There are two kinds of love. Let a millennial explain in Gen Z language. The first kind of love, if it were a gif, would be Guzmin smiling ever so slightly. The second kind, if it were a trending TikTok background song (is that what they are called?) would be Miley Cyrus’ Never Be Me going,
“I know I do this every time
I walk the line, I play with fire” (Cyrus, Miley. “Never Be Me.” YouTube)
Enquiries into love are probably the oldest areas of enquiry in literature. From as far back as my mind can go, love is everywhere - after perhaps only religion and war, love poems were being composed before we started saying anything about any other concept the 21st century folks are still mad about today. Love drives us crazy. We can put it into any literary form. We wrote epic poems and couplets about it, metaphysical poems, monologues, haikus, imagist poems, modern poems - and now we do flash poems, pop poems, Tumblr poems, and Insta-poems. We had our French romances, Victorian scandalous love-affairs, and now we have our Normal People, fan fictions on Harry and Hermione. In all of them, however, we have the two distinct types of love.
There is one love which dignifies, heals, makes one strong, so to speak. It restores one’s personhood, gives sight of the horizon under the sun, and helps those writers who can write their books only when they are happy in their lives. This love empowers us, expands our ability to love well beyond our selfish parts, opens us to the wonders of this world - or even better, opens the wonders of this world to us. This love feels as true to the bones as existence does. It does not leave the universe at the periphery - like John Donne’s poem, it brings the Sun into the lovers’ bedroom. This love is Resnais’ Hiroshima mon Amour.
Guzmin’s love for Maggie in the first episode of Modern Love is at once intimate and platonic. David’s love for the dog at he end of Disgrace is possessive like a brilliant gardener is possessive about their plants in their employer’s house. This is Miss Saeki’s love for Kafka. Nala’s love for Simba.
The second kind of love, to borrow the inverse of the popular quote, “Go swim in the ocean but come out dry” (or is this something I came up with myself and have been thinking of as a “quote”?). This love drenches you; you drown in it, and you come out choking. If necromancy was a lady, this is the love Dr. Faustus would have had for her. This is the love Mr. Darcy has for Elizabeth, portrayed not in a fiction of manners, but in a rare and magnificent short-story submitted to one of the million literary journals of the 21st century.
This love is for a Lana del Rey song. It shuts the world out for you, nestles you in the immensity of one roof, one word, one moment, one atom of one grain of sand. This love dials out the light and the atmosphere so much so that one is left with only the very primary, the fundamentals - the sky, the air, the sun. It is for the mad lover. It is for those writers who can only write their books when they are sad. This is Othello’s love, Brett’s love for Jake in The Sun Also Rises.
This is not to say, however, that Porphyria’s lover can never be Chris Nielsen in What Dreams May Come. Indeed, the happy writers can write the tightest tragedies when they have a love that is both as warm as it is catastrophic. The sad writer can write comedies as well as Shakespeare, the master tragic, if they at least have sight of the twilight even as the Sun goes down. It happens rarely, but there is evidence of that moment when one is standing in front of a wave that towers many feet over them - it dries out their mouth in fear of the menace they are beholding - and then one feels it, like the thought of a thought originating in the body, as the gigantic wave passes over them as dreamily and innocently as No-Face, the ghost, passes through Chihiro in Spirited Away.
Both and all kinds of love still always and inevitably carry the potential for falling apart. There is no guarantee in love, as the bloody merchandise say in a gift shop on Valentine’s Day. To add to that, there is no saying the loss of which kind of love is the most painful; painful is also a rather ugly short-cut of a word for what happens after loss.
That is not to say that what happens afterwards is actually “too painful”. What I mean is that loss and the pain in loss can be many things - it may be the wistful joy of discovering the neurology behind nostalgia, it may look like a poem about peeling onions, or it may look like the last act of a play when one of the characters blows out the bedside candle and everything returns to dark. It may look like a lot of dirt, but it may also look like pollen on the nose of your dog.