Offering: February 9, 2025
Love, loss & learning
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Hi All,
Just a quick note this week (and no audio) as I’m recuperating from a trip to Mexico City where I had the honor of officiating1 a wedding ceremony for two people I love.
To prepare for the ceremony, I asked the couple and those closest to them about their specific partnership project, gathered stories about what they’re up to and who they’re becoming, and pulled together some of my favorite words about love.
You know I never miss an opportunity to quote Kelly Oliver’s “love is an ethics of differences that thrives on the adventure of otherness,2” for example.
About a month ago I was gifted a copy of Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love—a transcript of a conversation on romantic love between Badiou and journalist Nicolas Truong—from someone special who also has great taste in books.
Badiou describes the basis of love’s starting and flourishing as the “encounter between two differences.” This “event”—the encounter of differences—is disconcerting. It comes as a surprise.
For Badiou this surprise and all it unsettles is completely essential to love. The disconcerting, surprising encounter that we experience in the early days of love “unleashes a process that is basically an experience of getting to know the world3.”
And I love this so much, because one of the best phrases I’ve encountered in my ongoing grief studies is philosopher Thomas Attig’s description of grieving as “relearning the world.”
Grieving and falling in love are such distinct experiences that it would be irresponsible to compare them without taking incredible care. But I do wonder about the learning they both involve, and the unsettling that learning entails.
Badiou writes, “Love isn’t simply about two people meeting and their inward-looking relationship: It is a construction, a life that is being made, no longer from the perspective of One but from the perspective of Two.”
Entering “the perspective of Two” involves learning to see from more than one’s personal vantage. And, as we know, when someone significant dies or goes away that “perspective of two” doesn’t simply revert to the singular. It doesn’t, and can’t.