Some people seem to understand love in a language I never learned. They speak it fluently—unafraid to be seen, to be vulnerable, to let their guard down. They know how to read subtle cues, how to repair conflict, how to remain soft even when it would be easier to shut down. I admire those people. But I’ve never been one of them.
I’ve only had three serious relationships in my life—my first girlfriend, my high school sweetheart, and my ex-wife. Each one arrived with the thrill of discovery and the promise of something lasting. And each one ended, as so many loves do—not with betrayal, not with drama, but with weariness. With misunderstanding. With two people who tried, and still somehow missed each other. Looking back, I can see how each relationship taught me something about what I wanted. But it also revealed what I couldn’t yet name: how deeply I long to be chosen, and how fragile that hope feels when held out to someone else.
Love, as the psychologists tell us, is both attachment and risk. To love someone is to say: I will let you matter to me. I will let you influence me. I will hurt if you go. The brain lights up in love the way it does with addiction or hunger. We are wired to seek it. But wanting love doesn’t mean we know how to sustain it. Esther Perel once said that modern relationships must hold what once took a whole village to provide—security, adventure, belonging, eroticism, friendship. It’s no wonder so many of us feel we’re failing. We’re asking the impossible of ourselves, and still we keep reaching.
So when I see Joseph Lorusso’s Lovers and Lautrec, something in me still stirs. The painting is quiet—just a man and a woman standing in a gallery, looking at a painting. But there is a hush to their posture. The woman leans into the man, her head almost resting on his shoulder. Their bodies don’t just stand beside each other—they echo the embrace they are looking at: a painting within the painting.
That inner image is In Bed: The Kiss by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Two women lie entwined in soft linens, their kiss more a breath than a declaration. It’s intimate, not performative. You feel like you’ve stumbled upon a moment you were never meant to see. Lautrec painted the fringes of society—sex workers, drinkers, dancers—but he painted them with grace, not judgment. In this piece, he paints love without spectacle. It’s not the first kiss, or the last. It’s one in the middle—familiar, folded into routine, and still tender.
Lorusso chose this painting for a reason. In placing his couple before Lautrec’s lovers, he draws a line across time, across art, across forms of connection. Both paintings ask the same question in different voices: What does it mean to stay close? And as the viewer, I find myself caught in that question too. The artists are not just speaking to each other—they're speaking to me.
I think about how often I’ve tried to answer that question. I’ve turned to dating apps, trying to find a spark in an endless scroll of faces and bios. I’ve composed careful messages, each word weighed and reread. And still, I’ve never made it past messaging. Something just doesn’t click. The digital world flattens everything. A profile can’t capture the gravity of longing. A match doesn’t mean mutual understanding. It’s all frictionless—until it isn’t, until the silence comes.
I listen to the Modern Love podcast and read the essays, and sometimes I find pieces of myself in those stories—other people yearning, fumbling, waiting. They remind me that this ache is not mine alone. That people everywhere are trying and failing and trying again. There’s comfort in that chorus. But there’s also loneliness. Because no matter how many love stories I consume, I still come back to the same quiet truth: I miss being chosen. I miss being in it. Not just dating, not just hoping, but held.
A psychologist might say I have an anxious attachment style. Maybe that’s true. I’ve always leaned in, even when I should have stepped back. I’ve romanticized too quickly, clung too tightly, believed too deeply. But even knowing that, I still believe in love—not the kind that sweeps you off your feet, but the kind that sits beside you in the dark and doesn’t leave.
And that’s what I see in Lovers and Lautrec. Two lovers, and behind them, two more. And then me, watching them all. The museum becomes a mirror. The longing isn’t solved, but it’s seen. The artists don’t offer resolution. They offer recognition. They say: We, too, have known the quiet ache. We, too, have stood beside someone and wondered if they still felt it too.
So I return to this painting not to be comforted, but to be understood. Because in a world where love feels harder to reach—where messages disappear and moments are curated—it’s something rare to feel seen. And if love is, at its core, the desire to be known, then maybe this painting is a kind of love too. A brief moment of being known, without having to explain a thing.
