Relationships Talk

Dear Roxane,

I am a 43-year-old, single, never-been-married, educated mother of one and would like advice on love. I’m navigating dating life and need to fully understand the difference between loving someone, being in love and having a soul mate. I love the idea of love and would very much like to spend the rest of my life with a man, but find myself having commitment issues because I am afraid of choosing wrong. I see couples that have been married 10, 15, 20 years who get divorced and seem to be completely fine with it. It’s scary to me because I would like my marriage to last a lifetime. Am I overthinking this totally or being too paranoid? Or do you really never know, because only time will tell?

Sincerely,

Where the hell is the love of my life?

Dear Searching for the Love of Her Life,

We live in a culture that idealizes the idea of love, and the idea that there is one true person who will complete you, fulfill all your dreams and love you forever. We are told from an early age that our true love is out there, waiting for us and so we yearn to find them, to know what it feels like to experience true love, to know you have made the right choice. The truth about love is that it is often bewildering and unknowable. You may never know if you have made the right choice. But when love is true, you embrace all the unknowns, regardless.

I am 44, in a complicated romantic situation, never been married. I am no expert on love. I love the idea of love but I have lived and loved long enough to recognize that there is a difference between the idea of love and the reality of love.

You never really know if a marriage or relationship will last a lifetime. You can want that. You can work hard to make a relationship work and have the best of intentions and still, things might not work out but that doesn’t mean you have wasted your time or failed. Many people who choose divorce are completely fine with it because they know the difference between the idea of love and the reality of love. They know there is nothing to be gained from staying in a marriage simply because the idea of love demands pretending everything is fine when such is not the case. What may seem cavalier to you is most likely a decision that has been agonized over. Few people take divorce lightly because it is a profoundly painful thing to end a commitment you nurtured and fought for and hoped would last a lifetime.

In your letter, you are very much focused on what could be rather than what is. You worry about choosing wrong but are not considering that you might choose right for a lifetime or right for a moment. When you meet someone and start dating, you have no idea where things will lead. You have hopes, yes, and dreams, but you also have to get from one day to the next, getting to know a person, deciding to deepen the relationship and, sometimes, choosing to formalize a commitment. It is so very important to know what you want from a relationship but you also have to create space for a relationship to develop without worrying about what the relationship will or won’t become. You have to be in the relationship in the present, from one day to the next, and some of those days will be glorious, but some of them are going to be a complete disaster. You would like a marriage to last a lifetime, but you are, perhaps, overlooking what it takes to love someone for a lifetime. You are overlooking the small joys and sorrows and frustrations of threading all the days that make up a lifetime of loving someone.

Ask 33 people about the difference between loving someone, being in love and soul mates, and you will get 33 different answers, so I will simply tell you what these things are to me. I must also warn you, I am a passionate, foolish romantic. I believe in love and grand gestures. I am all about the chase, seduction and woo, not just during the shimmering early days of a relationship but also years in when you’re thinking about the maddening ways your person behaves but still, isn’t today a good day to send them some sunflowers or bring them their favorite coffee?

When you find the one you just know. But that isn’t guaranteed. Some people never find the one, or there are several people for whom you have such feelings or you think you have found the one and they change or you change in ways you can no longer tolerate. Love is so damn messy. There are days when I hate love as much as I love it, when I just want to walk away, give up but still, something holds me there, to the center of my gravity.

Loving someone is recognizing the role they play or have played in your life and honoring that presence. Sometimes, love feels like an obligation but it is one you are willing to fulfill. Sometimes it takes hard work but you are willing to put in that work. Love is the constant you hold on to when you don’t particularly like the one you love. Love is recognizing the ways in which, for better and worse, someone has contributed to your life. It is up to you to decide what loving someone, being in love with someone and a soul mate mean.

Being in love is wild, breathtaking, infuriating. It is butterflies in your stomach when you think about your person, when you see them, when you hold them. It’s the electricity when your skin meets. It’s smiling at your person with wide eyes and an open heart and seeing them smile back at you in the same way. It’s wanting to hold someone’s hand, even when your hand is hot, a little sweaty. It’s lust and the heat of wanting, wanting, wanting. It’s seeing who someone truly is, the best and most terrible parts of them, and choosing not to look away from everything you see, actively embracing everything you see. It’s the willingness to have difficult but honest conversations. It’s compromising on the structure of your relationship. It’s about patience and being flexible and getting irritated or furious with a person but still holding on. It’s wanting to be the best version of yourself for your person but also for yourself, especially for yourself. It’s the pride you feel in their accomplishments and being as happy for their successes as you are for your own, if not more. It’s their hurts becoming your hurts. It’s feeling their absence when you are apart and the rush of joy when that absence ends. It’s liking someone as much as you love them, being interested in who they are, marveling at the ways they are interested in you. It’s a gut instinct. You just feel it. You know it in your bones. It isn’t perfect, not at all. It doesn’t need to be. It is, simply, what fills you up.

As for soul mates, I did not believe such a thing existed until I did. A soul mate is someone so deeply part of you that they feel like a vital organ, living outside of your skin. They are the hottest part of the sun, your true north, your home, the one from whom you will never walk away, no matter what the material conditions of your relationship might be. Your soul mate is the one you wait for knowing no matter what happens, that they are worth the wait. Your soul mate is the person you choose because you look at them, always and think, “You … there you are.”

But it truly doesn’t matter how I or anyone else understand love. You get to decide what loving someone, being in love with someone and having a soul mate mean. You get to choose the kind of person you want to spend your life with and for how long and what that relationship looks like. You get to fight for what you want so long as the person you love is fighting alongside you.

I hope you find that person you are looking for. I hope when you meet him, you don’t worry about how the relationship might end. I hope you find joy and fulfillment in the very act of loving and being loved, no matter what may come.

Roxane Gay (@rgay), an associate professor at Purdue University, is the author, most recently, of “Hunger” and a contributing opinion writer.

“Ask Roxane” is an advice column that appears periodically in The New York Times Opinion section.

If you’re looking for some comic relief and live in the San Francisco area, come to The New York Times Opinion Live on Friday, Oct. 19, for an evening of politics and advice — and advice on coping with politics — with Roxane Gay, Michelle Goldberg and Jennine Capó Crucet, hosted by the Sunday Review editor, Rachel Dry. Get tickets here.

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