This is the eleventh installment of Higher Gossip, an advice column on sex and love. Read previous installments here.

Q: I’ve never been good at dating, by which I mean I usually decide quickly whether I’m interested in someone beyond being sexually attracted to them. When I’m single I’ve often intentionally slept with people who I’d never want to be in a relationship with. As I’ve gotten older, this has gotten increasingly difficult. People are more eager to cultivate intimacy than they were when I was younger, and I find it unappealing to be emotionally intimate with people I know I’ll never fall in love with. I’ve never worried about my inability to feign interest in people I’m sleeping with because real love has always hit me like a lightning bolt. I associate love with my own passivity. When I fall for someone I’m unable to make any decision that doesn’t lead directly to closeness with the person I’m falling for—I cancel plans, I fall behind on work…

For the first time in a while, I’ve started seeing someone who I can imagine incorporating into my life. She’s beautiful and I like having sex with her, she’s smart and interesting. After only a couple of dates I invited her to hang out with my friends. But I’ve become unsure about her, and the relationship (or its potential), because I don’t feel a crazy, obsessive pull toward her. I don’t think she’s uninteresting, or totally wrong for me, like I usually do. But I don’t feel the need to reorient my life (or even my week) to get as much time with her as humanly possible. At first this wasn’t true: after we slept together the first couple of times, I found myself thinking about her nonstop, and spent entire weekends with her when I was meant to be doing something else. Then when we were together the other night and a friend texted to say they were doing something fun, I had a mild feeling of missing out—this spelled disaster for me. But I worry that my understanding of real interest as obsessive, or something that has little to do with my own actions, is a dangerous one, and might keep me from forming meaningful attachments.

A: There’s an elegant, provocative pebble buried in your letter: I associate love with my own passivity. Or, posed as a question: Does love just happen to us, without us choosing it? When it’s proper, when it’s real, are we capable of nothing but passively receiving a visitation? This reminds me of a passage from Swann in Love that I quoted in an earlier column, which begs its relevance yet again: Of all the modes by which love is brought into being, of all the agents which disseminate the holy evil, surely one of the most efficacious is this great gust of agitation which now and then sweeps over us.

Agitation. Love doesn’t merely touch us like a balmy breeze. We are disturbed by it. You cancel plans, you fall behind on work. But does this mean you’re passive? In fact, when the gust arrives you rush to accommodate the intensity of this feeling, to remove the obstacles in your life that were just moments ago comforting pieces of furniture, to make yourself, who were once closed off, available. You don’t feel you have a choice—you feel no possibility except to acquiesce to the feeling—and yet the acquiescence is highly active, busier and more overwhelming than the usual rhythms of your life.

You don’t describe yourself as someone who lets yourself be pursued and accepts the sudden imposed primacy of someone who wants to love you. That is what we might call passivity in love. In fact there is nothing passive about your experience of love. Perhaps a better term for it is submission, or that overburdened word, compulsion. It makes you feel animated, in all your obsessive activity, by something you aren’t consciously choosing.

This is the much more interesting problem to sort out. We are conscious of having put only some of our actions into motion; many others seem to be made by a puppet version of ourselves, which takes possession of us in some vulnerable state. Opinions are divided about the origin and meaning of this version of ourselves, the one that “knows” immediately what it wants and rushes to secure it. Should we conceive of this unconscious, instinctual, profoundly feeling self as true and right—as a dispatch from our innermost ancient humanity or God? Or should we walk around it circumspectly as we might a captured animal and say: this feels ancient because it comes from childhood, a place that seems to me ancient, but which has no corner on “truth” or “rightness”?

When you worry that your conception of love is “dangerous,” I think what you mean is… outdated, childish—not in the sense that this is a universally immature idea about love, but that it comes from a younger version of you, for whom there existed no spectrum of desire between wanting a person unequivocally and wanting to just enjoy someone for a night. And I know that you don’t feel that young anymore. You start your letter with an acknowledgment that dating has gotten harder for you as you get older, and not for the reasons we hear about so often and might assume—that you’re lonelier, that more people are married or rushing to meet someone to marry or cynical or somehow terribly damaged. It’s become harder for you because fewer people want to have casual sex. In connections that you consider obviously casual, you can feel the encroaching wish for intimacy, for solace. The desire for intimacy is more acute, the awareness of its rarity at times overwhelming; sometimes when you undress with someone it’s as if a special, greedy spirit inside us (or me, rather, I should say) suddenly sees its opportunity and screams.

So what does it mean to be good at dating? Is it knowing when to slap this animal back down, because you can tell that going through the machinations of love with this particular person won’t end well? (In this sense, you’re quite good at dating.) Or is it—as your question implies—being open to what might happen, making your decisions with more curiosity? Opinions are also divided on whether love should feel soft or immense, gentle or intense, accommodating or overwhelming. Is this just who you are—someone who wants to fall in love obsessively, or passively, as you call it—or is it a trick you’re playing on yourself, an avoidance strategy?

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I worry over all the same questions as you do. This summer, I fell in love very deeply, and very quickly. I tend to date somewhat widely—here we are in a dating column, after all—but, in general, I’m reserved about committing myself in a serious way. In my years of dating in New York, I’ve fallen passionately in love, but with a sort of cap, a constant caveat, a feeling of not quite. I’ve never moved in with a girlfriend or gotten engaged; even in relationships I tend to identify as a solitary person. I frequently return to a quote I find very rich on this subject, from Patricia Highsmith’s diaries, dated June 1947:

Again & again I am fooled by the egocentric pseudo-bliss of aloneness into thinking it makes me perfectly happy. I have to be blasted out of it. I should never be alone. It is happiness without love or a woman, which (to my thinking, for me, now) can never constitute a real happiness. My intellect may be happy, it is. But I don’t even function properly physically. Isn’t this enough proof? Yet for ten years or more, my schizophrenic personality has tricked me. I revel in aloneness again and again, before I realize, again & again. The real trouble of course, as always with me, is in trying to find absolute and permanent values & advantages in experiences which are & should be only transitory.

I identify deeply with Highsmith, which is, holistically speaking, a fairly disturbing realization. Like her, I am often fooled by the egocentric pseudo-bliss of aloneness into thinking it makes me perfectly happy; like her, I frequently have cause to realize this can never constitute a real happiness. These twin impulses fight within me in a continuing war of many losses. When I fell in love this summer, it felt different. I wasn’t merely smitten with this woman; I felt as if, in some way, all the uncertainties that had prevented me from giving myself totally to a relationship, uncertainties both about myself and about the people I dated, had been blasted away. Many paths that had previously seemed obscure to me cleared themselves. I saw the healing of all my own foibles, I saw far into the future, and I wasn’t afraid, I was eager. Even my mother, who I consider one of the more emotionally conservative forces in my life, tossed up her hands at my news, and said: “Sometimes you just know.” Previous to this summer this very phrase would have been offensive to my sensibilities. What could be more intellectually boring then some magical, inexplicable, flattening “just knowing”? Weren’t the people who talked about that just… simplistic? And probably not Jewish?

The breathlessness and totality with which I fell in love was a point of anxiety for me. I was obsessed with knowing what it meant. Did it mean that this love was realer (more genuine, more lasting) than a less breathless and totalizing one? This assumption is echoed in your letter. Or did it herald some blindness, some weakness, some machination of my own powerful solitary fantasy system? As is my wont, I spent a lot of time on the internet, reading about other people’s romances and views on love, and receiving vast swaths of impersonal advice about whether “when you know, you know” or about whether “slow and steady is the only sustainable way to build a relationship.” I negotiated with myself. On the one hand, the relationship was moving at a faster pace than I could reasonably get to know my new girlfriend. On the other hand, I hadn’t experienced falling in love as a “gust of agitation,” as, like you, I generally do; it had been swift, but almost effortless, like making a friend out of someone you’ve long admired. Basically, this was not my usual way, and despite that seeming like a good thing, I was suspicious. Some mornings I woke up in a light sweat, and called my friend Louise to describe how strange it was to feel like such a different person than I had felt a few months prior—a person who really identified as part of a couple—and ask her if it was unusual that I found that strange. When we were young together, in college, our identities had been profoundly wrapped up in being people who lived and adventured on our own, who weren’t beholden to any one person or commitment. This was a difficult self-conception to shake. Louise said she still sometimes found this shift in herself strange, after almost a decade with her boyfriend.

I have a feeling, from your letter, that like me you habitually think in dichotomies. (It won’t be lost on you that I’ve chronicled “divided opinions” on two subjects already in the course of a few short paragraphs.) We might as well acknowledge the assumed dichotomy of romance we are both working within: that on the one hand, there is the casual, the stopgap, that mere comfort about which we shouldn’t trick ourselves; on the other hand there is exalted love, which sturdily endures all wounds and lasts. I’ve never consciously affirmed this dichotomy, but I think anyone who writes about romance is to some extent functioning within it. In a previous column, on inequality and love, I attempted to throw a wrench into this simple dichotomy; but a thousand other trivial, throwaway lines endorse it. I hope that, with some time and experience, we can transform this kind of strict dichotomous thinking into a more considered dialectic. What is the root of that thing that feels magical when we “just know,” or when we’re overcome by that “gust of agitation,” or when we’re hit “like a lightning bolt”? Is it fascination? A sense of familiarity, the impression of safety? It presents itself as a dizzying monolith, this feeling, which inhabits us so fully that we imagine it is us; but it, too, has its own sources, its own textures.

For Highsmith, what gives her trouble is repeatedly “trying to find absolute and permanent values & advantages in experiences which are & should be only transitory.” Like her, you and I are pattern-makers; like her, we’ve both, in the course of this single webpage, laid out what we consider our particular modes of emotion, not merely our habitual behaviors and ideas in love but that sense we each have, inevitably, that there is some kernel in these behaviors and ideas that is inescapably us, an instinct, a true self. Yet aren’t we merely trying to find absolute and permanent values, if not advantages, in experiences which are (& should be only) transitory? Is this the awareness behind your fear that you “aren’t very good at dating”?

In these terms, we are almost all bad at dating—that’s why it’s so famously rough. What makes dating pleasurable, aside from small talk or sexual attention, is, I think, how it cultivates curiosity, a willingness to open yourself up to new if fleeting encounters. What makes dating so miserable is entering each situation while asking yourself: Is this a permanent relationship? When will I encounter a relationship that promises to be permanent—and therefore not have to have these transitory experiences anymore?

When I woke up sweaty in midsummer, and called Louise, it wasn’t because I was having a bad time, exactly. In fact, it was because I was having a suspiciously good time. I was haunted by that question on an unforgiving loop: Is this permanent? Is this permanent? This is the question we are most encouraged to ask by dating experts, the question romantic culture obsesses over, the question we are advised not to be blind or self-deluding towards, lest we end up geriatric, regretful and—horror—alone.

Whether a given love is a permanent experience is neither the most interesting nor the most relevant question; in fact it narrows our fields of vision almost to the point of boredom. Not to mention that it’s fruitless. Relationships famously involve more than one person, and people famously change their minds. Even marriages are impermanent; and even long-married couples are the first to testify that marriage is an ever-evolving experience, that in fact a long relationship is made of many distinct phases, each with their own unpredictable flavor, with which one’s current values and ideas can scarcely keep up.

You spent a couple of weekends fixated on this woman you’ve been dating. Is this a permanent experience? you asked yourself. Will this look like my other obsessions looked before? Will I like this in the same way I liked those other romances? It’s hard not to ask yourself these things. But aside from being contradictory—your past intense, obsessive experiences ended, obviously—these are closed-door questions. Nothing so interesting can come from them. So you trembled at the wish you had, one evening, to hang out with your friends instead, because you were afraid it meant this one wouldn’t look like the others. I’d take that merely as a sign that you like your friends a lot. And if you’re lucky, you’re right: this romance won’t look like the others.

In March, I received a letter from a young person in a long-term relationship, who worried they were suffering from the permanence of the experience, although the relationship fulfilled them in many respects. My response centered around a passage from Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, about the types of suffering that “feel meaningful—like something of significance could be born.” I think that’s a good criterion not only for suffering but also for happiness, and for love. Not is this a permanent experience? but rather, can something of significance be born here? I’ll let you decide, but I suspect that something of significance is already being born between you and the woman you’re seeing. Try not to interpret the inevitable changes in your emotions as a disaster; try not to search for absolute and permanent values on every date. Remember that for Proust that gust of agitation is merely one “of all the modes by which love is brought into being.” We should hope to encounter at least a few others in our lifetimes.

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