Intimacy and its Discontents

Freedom and love are inseparable. We long for love to liberate us, yet we use it to hide. It has the power to reveal but also to deceive, to awaken but also to lull us into comfort. It can make us feel seen, yet just as easily cloud our vision. Rather than sharpening, it can soften, distorting what is real until we mistake illusion for transformation. Love fractures most painfully when it is built on lack—when it is not rooted in reality but in the desperate attempt to fill an absence. To love freely is not to bind another to our needs, nor to seek shelter in their presence, but to hold them fully in the weight of their being, without distortion or possession. As Simone Weil writes, “To love purely is to consent to distance; it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love” (p.115)

And yet, no matter how much love there is, eventually, it will break. Everything, even love, must come to an end. And here, too, we resist. We stretch its dying form, trying to preserve it beyond its life, as if suffering through its demise would give it meaning. We fear the finality of loss, so we numb ourselves—with distractions, compromise, work, spiritual or tangible substances—anything to avoid the truth that not everything is meant to last. But a love that ends is just as real as one that endures. The truest devotion is not in clinging, but in allowing it to be what it is and then letting go when the time comes.

To love freely is not to hold on but to hold fully—to meet another without distortion, without projection, without using them as a shield against our own fears. And yet, we betray ourselves daily. We say we want love, but when it comes, we run. We crave closeness, yet fear the unknown that comes with it. We teeter on the brink of desire, only to reverse course, retreating into what is familiar, what is allowed, what is safe. Mistaking capitulation for love, we comfort ourselves with illusions of certainty.

For love to be free, it requires vulnerable courage—the willingness not just to want, but to will. Wanting is passive; willing demands clarity. To will properly, we must first remove illusion—to see where we have traded autonomy for comfort, where we have accepted invisible chains in exchange for safety. The force that oppresses us is not always external. It is thought’s hegemony, the silent shaping of our needs and ambitions, the gentle hand of a world that rewards conformity and calls it wisdom.

The struggle for freedom is not against fate, but against blindness. Not against limits, but against the fear that causes us to accept them too easily. The path to self-determination is not about acquiring more, achieving more, or securing more, but about seeing—cutting away what is false and unnecessary. It is a descent, not an ascent—a stripping away, a surrender to what is raw, real, and essential.

We are born, as Weil says, “wrong side upward” (p.81). To reestablish order, we must undo what is unnatural in us—the illusions, the false selves, the need to possess rather than to see. Only then can what is higher in us rise.

And in that process of undoing, something shifts. We see that the freedom to love was never something to be earned; it had always been there, hidden in plain sight, waiting for us to summon the courage to claim it. The will to love, too, was never something to be won—it had always been freely given. In stepping into the invisible, we reveal what has been visible all along. Freedom, love, and will are not things to attain but truths to recognize, already alive in the space between what we cling to and what we are willing to let go.

References:

Weil, S. (1997). Gravity and grace (A. Wills, Trans.; G. Thibon, Intro.; T. R. Nevin, Ed.). University of Nebraska Press. (Original work published 1947)