I have been thinking about what makes romantic love different from every other kind of connection because you can feel connected to your friends and you can feel connected to your colleagues and you can feel connected to your family but none of these people are cuddling with you in bed and there is a level of intimacy that exists between two people that is its own category of thing. I think of love as a cosmology of two which is this idea that two people create a shared subjective life world together and it is like inside cricket where there is a camaraderie that comes from having your own language and your own inside jokes and your own baby talk and your own set of shared references and experiences that belong to no one else.

It starts with a spark where you feel intuitively that this person kind of gets you because there is something in the glimmer of their eye and the way they look back at me when I say something and it feels like they are understanding me at a level almost beyond words and there is a nonverbal tuning in where they are attuned to me and that is reassuring and you immediately feel like they get you and you are getting them and that creates the kind of irresistible butterflies where you are smiling at each other a lot because there is a giddiness that emerges from being seen. Then comes the desire to take intentional authoring of this growing connection because you want to go somewhere neither of you has ever been and orbit some alien landscape together and create a shared experience narrative that cements the idea of our world and you find music you both love and a song that becomes your song and a playlist that is our playlist and you go to Tokyo together and get stoned and listen to the Beatles sing Let It Be and that becomes your shared world that is just for the two of you.

There is a candor that comes from the most unguarded moments not when you are dressed and your teeth are brushed and you are ready for the world but when you are emerging into consciousness in bed together and taking baths together and there is this nakedness that continues to cement the feeling of connection and it is a yummy thing and I kind of live for it. But my problem if I have one is that I love feeling connected so much that fear creeps in around losing it because I do not want you to go away and I do not want you to ever die and I do not want the ravages of time or entropy to rob me of how safe I feel around you because the world has been brought down to size by you and I can handle a world that is normally overwhelming because you are there and I can take more risks because you are there and if you are not there what will I do. Even the greatest ecstasies of trust and connection are tinged by the fleeting nature of our lives and I feel that deeply.

My response to that though has not been to succumb to despair but to double down on the bet that it is worth it anyway and I am going to love you anyway and I am going to try anyway and we are going to imprint ourselves emotionally on each other and create our playlists and take MDMA together and experience what it feels like to be gods outside of time.

Give me a shout on Twitter if this connects. I am @troysk704.