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I have been studying philosophy for some three years now, and have recently chosen to make it my life’s work. Still, every time someone asks me a variation of the question: “How is philosophy actually applied? How does philosophy change the world, change us? What does it do?” I find myself answering with words whose logical coherence belies an internal struggle with doubt. Philosophy has the unique and privileged power to elucidate our experience, to reveal the most essential meanings of existence, and to re-light the life that we find ourselves so submerged in as to have become drowned.
Yet, after the last page of some astonishing or beautiful work of philosophy, I am often left with the strange feeling of reintegration with the world and, thus, a vague sense that I had returned from another. The question creeps up my spine: is it? Is theory strictly theoretical? Or does it, with any frequency and force, hop the border from the metaphysical to the physical, from abstraction to action? Is our lived reality philosophy’s only basis? Or is theory formed ahead of life, asking life to catch up?
These very questions have recently become anything but theoretical, having overspilled straight into my life, my love life. Love can not, of course, be wholly accounted for by theory alone. At the limit, as I have come to know, love scrambles theory by rules written with seemingly no pattern or logic. Yet I try. I have found myself living theories that were once only intellectual exercises, using them as maps to navigate my relationships.
Theory #1: Love is now, not later.
My partner of many years is in love with another. Another city. We discovered it together, on a study abroad trip during our third year of college. Yes, Paris is visually beautiful—the dramatic sky, the beige facades, the wide boulevards, the art nouveau metro entrances. Even the infuriatingly confusing neighborhood layout, arranged to replicate the spiral of a snail’s shell, looks on a map as though the city planners valued form over function. Yet more than the raw beauty of Paris was its pace of life. Two-hour lunch breaks were not uncommon. The resulting “will return” signs on storefronts looked to my American eye as anti-capitalist-efficiency manifestos, yet were as natural there as 15-minute Uber Eats delivery orders are to us. The dinners took so long that it didn’t make sense to have timed plans after. In New York City, where we live, excess time is often implicitly felt as time wasted, time not spent getting ahead in some way. In Paris, there was the implicit feeling that excess time was simply that—time. Time to sit on a bench by the Seine and look at nothing, time to walk in a purposelessness meander, time to be. If New York City were whitewater rapids, Paris would be a gently flowing stream, and my love wanted in—and who could blame them?
They have not given me a date but rather a vague, though nevertheless certain, intention of moving someday. Long distance isn’t in the cards, but the relationship’s eventual end is. For many, this fact would make continuing any relationship counterintuitive, if not absurd. From such people, I have gotten the question a million times: “What’s next? It’s been years now! Do you think…they are the one? But they want to move to Paris, right? Then…why?”
Yet, for me, what’s next is tomorrow. Yes, the years have been wonderful and will continue to be—would any eventual end fundamentally change that? They will move to Paris, but right now they are here. Why continue? Quite simply because I love them, am loving them, am in love. The timer doesn’t stop the clock moving.
Love is now, not later. Love happens; it isn’t a destination nor a goal nor a stable place that one reaches. The statistic that around half of all marriages in the United States end in divorce is often cited with an unseriousness and manufactured indifference in an attempt to protect oneself against an existential amendment to an implicitly held conception of what love is: always precarious. This fact alone, when seriously digested, opens a fissure in the smooth and polished surface of the modern, conventional notion of what love is: something stable and unmoving. Something that lasts forever. Something too beautiful to question at all. Something that—with enough patience and right swipes and chemically harmonious first dates and consultation with friends about how to convert those first dates into a long-term relationship, and further consultation on how to convert said long-term relationship into a life-long one, and enough self-help books read cover to cover on Audible—will, then, at long last, be the love we had been looking for and now found once and for all.
Such a conception of love forfeits the present in service of the future, forfeits love that is now for a later love that will not come. Too many of my friend’s relationships have ended prematurely because they identified some factor that they deemed would inevitably spell the end of their relationship at some point, even if there were no problems at present. In many of these instances, it was ironically the very act of oversaturating the present with the future that itself spelled the end of the future. Perhaps it might be right to call my theory of love Parisian. There, time now is time at its most present. In New York City, time now is to be invested for later, it is bent by the will and demanding expectations of the future.
More than sixteen hundred years ago, Saint Augustine formulated the experience of time in terms of singing a song. As you begin to sing, you know how much of the song has passed and how long remains until the end. Yet there is no holding the whole song together, no way for the entire song to be present to you at once, for at each moment, it is already slipping away. Such is life, such is love. “Do not our years fail every day? Do they ever stand still? The years that have come exist no longer; those that are still to come have no existence yet.” Love, as in life, only exists as flowing, slipping, happening, never all at once in full or frozen. It is in fact precisely this precarity that makes love so precious. What would love be without the risk of it ending? What would life be without death? As the Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund wrote, “For a life to be a life, it must be finite.”
And yet, for all my theorizing, for all the real conviction I feel in the words I have just written to you, I can not deny the effect my relationship’s inevitable end has on it now. If I think about it too long, I sense a big black hole that threatens to suck me in. Instead, I simply hew closer to my theory, and it goes away.
Theory #2: Love is not a zero-sum game.
To my own surprise, I have found myself in love with another. On our first date, she asked me what I studied. I kept my answer brief, as “phenomenology” doesn’t exactly have a ring to it, and six-syllable words have connotations I did not wish to correct at that moment. Yet she not only knew what phenomenology was, she had written a thesis on it. So instead of hobbies and family history and career and friends, we talked theory, drinks in hand, with the same ease and thrill of any fortuitous first encounter. Indeed we had so many similarities that the meeting felt almost inevitable, like fate catching up.
After many dates and many months, we chose to remain friends. But this new form of our relationship changed again. When I told her that I was applying for a master's in the philosophy of art, she herself became so interested in the program that she eventually decided to join it. And so we became classmates. Now, when anyone asks her how she discovered our small, idiosyncratic masters program tucked away in a rented room in Downtown Brooklyn, the answer begins with “Well, technically, Bumble.”
Years into our friendship, everything came unexpectedly aflame at last year’s end. Over the years our relationship had become something unique in itself, something distinct from either one of us alone and greater than us both. I was reminded of Gilles Deleuze’s relationship with his intellectual interlocutor Felix Guattari, of which he had said, “We didn’t collaborate like two different people. We were more like two streams coming together to make a third stream, which I suppose was us.” Perhaps our third stream was love itself.
However, within the bounds of my existing relationship, I had found myself in a pickle. I felt no tension in my heart between these two loves, only an external pressure to remain within the either/or expectation. I found myself head to head with the question: how big is love, and what are its rules? Does more love for one mean less for another? Is love a zero-sum game? I had interrogated the temporality of love within my first relationship; now I was attempting to discover love’s spatiality.
And so I raised a question to my partner and myself that would test these questions: Could our relationship exist outside monogamy? Confident in our love and with astonishingly little drama, we decided we knew the answer: that love is expansive and seemingly endless, that another relationship would not threaten our own, and that we might try—and mind you, it feels awkward even typing the word—polyamory. And so I find myself now in love with two, living what was once just a theory.
I have come to believe that polyamory is anything but unnatural, that perhaps it is the closest existing form of love humanity has conceived of to a utopian conception of love. Jealousy and possessive instincts are replaced with vulnerability and joy in the joy of others. The colonial bio-politics of patriarchal possession make no sense within a polyamorous framework (indeed, Japan, for example, only outlawed polygamy in 1945 during the height of WWII-era American imperialism in Japan. Other examples, from Southeast Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa, could fill volumes).
I find myself living a theory of unending love, a theory that does not abide by the finite laws of physics and the binary, bounded market forces of capitalism. Rather, as the Sufi mystic poet Rumi once wrote, “Of all you see, only love is infinite.” My heart feels no conflict in loving two. If anything, it has only grown.
So far, this theory has held fast, but practicing it is not as theoretically bulletproof as the concept itself. The awkwardness I feel towards typing the very word “polyamory” is perhaps the very manifestation of the tension between theory and reality, a clash with existing societal norms.
Further still, if love is a zero-sum game expanding effortlessly, time isn’t. And what is love but time spent? What is love outside of it being done, being practiced in the world? My heart feels no conflict, but my calendar does. If my time could expand in pace with my heart, I'd live forever in unending time. Ironically, the only thing getting in the way of my total and profound revision of love itself is the mundane, menial, and seemingly insignificant element of logistics. The devil is, as they say, in the details. Perhaps the cultural hegemony of monogamy is not because of any ethical or accurate theory of what love is or should be, but simply that monogamy is much more logistically convenient than love in other forms. I have begun to ask myself: are these details merely details? Or are they actually what love is? Plenty of relationships die because of logistics, long-distance or otherwise. To what extent are these structural factors outside of love, and to what extent are they love itself? Perhaps monogamy fits (our current, at least) reality, while polyamory fits theory.
Did I enter this new relationship to ground my theoretical beliefs? Did I fall for her to prove to the world and myself the possability of love outside the hegomonic norm? To ground a more-perfect theory and give it feet? Of course not. I fell in love, and explanation came later.
The Coin Flip
There is an interesting piece of advice I heard a few years back—apparently based on a psychological study—about how to make a decision which perhaps serves as the bridge between theory and reality: If you have a decision to make and can’t decide on which path to take, assign either side to heads or tails, then flip a coin. Once the coin has flipped and the outcome is made clear, do not base your decision on the actual result of the coin flip but rather on your instant gut reaction to the outcome of the coin. As weird as this may sound, I urge you to try it the next time you can’t make up your mind. It works surprisingly well.
Perhaps the function of theory—in love or otherwise—serves the same function as the coin. Though the coin may seem arbitrary to the actual lived result, it is nevertheless absolutely necessary to it. Though it may disappear in what it creates, it is still essential to the outcome, like cooking wine burning off in a pan. Even if the coin flip or the theory is wrong or does not end up as the actual result, it still crystallizes, is made explicit, and forces the conclusion to whatever happened after.
Marx once famously claimed that “philosophy has only interpreted the world. The point, though, is to change it.” Of course, he is right, though what his formulation overlooks is that in the very act of interpreting the world, we change it. In simply flipping the coin, despite there being no direct link between the side facing up and any corresponding choice, the act of flipping it has changed reality. In interrogating the nature of love, we change love itself, and love differently.
Is love a theory? Yes. Is love a practiced reality? Yes. Both sides of love—the theoretical and the lived are as necessary to each other as the bee is to the flower, and the flower is to the bee. Their symbiotic relationship spans each and is greater then both. Love dances effortlessly between these two realms, and indeed does so at its best when in that middle, when theory reaches down to touch our lives without dictating them.
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