the time, some out of a need to connect without any real intention to open up more. A warm embrace is wanted but the person behind the embrace, he wants to keep at a "safe distance". He subtly recalls that love changes you, and if he likes who he is, well why should he want to change. Can't she just take him as he is?! Can't she learn to love him - reasonably??

Intimacy is replaced with sexual connection and performance. He has embarrassing moments but like a good achievement subject, he learns. He learns how to perform as a lover and realizes that abstinence before had him missing out. Sex liberated from the mores of the convention is exciting and means you can explore all amalgamations of relations, limited only by the flexibility of both your joints and bank account to create magical moments in Instagramable places. 

Then an encounter that seemed so random happens. And it lingers. 

She was meant to be just another buddy with no strings but ..she intrigues him. In moments he finds himself,f opening up more than usual, wanting to be released from the burden of having it all together all the time but unable to make that request, or even admit to himself that it might be something he deeply wants. 

"After all we're both just playing the field. I am no simp. Kampala is for business, not love."

Still, the connection over shared trauma grows. They both had tough childhoods, and they both enjoy a good hang but also quiet times away. They find in the pseudo lack of commitment, a freedom to be able to say things truthfully to each other. There's after all, no relationship to protect. they find in each other a place to not only do all manner of fun things but a place to softly broach their pain. They become real people to each other but at the same time, they realize their own limitations. 


They have hearts with calluses.

Now they have hurt people just like they've been hurt. Not through cruelty but from non. commitment. From being loving but from a distance to opening up feelings in others they were not ready to responsibly engage with.

They have defenses. They occasionally see in each other the dysfunction they witnessed in their lives before-win their homes, with their friends, and in the media, they find it because they know it. It's familiar. It feels free because it doesn't challenge who they are or how they cope with life. they think this is freedom. 

They joke that falling in love is for simps who mistake sentiment for a serious commitment. As if the two are mutually exclusive. 

The liberation of being able to be individuals, still independent but "together" makes them feel like they have discovered a way to have love without the dangers of the fall. The boy cum man feels liberated to be himself with her but it comes at the cost of not wanting to be changed by the encounter. 

"That you can remain who you are, be vulnerable, and come out the other end still the same: this is the greatest delusion of our consumer age where we want to consume but without the essential unpleasant risk- we want good food but can we not get fat ?! We want alcohol and parties, but could we not do with the hangovers and time to recoup, please? We want intimacy without the danger of strings being attached. We want a pragmatic solution."... The words she says as she says this love is not healthy for both of them. 

He can't stand the fact and he decides instead of changing and being more vulnerable, painfully so..that he will find someone who is a "better match". Forgetting that the quiet part is that he wants to not be challenged, he's afraid to change. 

Holding on to the idea of freedom as being unencumbered, instead of the ability to bind yourself to your choice. That freedom is not for its own sake, but to allow you to choose what you will bind yourself to is a lesson he learns much later. 

Love as Sacrifice

To love someone is to accept the other as they are, with all their flaws and imperfections, and to be willing to work through conflicts and difficulties together. It is to recognize that the other is not a fantasy object, but a real person with their own desires, fears, and vulnerabilities."

Now older, more humbled but still set in his ways. 

He finds that he never really loved himself. Not in a way that was truly liberating and affirming. It was conditional. He loved himself on condition that he was strong, and not needy and sniveling. He couldn't accept love without understanding what the other person saw in him. However long the list was, it was never enough. Because he somehow failed to believe it. 

And at the bottom of this lack of belief is the need for him to understand that love is not just the lovely parts of us...it's the acceptance of the flaws and failures, the nasty and the embarrassing, and not the covering over them with great achievements elsewhere. The achiever and the "failure" are one and the same. And until both sides can be accepted by him, he cannot allow someone else to love that part of him

Love carries risk, it's not the elimination of it. And time slowly shifts him towards looking at himself beyond the pristine image of the man the boy became. He's no longer timid, awkward, or unsteady. He's firmly become what he wanted to become but still can't fully accept it because he knows it's a performance, a genuine performance but one all the same. 

As he lets the facade crack, he remembers what love as an encounter means...He remembers the false liberation he once held on to that love need not change him and becomes more open to the radical power of love. 

Oddly, he claimed that people think of love as sentiment, and that's naive. But he's been naive in treating the people that lead with sentiment as though that sentiment, that feeling cannot coincide with the choice of love, with the radical faith-filled decision to risk something for someone else. 

That this risk is probably the one thing in this life that can not only free the person who is giving it but can help free the one it's being given to. By learning to love himself, he begins to see the people around him with more love, with a more genuine vulnerable connection. 

His friendships are fewer because he is now more intentional. The skill of love comes with practice..it's more than easy friendship, and shared fun encounters when things are easy. It's in showing up when it's difficult, it's messy fights over principles, it's doing things for the sake of the other because it's the right thing to do. 

He slowly finds himself trying to find love again. The old ways come back now and then, and he feels the phobia, the need to be strong. He tells himself "Many men are married and no closer to their wife than they are to their work or buddies". That excuse rings hollow. Does the fact that many men do it mean, it's what ought to be done?

Awkwardly he tries and fails. He thinks he's ready but then backs down from taking things to the next level with people he sees.  But eventually, he musters up the self-courage to tell the person he is with this. That he longs to be able to love so freely and to align his feelings and his dedication, for when the former was, the latter shall sustain. He tells her how he is falling in love and it's scary.

That he is handing her his heart. 

She kindly rejects him. She can't deal. It's too much

He is hurt. A pain he never thought he'd feel again. But this pain gives him hope. He was able to gain a heart o flesh. He wasn't reacting by wanting to go to the gym, get bigger muscles, make more money find some other markers of success to prove that he was worth the love.. because ironically that proves that he felt he wants worthy of it. Instead, he finds a quiet peace in accepting that love is not a guarantee, it's a sacrifice we are willing to make because it's worth it. 

It's worth this pain. And he feels ...like a person again. 

Finally, the man has reclaimed, at least in part, the heart of the boy he once was.