Romantic love, Emotional Impermanence, and Pointlessness

Advice on being human and sorting through the pointlessness of it all

Advice from someone who doesn’t know but likes to think about it. Keeping purpose alive in the pointlessness.

This week, three questions, three non-answers, and one interview with New York Times bestselling author Meghan O'Rourke on her groundbreaking book, The Invisible Kingdom. I basically begged Meghan to come and talk about how we understand chronic illness in this moment. As someone who has a child with complex medical needs and a partner suffering from an unnamable ailment, I wanted to hear about how other people understand chronic conditions and how we can support each other. We have two books to giveaway, comment here: (there will be a second chance later this week for non-paying subscribers.)

Now for this week’s questions from Instagram:

1. Is seeking romantic love a form of self-abandonment?

2. Tips on finding a balance between nihilism/existentialism? Lately, it feels like there’s just no point.

3. How to cope with emotional impermanence and reduce relationship anxiety

Question 1 from @allhaildirt - is seeking romantic love a form of self-abandonment?

This is such a good question. I think we should start by making sure we are on the same page with both of the terms: romantic love and self-abandonment. When I think about what romantic love is, several things come to mind - it is perhaps a feeling that beings have adapted as pleasurable to unite us to ensure the survival of our species. Seems a bit dry. Romantic love is for me this weird binding energy/drug that is too complicated to actually describe in any meaningful way. We can call it the type of attraction to another human that makes you lose your rationale, become addicted to them like a drug and need to jump their bones. There is a desire to both make them happy and to be somehow one with them in both a physical and mental sense.

Romantic love is also a societal construct. Or collective ideas around it, even in the context of evolution, it is still just an idea that humans have placed on this matrix of feelings and actions based on neurological chemical reactions. For me, humans are social creatures that derive meaning from our relationships with each other. Romantic love is a form of meaning, a way of surviving, if it feels good, and offers a raison d'être. If it feels shitty, there are other ways of surviving…