If love is so full of illusions and painful repetitions, why do we want it so badly? The simple answer—one that this chapter is intended to complicate—is that we want it because it gives rise to an unparalleled sensation of self-awakening. Through love, a sliver of eternity, of what appears magical and awe-inspiring, inserts itself into our ordinary existence. We feel as if we had been touched by a magnificent force that lends nobility to our lives, lifting us to an existential sphere that feels more elevated, more meaningful, than the one we normally inhabit.
Under usual conditions, we tend to glide through the world without paying much attention to its intricate texture. Meeting the demands of the day often requires that we temporarily disregard our surroundings; we procure our everyday efficiency by suspending our connection to those parts of the world that do not serve our practical concerns. One of the amazing powers of love is that it offers a potent remedy to such carelessness. When we fall in love, dimensions of the world that have remained blurry or marginal suddenly click into focus for us. Neglected aspects of our environment clamor for notice. Facets of life that we normally ignore take on a heightened significance. Through an openness to those shades of our surroundings that usually remain eclipsed, we become keenly attentive to the myriad details of our lives.
While our ordinary preoccupations take place in the world, they also, in some ways, distance us from it. They distract us from the worldness of the world, as it were, because they are designed to allow us to make use of the world rather than to become fully and passionately immersed within its folds. In this sense, navigating the routine tasks and liabilities of life is not at all the same thing as being in touch with the pulse of the world. What is so wonderful about love is that it reconnects us to this pulse. It cuts through the din of our regular concerns so that we feel uncompromisingly real, aligned with the roundedness and timelessness of being. Yet we also feel firmly anchored in the here and now, embedded in the concrete materiality of the world. In a way, we are able to touch the sublime without ever leaving the world behind.
There are of course other experiences besides falling in love that summon us to this kind of acute vigilance. These can be as uncomplicated as inhaling the invigorating crispness of autumn air, observing the intricate design of snowflakes on a window pane, or running our fingers over the velvety surface of a fine piece of paper. Or they can be as complicated as trying to intuit and respond to a friend’s pain or apprehension. What such experiences have in common, however, is that they invite us to perceive the world more carefully. They ask us to slow down and proceed with more deliberation than we usually do. Sometimes they enable us to find value in something that appears entirely banal. Other times they allow us to recognize beauty within what is seemingly devoid of it. In this manner, they ensure the liveliness of our spirit, fending off states of inner stagnation. They assure that we do not get completely buried under the morass of our practical concerns. Like eros, they carry us to an enchanted place that is filled with intimations of eternity, giving rise to a robust sense of being part of something that exceeds the purely commonplace or circumstantial.
In this—as in so many other things—we have a great deal to learn from Plato, who already saw eros as a means of approaching a realm of uncorrupted truth and beauty that otherwise remains largely inaccessible to us. He advanced a two-tiered conception of the universe by distinguishing between an invisible realm of divine perfection and the inherently flawed terrain of human life. While the divine realm embodied pure and immutable ideals, the human domain was composed of defective copies or imitations of these ideals. In this context, the task of the seeker of enlightenment was to ascend, as far as he could, the (intangible and spiritual) ladder that led from the realm of human materiality to the sphere of divine ideality. His mission was to penetrate the worldly veil of illusions and appearances amidst which humans lived so as to gain a glimpse of the more exalted reality that was obscured by this veil. And Plato did not hesitate to suggest that eros was one of the most effective means of accomplishing this task.
Plato explained that before our soul got encased in the material vessel of our body, it enjoyed the company of the gods. Having been asked to drink from the river of Lethe (of forgetfulness) prior to settling into its human host, it does not explicitly recall this, yet it retains an intuitive connection to the celestial domain it has lost. More specifically, the feverish desire we experience when we fall in love signifies that our soul is yearning to rise to the transcendent realm from which it has been exiled by its earthly existence. The fact that the person we love incarnates ideal beauty on Earth stimulates our longing to reunite with divine beauty. We may not be consciously aware of this nebulous affiliation between earthly and divine beauty. Yet our insistent craving for the company of our beloved is a sign that our soul is enthusiastically preparing for its upward flight toward the incandescent province of divine splendor.
In one of his most famous similes, Plato portrays the soul as a winged entity awaiting the reviving jolt of eros. He specifies that while earthly existence causes the feathers on the surface of the soul’s wings to wither away from lack of use, falling in love softens and revitalizes the passages from which the feathers grow, allowing new feathers to shoot. The strange agitation that we feel in love is thus, metaphorically speaking, an indication that our soul is refeathering its wings so as to better soar to the heights. Plato depicts this state of the soul as one of mingled pleasure and pain that renders us irrational, tumultuous, and even a bit insane. As he posits, “the soul of a man who is beginning to grow his feathers has the same sensation of pricking and irritation and itching as children feel in their gums when they are just beginning to cut their teeth.”
The restlessness of the lover is hence expressive of the soul’s impatience to recapture a divine domain. Eros, in a sense, bridges the human and the divine. Plato’s parable implies that if there is something about human life that makes it difficult for us to remain cognizant of the transcendent dimensions of life, eros insists on animating those dimensions; it insists that we look beyond the daily grind. The fact that we may not be able to name or accurately describe this experience does not dilute its power to move us. In the same way that the wings of the soul swell with the regrowth of feathers, love makes us feel as if we were able to reach beyond the familiar topography of our everyday reality. We attain a stirring sensation of coming to our own, arriving, as it were, at a loftier sense of life’s possibilities.
We do not need to believe in divinity in the sense that Plato is talking about to grasp what he is getting at. We know that eros calls us to realms of self-experience that make us feel more actualized. However, what is perhaps less obvious (and therefore noteworthy) about this is that we tend to purchase our sense of self-actualization at the price of our social identities. That is, eros rewards us only to the extent that we are willing to temporarily sideline, or ever suspend, the socially intelligible persona through which we customarily negotiate our place in the world. It carries us into a quasi-mythological domain where the normal matrix of social relations no longer applies, effectively fissuring the façade that demarcates our personal boundaries. As a consequence, our most treasured moments of transcendence—those moments when the sliver of eternity manages to touch our spirit—are also often piercing experiences of surrender and self-loss.
Oddly enough, the dissolution of social identity that characterizes moments of erotic surrender does not connote submission or victimization. Even though such moments can make us feel temporarily “seized,” “erased,” or “taken over” by a force more powerful than us, they do not make us feel mortified or defeated. Quite the contrary, we tend to feel rejuvenated and more immediately connected to ourselves. During such moments, time stands still so that the usual distinctions between past, present, and future cease to function. We fall outside of time, as it were. We exist in a space of infinity, complete and fully meaningful in itself. Eros, in a deep sense, arrests time’s unremitting movement into an instant of timelessness. Or, to express the matter in the words of the contemporary philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, eros represents the emergence of what is “untimely” within the timely, epitomizing a “cut” or a “nick” that punctures time’s incessant motion by a pure moment of stillness. This explains why it allows us to feel fulfilled and in touch with the most profound layers of our being.
In the same way that our spirits might climb at the sight of something sublime or strikingly beautiful, the experience of being captivated by eros feels self-enhancing. This of course does not guarantee that we will not get wounded. In fact, given that erotic surrender by definition exposes our soft underbelly to the person we love, the potential for hurt and abuse is ever-present. By opening ourselves to eros on this fundamental level—by inviting another person to dwell within our being in ways that are potentially explosive—we inevitably trade away our claim on security. Our culture does its best to lull us into an innocent complacency about eros by saturating us with images of light-hearted romance and happy endings. Yet anyone who has ever truly loved knows that even the most gratifying love affairs are at times wrought with anxiety, hesitation, apprehension, and moments of utter helplessness.
In the realm of eros, exposure to the possibility of pain is the flip side of transcendence. As a result, whenever we choose to make a leap of faith into the unknown that eros represents, we are never far from disaster. It is hardly surprising, then, that many of us learn to view love as a threat to our viability as sovereign and self-sufficient creatures. It is no wonder that we learn to skid its fragile surface with a nimble-footed lightness that is intended to protect us from its lures and treacherous trapdoors. After all, how do we know that we will manage to withstand the destabilizations of eros? How can we be sure that we will be able to reemerge from experiences of self-disintegration with our identities intact? What assurance do we have that we will be resilient enough to reclaim solid ground afterwards?
If one of the goals of social existence is to establish the necessary boundaries between self and others, eros strives to demolish such boundaries, hearkening back to those earliest stages of life when the basic distinction between the self and the world was not yet entirely established. This is one reason that eros calls for a sinuous interplay between the structured (social) and unstructured (asocial) elements of our being; it demands a sustained ability to move back and forth between these two (seemingly incompatible) realms. Some of us find this easier than others. Many of us know that we are able to embrace disjointed states of self-experience without thereby imperiling our coherent selves. We remain confident that we will be able to recover our more structured identities relatively rapidly. And we understand that being able to embrace archaic forms of connectedness feeds our ongoing aptitude for transformation by making us feel ardently engaged in our lives. Some of us, however, refuse love’s summons because we find the prospect of teetering on the verge of self-loss too daunting.
It may well be that we need a fairly secure sense of our personal boundaries to be able to benefit from states of surrender and self-dissolution. Though some of us are kept from such experiences by personal boundaries that are too rigid—too tightly defended and impermeable—others may resist them because our boundaries are too flimsy. When we are not entirely sure where the edges of our personality reside, it may be doubly difficult for us to allow these edges to disband, however fleetingly. In such cases, the biggest reward of eros may well be to illustrate that there are ways to let go of our self-certainty without falling irrevocably. By this I mean quite simply that the more we practice giving ourselves over to erotic experience, the more assured we grow in the knowledge that we will not lose our footing permanently. If the rest of our culture tends to equate surrender with powerlessness, eros teaches us that it is possible to relinquish control without being irredeemably weakened or derailed.
The most common way to understand erotic surrender is to think about soul-scorching sex. But there are other modalities of surrender that may be less self-evident. The philosopher Luce Irigaray, for example, proposes that sometimes we reach a space of surrender through something as simple as our lover’s devoted caress. Such a caress is a gentle gesture that allows us to shed the practical layers of our daily reality so as to access a more transcendent existential frequency. According to this formulation, transcendence is not a function of the soul’s flight into a higher realm, as it is in Plato’s rendering. Nor is it necessarily an experience of timelessness whereby we exit the chronological sequence of our lives. Rather, it is a fall into tenderness that allows us to become more intensely embedded within the sensuous folds of the passing moment, and particularly of our own materiality. The caress seeks no reward beyond the tactile realities of the world. Yet it is not mundane. It effectively detaches us from the routine concerns that normally fill our consciousness.
The fast-paced and overstimulating tempo of modern life can shut down vital aspects of self-experience. We can become so focused on trying to achieve social and material insignias of success, so swept up in the currents of consumer culture, and so harassed by the incessant demands of daily survival that we lose touch with the more archaic layers of our being; we “forget” how to relax into our minds and bodies. Alternatively, we can become so immersed in the pragmatic responsibilities of our existence that we develop an overly rational approach to the process of living, thereby neglecting the more intuitive, spontaneous, or emotionally resonant densities of life. Over time, we can begin to feel psychologically and physically indigent. Against this backdrop, a lover’s caress can restore our capacity to listen to the messages of our interiority and body alike. It can induce us to pay more attention to what might be laboring for expression from within the foundations of our being.
In Irigaray’s terms, a lover’s caress is an invitation to meet the world in a way that is more mindful and contemplative than our habitual goal-oriented existence. As she states, the caress is an “an awakening to a life different from the arduous everyday.” If day-today life often draws us into its utilitarian concerns so tightly that we come to overlook our most rudimentary needs, the caress recalls us to a more restful mode of being. By cutting through the polite structures of sociality, and by releasing us from the strenuous requirements of the workday, it enables us to enter a more serene bodily and emotional space. It slows down the rhythm of our lives so that we can gain entry into sediments of our being that under normal conditions remain masked; it helps us connect with parts of ourselves that tend to get lost in the frenzy of our public lives. Ideally, we emerge from its recesses amplified, with our capacity to confront the challenges of the world rehabilitated.
Everyday life can make us feel besieged and overwhelmed in part because it exacts a more or less habitual denial of the body and its desires. Many of us are used to thinking about the body as what keeps us from being sufficiently focused on our practical pursuits. It gets tired and needy. And it distracts us from our “higher” goals and preoccupations. Consequently, we frequently develop an antagonistic, and sometimes even an overtly hostile, relationship to our body. We may do our best to ignore its demands whenever these threaten to undermine our efficiency. At times, we may even feel ashamed of it, particularly when it does not measure up to our ideals of beauty or endurance. Under such circumstances, a loving caress restores our bodily integrity, allowing us to experience a roundness of embodied self-presence that, momentarily at least, heals the rift between us and our own materiality.
Every now and then we even find a way to transfer the soothing effects of the caress into the commotion that makes up the rest of our lives. Even as the caress gradually fades away, its trace lingers on as an enduring mark of bodily attentiveness that infuses our ordinary occupations with an elusive yet luscious tranquility. In effect, once we have allowed ourselves to experience such a moment of richness, we can use it to evaluate other aspects of our lives. It can become a prism through which we scrutinize our daily existence so as to ensure that we do not settle for what is merely convenient, but rather put our passion behind those goals, actions, and relational dynamics that allow us to stay connected with ourselves, as well as with those we love. It can act as our private escort beyond the morass of the mundane social interactions that tend to fill our lives with trivial (yet exhausting) activity.
Social interactions invariably entail an exchange of emotional, psychic, and physical energies. While many of these exchanges invigorate us, others consume our being. In addition, exchanges that are cutting or malicious denigrate us, bordering on soul-murder and subduing the voice of our inner giant. As a consequence, we need ways to counteract the expenditures of sociality. We need ways to keep our lives from sliding into defensive patterns of relating to the world. And we need ways to protect our psyches from the sterile solutions offered by much of mass culture. The caress can help us in this regard because it allows us to regather those fragments of ourselves that have been scattered around by the pressures of living. It offers a valuable reprieve from the ordeals of social exchange.
The caress of course is also a form of social exchange in the sense that it involves two individuals with distinctive personalities. However, while most other forms of social exchange ask us to activate our public persona, the caress implores us to “return” to ourselves beyond the realm of collective categories and classifications. It encourages us to dip into the least socially regimented echelons of our character, thereby activating what is most peculiarly “us” outside of the demands of collective negotiation. Indeed, one reason that the caress replenishes us is that it allows us to circumvent the usual currencies of social exchange. Within its cocoon, there is no need to rationalize, reflect, deliberate, or talk things through. Instead, there is a subtle and insubstantial flow of nonverbal communications that bespeaks a certain porosity of being. Through the caress, we are able to cross the permeable boundaries between self and other effortlessly and without the slightest sense of violation.
The caress opens up horizons of experience that we could not attain independently of our partner. It is a way of coming together in a sheltered space of mutual reassurance. And although it takes place on the surface of the body, it can reverberate within the deepest indentations of our being. It responds to our need to be reached and understood in a profound way, as who we are beneath the refined veneer that we display to the world. We can in fact feel terribly forlorn when we sense that our partner fails to touch the “real” of our being—that he or she is merely enamored of our public façade. In contrast, the loving caress bears witness to those aspects of our being that we typically conceal from others. In this sense, whether we experience the caress as a transcendent moment, or simply as a means of melting away the tensions of the day, it galvanizes realms of interiority that cannot be reached by logic alone.
There are individuals who are exceptionally good at facilitating moments of surrender. They offer an evocative presence that allows us to fall into a state of self-fragmentation without triggering our anxiety about not being able to find our way back to our social identity. Their silent yet attentive presence builds a foundation for a connection that is neither impinging nor intrusive, but rather calmly embracing. Because there is a finely woven reliability to the care they provide, they manage to create a peaceful refuge of intimacy that effortlessly removes the clutter of our minds and bodies alike. As a result, they invite unscripted and unself-conscious pieces of our interiority to make their way into the open. They may even allow petrified forms of pain to play themselves out in the empathetic space between self and other. In this way, they make it possible for us to begin a tentative conversation with dissociated or prohibited facets of our being, thereby facilitating our continued capacity for personal renewal—for what philosophers have called the process of “becoming.”
The process of becoming ensures that our identities are never fixed once and for all but remain in constant evolution. This process is what lends our existence its distinctively human character by granting us the ability to self-reflexively (and repeatedly) inquire into the possibilities of our future. Many of us enter this process with a degree of deliberation, asking ourselves how we can best meet the needs of ourselves and others, what kinds of goals are worth pursuing, which existential paths grant us the greatest degree of aliveness, and what the most dexterous course of action in a specific situation might be. In this manner, we strive to develop our own distinctive art of living, making a commitment to foster the singular “spirit” that allows us to feel like “ourselves.” We dedicate our lives to cultivating the characteristic inner lexicon that determines how we reside in the world.
Our answers to life-defining questions change over time. Because there is no way to halt the interplay of question and answer, there is in principle no end to the process of becoming. Indeed, even when we actively resist this process—even when we choose to lead more or less haphazard lives—we cannot entirely arrest its momentum, for it is the very essence of human life to be in a continual flux. Though it is not necessarily the case that a conscious effort to fashion an identity results in a more rewarding life than one where no such effort has been made, it would be difficult for any of us to completely escape the realization that our lives are by definition unresolved and therefore open to constant reconfiguration; it would be difficult to avoid seeing that there is always room for refinement. Yet it is tempting to try to overlook this. It is tempting to neglect the interplay of question and answer that epitomizes human existence, for doing so can reduce our apprehension about having to make explicit decisions about the parameters of our lives.
Our identities are rich with potentialities that we can either pick up or ignore, that we can either materialize or fail to materialize. One of our biggest challenges, then, is to resist getting caught up in complacent forms of being, for it is when we become too attached to any one incarnation of ourselves that we forfeit our capacity for regeneration—that we give up on our process of becoming. Sadly, our everyday lives make it almost impossible to avoid such habitual attachments because they usually demand that we privilege one version of ourselves over all others, and that we do so repeatedly, until all alternatives fade into the background and become increasingly difficult to discern. In other words, our daily existence is in many ways designed to seduce us into a deeply complacent understanding of our life’s mission; it is designed to exhaust the momentum of transformation that lends vitality to our being.
This is the case in part because our everyday lives are founded on a fairly coherent and well-established psychic structure. This structure is reassuring because it enables us to function effectively and to some extent anticipate the outlines of our future. Yet it is also limiting in the sense that it automatically eliminates or suppresses elements that do not comfortably fit within its confines. Like most other structures, it works by simplifying and streamlining, by molding new ingredients to correspond to preexisting patterns, as well as by excluding ingredients that resist such molding. As a result, although it provides a measure of existential consistency, it simultaneously exacts a high price by compelling us to relinquish dimensions of ourselves that do not serve the whole. We are, as it were, obliged to give up some aspects of ourselves so as to allow others to thrive. According to this perspective, our identities gain predictability at the expense of those features that appear to interfere with or confuse the intelligibility of our lives; the clarity we seem to have about ourselves demands a lot of sacrifices.
Some of these sacrifices, while perhaps forgotten on the conscious level, continue to live on as unconscious components of our interiority. They persist as melancholy pockets of psychic and affective possibility that have not been properly mourned and that, consequently, still lurk in the shadowy crevices of our being. One reason that eros moves us so intensely—that it feels so transcendent—is that it extends a generous summons to these components; it invites what has been stifled, estranged, undervalued, and unarticulated back into our lives. By encouraging us to recuperate splintered aspects of our being, it reminds us of, and brings us in touch with, what we have had to renounce in order to claim a place in the world. It is therefore no wonder that it makes us feel as if a sliver of eternity was suddenly announcing itself within our mundane reality. On this view, we covet romantic experiences not only because they bring us pleasure, but because they animate as-of-yet-uncharted potentialities of our interiority; they elevate us to otherwise unattainable levels of self-awareness.
The fact that our identities are never complete implies that self-fashioning is a task we must resume time and again. Fortunately for us, romantic relationships hold an especially strong promise for the concretization of embryonic potentialities because they contain an almost interminable string of moments when we are called to renegotiate our identities. Though the particulars of our selfhood are dependent on our interactions with more or less everyone we encounter, romantic attachments are particularly likely to induce us to actively take up the ever-renewed challenge of deciding how we wish to live. This is because we cannot sustain an intimate relationship without considerable psychic restructuring; we cannot invite a lover to share our lives without being willing to redesign our inner universe. Every new alliance, and every modification of an already existing one, offers us an opportunity for self-cultivation. In this sense, loving another person is not merely a matter of discovering and appreciating who he or she is, but also of determining who and what we can become in relation to him or her. In short, our lovers can serve as catalysts for the reinvention of our identities.
In chapter 1, I outlined the dangers of using lovers to prop up our narcissistic quest for self-completion. The dynamic I am talking about here is different not only because the gifts of relationality are, potentially at least, reciprocal in the sense that we can accelerate our lover’s process of becoming as much as he or she accelerates ours, but also because we are not asking our lover to reflect back to us a static (and flattering) image of ourselves. Rather, we are asking him or her to promote our ability to connect with sacrificed parts of ourselves so that we can, over time, craft ourselves into more intricate beings. By empowering us to surpass the limitations of the various structures—rules, regulations, and self-imposed restrictions—that we have come to take for granted over the years, romantic love makes it possible for us to begin to work toward a new kind of self-relation. If we are lucky, it reignites the spark that lends our personality its inimitable specificity.
This explains why we sometimes find ourselves hurled into a state of profound longing reminiscent of the agitation that the soul, according to Plato, experiences when it is regrowing its feathers; it explains why eros makes us want to spread our wings in the Platonic sense. In Plato’s account, eros offers the soul a glimpse of the divine radiance it has lost. In the account I have advanced, it gives us a taste of what is missing from our lives, reminding us of what we have had to give up in order to evolve into the person we currently are. If Irigaray’s caress offers us a soothing model of transcendence, my quasi-Platonic model asks us to think deeply not only about who we are, but also about what we would ideally like to become; it motivates us to realize ourselves on a more multidimensional level. In the best of circumstances, these two models complement each other, allowing us to work toward a fuller understanding of the various ways in which relationality is a key component of self-cultivation.
It may be worth noting that self-cultivation through relationships has traditionally been viewed as a “feminine” approach. If de Beauvoir warned women against overinvesting themselves in romance, it is because historically women were trained to do so. While men were expected to make their mark in the world through various forms of creative, intellectual, political, military, or financial achievement, women were, until recently, seen as the primary guardians of relationality. This clarifies why relationality, in Western culture at least, has had to play second fiddle to other forms of self-actualization, so that we often do not consider the full existential implications of what it means to interact with others in loving ways. Until the last century, philosophers (with the exception of Plato, Kierkegaard, and a handful of others) tended to relegate romantic relationships to the margins of their thinking. As a consequence, although we certainly celebrate the more sappy and superficial aspects of romance in our songs, movies, magazines, and wedding rituals, our cultural heritage has not accustomed us to recognize how fundamental intimate alliances can be to the overall scheme of our lives.
We also tend to downplay what I have chosen to accentuate in this book, namely, that, as a form of self-cultivation, relationality is far from straightforward. This makes it all the more crucial to pay attention to what kinds of lovers we let into our world. As I pointed out in the introduction, and as I have tried to elaborate in this chapter, the people we invite into our lives influence our basic sense of who we are. There are those who trigger our suppressed aggressions and resentments. And there are others who deplete us, sapping our strength and sending us into a spiral of negativity and self-doubt. In later chapters, I will illustrate that even such experiences may be spiritually or emotionally necessary for us in the sense that they can teach us valuable lessons about ourselves and about our patterns of relating. In this circuitous fashion, they may contribute to the density of our character as much as our more supportive relationships. Nonetheless, knowing how to select lovers who free, evoke, and illuminate the best parts of our interiority is essential for our ability to release our unique subjective idiom. As the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas notes, there are people who serve as psychic keys that open doors to meaningful inner experience—to what he describes as “a form of lifting” that ushers us into “a new knowing of ourselves.” Such lifting allows for a greater versatility of personal (and interpersonal) expression, thus greatly supporting our process of becoming.
If specific lovers captivate us more than others—if they consistently make us reach for that sliver of eternity—this may well be because they manage to mobilize those of our inner passions that matter to us the most. They meet our singularity with kindness and generosity, thereby providing an inspiring environment for the creative unfolding of our potentialities. Such lovers not only help us forge gratifying romantic alliances but also confirm that our emotional alertness, let alone our process of becoming, depends on our openness to others. Indeed, the moment we become impervious to the influence of others, we risk losing our inner elasticity. In this sense, it is our continued capacity to love and be loved that allows us to evolve over time. Though the perils of love can be formidable, too hesitant an approach to romance may in the long run be equally detrimental in causing us to atrophy inside. From this point of view, our faithfulness to love’s summons means being willing to heed its invitation to continuous self-inquiry. It entails being willing to repeatedly question the habitual contours of our lives so that fresh existential configurations become possible for us. While there is no doubt that eros can at times feel overwhelming because it pulls us in life directions that are unfamiliar to us, our fidelity to it requires that we respect this pull.