Do lovers always ruin love ?
On attraction, resistance, and identity.
A man has been called up for war. His wife weeps. As they are about to bid farewell, their bodies clinging, they shed tears. And they make each other promises, they know they might never see each other again. The train pulls away, leaving her on the platform, standing among the women who might soon become widows, tears flooding her eyes.
Three days later, in the morning, he is back. Standing at the door, alive, intact. No departure, no battlefield. She rushes into his arms, overwhelmed with relief. He has somehow escaped the draft and avoided hell. And it feels like a miracle.
The couple resumes their intimate life. He cannot leave the house without risking a court-martial for desertion, let alone return to his former job. She cannot even mention his presence, as all the other men of the village are at the front. He stays at home, idle. He becomes the man who stayed, while others went. As weeks, then months pass, the tension that once held the couple together has quietly and steadily dissolved. And with it, her love for him.
The disappearance of love in that situation is not a moral condemnation. She does not cease to love him because she thinks he is a coward. It is the loss of tension that has killed her love. Duty, risk and absence used to give him a symbolic substance. They would pull him away from his relationship. When he returns, he is only a cloistered fugitive. Symbolic and physical distance have crumbled, along with attraction.
But attraction is not simply about distance or proximity. It begins as a spark. A spark triggered when, from a distance, you sense that something in the other remains out of reach, a form of asymmetry. That spark then turns into an irresistible desire to grasp what escapes you. This makes attraction highly unstable by nature. It needs distance to emerge, but immediately seeks to consume the very distance that made it possible. Physics offers a clear illustration of this. Jump from the tenth floor of a building, and gravity, an attractive force, will lethally pull you down. It violently consumes all the distance between your initial position and the ground.
There always comes a moment when attraction reduces the distance to zero. When you love someone, you naturally want to be as close to them as possible. The completion of this proximity being physical touch, and ultimately sexual intercourse. But even at the point of maximum intimacy, when your skin is pressed against the other’s, something resists. You physically cannot fuse with the other person.
Does this mean attraction is doomed to disappear once closeness is complete ?
Stabilizing attraction
If attraction always collapses inward, is it necessarily ephemeral ? Is there a way to stabilize it ? There must be one : each of us is constantly attracted to the ground by gravity. It appears to be a long-lasting attraction. Why does it endure ?
The answer is simple. When we stand, gravity is not the only force at work. The ground also exerts an opposite force on us. The atoms composing the soil push back the atoms of our feet. That opposing force, known as the normal force, is what prevents gravity from crushing us into the ground. Attraction persists because something resists it. These two opposing forces generate tension.
That is the key point. Attraction does not die when distance disappears. It dies when nothing resists being consumed. Attraction may endure only as long as some tension remains.
Keeping tension high
The same force that allows you to whitstand gravity is also at work when another person’s skin is pressed against yours. It is the normal force that prevents bodies from intermingling. A force that pushes each of you back, and in doing so, forces each to remain themselves.
This is the condition for tension : clear identity. Identity is what defines your individuality. The things that cannot be dissolved into the other.
What erodes attraction is not proximity itself, but familiarity. Likeness. Symmetry. The vitality of a relationship can be measured by the quality of its tension : by the presence of two clearly defined poles that do not coincide, and therefore preserve their asymmetry.
That is why the notion of identity deserves attention. Identity does not mean conforming to a masculine or feminine archetype. It absolutely does not mean playing a role or acting distant. It means assuming what is genuinely yours : what you are, what you do, what you are oriented toward. It means accepting friction that may appear when you refuse to twist yourself, to abandon what you should be or do, or to surrender blindly to attraction itself.
Just as our bodies are delimited by our skin, we also need a symbolic identity that cannot be fused with another. Staying true to your identity maintains tension. Proximity is not the problem, as distance between the two poles is dynamic. It contracts and expands, constantly shifting. It shrinks to feel the warmth of attraction more acutely. And it extends to allow contemplation, and mostly, to leave room for the other to move freely towards us.
Paul
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