Thinking About Love: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

by Diane Enns

I was the eye of love’s storm, willing the destruction of your suffering with iron determination. But my will, in the end, betrayed me. This was the source of my own pain: to caress your face, smooth your hair, bathe your body, yet remain unable to suffer in your place. But now I know: to love you was not to suffer in your place and so alleviate your pain. There is no substitution—this is the limit of love. I could not be your leg for you. I could not be your crutches. I could not absorb your pain to free you of it. I could not be your will to live or your excuse to live badly. I could only love you beside you, fighting against the limits of what my love could do for you. In the end we can only live our own lives, in the most bearable way possible. I could only love you by letting you be, for this is love’s “incalculable grace” and its singular power: my desire to let you be—Augustine’s volo ut sis—my unsurpassable and inexplicable affirmation of you.1 No one can love or be loved without this wanting the other to be.