Real Love Is Thermodynamically Impossible

I think being a parent taught me what love is. Thank God.

Before my kids, I was a wound-up ball of rubber bands

For most of my life everything was survival. Take care of yourself. Fulfill some sort of destiny that was really just ego with good posture. Personal fortitude. A ball of rubber bands, wound tighter and tighter, looking for its achievements, counting its money, registering its failures.

There isn't any love coming out of a thing like that. It's just responding to its environment, bouncing around, all wound up. I'm sure the capacity was in there somewhere. It just had no way out.

It didn't even start as love

There is something a little magical about looking down at a fleshy wad and feeling an independent heartbeat, this tissue made out of your own.

A lot of it is placebo, honestly. It's an experience the mind creates, a bonding ritual you talk yourself into. But the placebo is the door. The benefit is that you get to walk through it into an extremely crushing process of learning. It starts with all the glowing emotions, the thing you hold and wave around, the running story that you're doing the right things.

Caregiving snaps the bands off, one at a time

Feeding. Driving. Listening. (Good Lord, I wish I were better at that one.) Cleaning. Stupid little surprises. Things that start as an act of duty to someone other than yourself.

And those acts of duty do something the glowing feelings never could. Band after band, they snap right off your stupid little ball. They leave you open to the world. Tender, undefended, available. That is the transformation, and it does not feel like a gift while it's happening. It feels like sacrifice.

It was never the feeling

It's not the feeling. I had that backwards for most of my life. The feeling is your careful, thinking brain handing you a story so you'll keep showing up.

You convince yourself that this beautiful child is a painful, unending sacrifice you make seeking your own glory and affirmation. You half believe it. And that conviction is exactly what keeps you feeding and driving and cleaning long enough for the bands to keep snapping. I wouldn't have put myself through that much pain, discomfort, and sleeplessness if I hadn't been convinced, at times, that there was an absolute duty in it, and some glory waiting at the end.

There wasn't glory. There was the work itself, doing the work on me.

You can't find love until you lose yourself first

No one tells you that. You go looking for love in attraction and fulfillment, and you call that the thing. It isn't. That stuff is real, but it's not love.

Real love comes in late, almost like a self-love you finally earned, and it isn't until it's over, for late bloomers like me, that you understand what you were doing the whole time. Twenty-plus years. Brutal, agonizing, confusing, frustrating. The work of keeping a couple of small humans alive long enough to become young men.

Real love is thermodynamically impossible

People love to say kindness is magic. It's a nice idea, but kindness is thermodynamically possible. So is generosity. So is compassion. They cost a little and they pay you back, in status, in safety, in the warm feeling of being good. All of it already exists in the animal kingdom. None of it is rare.

What's rare, what might be uniquely ours (a few animals may get there too), is mercy and forgiveness. Those run against self-interest with nothing on the books to recover. You don't come out ahead. Those are the true tenets of love.

Because real love is a void of self. You empty yourself out so completely that there's no one left standing there to come collecting for it. The universe tends toward coming apart, things wind down and fly out and explode, and here you are pouring yourself into someone with no expectation of return. That's the impossible part. You're running the wrong way down the hill on purpose. I see that in the stars, and I think it's the one genuinely impossible thing we get to do.

All of it runs on attention

I know I'm starting to talk about AI a little here, but this is where my whole tech leaning comes from. From the day you're born, the world is competing to hook your attention. The people who learn early how to hook everyone else's attention often fail themselves the most, because they never turned that gaze inward.

Love is just attention you refuse to sell. It's hard to capture the attention of someone whose attention can't be cheaply caught. And honestly, if something hooks mine that easily, that's not me.

Thank God for my children. They snapped me open.