Valentine’s Day arrived this year with a fever. Not one of love, but a literal sickness that slowed down the weekend and left me at home.
The house was quiet in the particular way winter houses are quiet. The heat clicking through the vents, light leaning pale against the walls, my body moving slowly between couch and bed. On the coffee table beside tissues and a sweating glass of water were four books I had not intended to read together: Flowers for Algernon, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and How to Talk About Love (a modern translation of Plato’s Symposium).
Only after I closed the last did I realize that I had spent Valentine’s weekend reading four meditations on love while alone.
Illness narrows the world. It strips away performance. It leaves breath and thought. In that narrowed space, I kept returning to a painting that has lingered in my imagination, and my art folder, for months: Gerda Roosval-Kallstenius’s A Blue Hyacinth in Paris. A woman stands alone, eyes closed, holding a hyacinth to her face. There is no lover in the frame. No witness. Only the intimacy of inhalation.
I have begun to see myself there.
I grew up inside a particular story about love.
God had a plan.
No one was meant to be alone.
If you stopped looking, love would find you.
Romance was not simply attraction; it was teleology. Marriage was arrival. Longing was interpreted as evidence of eventual fulfillment. Even delay was reframed as preparation. Somewhere, someone was being shaped for me as I was being shaped for them.
I believed that. I believed it so much that I remember carrying my True Love Waits pledge card in my Bible even through college.
There is comfort in a universe arranged toward companionship. It relieves existential anxiety. It transforms solitude into a waiting room rather than a dwelling place.
But life proved more contingent than curated.
Divorce did not merely end a relationship; it fractured a cosmology. I once stood before witnesses believing permanence was real. I believed vows constructed architecture. When that architecture collapsed, what dissolved was not only a partnership but the metaphysical confidence that love was guaranteed.
I grieved not only a person. I grieved a narrative.
As I lay fevered beneath blankets, Daniel Keyes’ Charlie Gordon moved through my mind. In Flowers for Algernon, Charlie writes, “I want to be smart. My name is Charlie Gordon and I want to be smart.” Beneath that desire is something even more tender: he wants to be loved without being pitied.
When Charlie briefly ascends intellectually, he discovers that affection is fragile when built on imbalance. Love does not arrive as destiny. It falters under asymmetry. Even at its most hopeful, it remains contingent.
Then I turned to Emily Brontë. Catherine’s famous confession—“I am Heathcliff”—once sounded to me like the apex of romance, an ontological fusion that abolished loneliness. Reading it now, I felt something different. Their love is not peaceful. It is consuming, prideful, misaligned. Passion does not protect them from consequence. If anything, their attempt to eliminate separation only multiplies suffering.
Intensity is not inevitability.
Anne Brontë offered gentler ground. In Agnes Grey, affection grows not through storm but through steadiness. And then there is the primrose scene, the moment where recognition feels almost providential. Light softens. Conversation deepens. It feels, briefly, as though the universe has conspired in mercy.
Perhaps that scene lingers because it resembles the myth I once believed. Love as gift. Love as quiet inevitability.
But even primroses bloom briefly.
Plato complicated everything.
In How to Talk About Love, the speakers do not agree on what love is. Aristophanes offers the myth of the divided self: humans once whole, split in two, forever searching for their other half. It is the ancient origin of the phrase “finding your other half.” It is beautiful. It is seductive.
But Socrates, quoting Diotima, disrupts that simplicity. Love, she argues, is born of lack. “Love is the desire to have the good forever.” Eros is not possession. It is longing. It is the restless movement toward beauty.
And the ladder she describes ascends beyond romance:
from love of one body,
to love of many bodies,
to love of beautiful souls,
to love of laws and knowledge,
to the contemplation of Beauty itself.
Romantic partnership is not the summit. It is one rung.
English flattens the word love. Plato multiplies it.
That multiplicity gave me room to breathe.
Perhaps I had not failed at love. Perhaps I had simply mistaken one form for the whole.
After divorce, I stepped into the digital theater of online dating. Profiles. Photos. Carefully curated descriptions of self. I found it superficial and unflattering, not because others lacked depth, but because the medium compressed interiority into metadata.
The myth of destiny had dissolved. In its place stood algorithms.
Messages arrived and vanished. Conversations evaporated mid-sentence. I recognized in myself a fatigue not only with the process, but with the narrowing of love to selection.
I am not built for the marketplace of desire.
At some point, I acknowledged a fact I had long avoided: I have spent more of my adult life alone than in relationship.
Solitude is not an interruption. It is my primary environment.
It has shaped me. I have built work, intellectual life, travel rhythms, and creative practices without daily romantic mirroring. The house, even when I am sick, holds me.
When I imagine myself ten years from now, I see continuity. Myself older. My cats. Books stacked unevenly. A suitcase by the door.
The image does not frighten me.
I am at peace.
And still... would it be good to hold someone or be held? Absolutely.
Plato was right. Longing does not disappear. It changes object.
There are forms of love I have not experienced.
I was never anyone’s great love.
I am not anyone’s father.
Both carry the promise of singularity: to be irreplaceable in another’s story. I do not deny the quiet gravity of that absence. But I also do not interpret it as indictment.
Diotima speaks of two paths to immortality: through children of the body or through creations of the soul. I have no biological children. But I have stood in classrooms where students borrowed courage from me long enough to find their own. I have written. I have built programs. I have shaped trajectories.
These are not substitutes. They are different lineages.
Romantic love and fatherhood are powerful forms of eros. They are not the only ones.
Travel with my brother has been a form of love: shared stadiums, shared museums, and shared laughter. If his circumstances change, I will still go. I will stand alone before a painting and feel no diminishment.
Art is love.
Teaching is love.
Attention is love.
Even the cats curled beside me during fever are small and warm embodiments of affection.
Romantic partnership is not eliminated. It is equal.
One peak in a wider range.
I return now, as I often do, to the art.
In A Blue Hyacinth in Paris, the woman does not wait for someone to offer her beauty. She already holds it. Eyes closed, she inhales. She participates directly in what is present.
She is not waiting to be completed.
I no longer expect primroses arranged by providence. I no longer believe the universe owes me singular romance. But I understand now that love is plural. It is longing directed toward beauty in many forms. It is presence.
If romantic love comes again, it will be gift, not fulfillment of prophecy. If it does not, my life remains textured with travel, brotherhood, vocation, art, quiet rooms, and the embodied desire that occasionally surfaces in the simple wish to be held by another.
The fever has broken. The books are closed. The house is quiet in a peaceful way.
I inhale.
Not because destiny promised it.
Because longing itself is life.