you have to be in love with strangers

in praise of more more more

In New York City this September, I was riding the train back to Brooklyn from the Met and I was eavesdropping. Which is an easy thing to do on the train, but is impossible to do in your car in traffic on I-35. And I overheard one of my favorite things, which is one of those really hasty train goodbyes, where one person says, “this is me,” and their friend has to say, “I’ll see you soon,” and then they quickly hug before the stop person runs off the train to go back up above ground.

That’s what I miss the most—the proximity, and what it allows. You can only form a fleeting crush on the person who lets you merge on the interstate, but you can fall in love completely with someone who holds open the closing doors so that you can squeeze in.

***

I have spent months trying to examine my summer for its meaning. It was a beautiful summer—we got married and we went on a gorgeous and long honeymoon, the trip of a lifetime. It was also a summer for existential crisis. I finished grad school and forgot how to write immediately. The wedding and honeymoon ended. I didn’t get the job I really wanted. I felt like a failure, even on the sandy beach in Antibes, where no one should be able to feel like a failure. I’ve cried about the same problems so many times it’s amazing I can still find emotion in them.

Now that the weather has cooled for the first time and summer feels like it’s finally over, I think I know what the summer’s lesson is, and it’s this: There is no hierarchy of love, and all forms of it are essential.

***

Romantic love is exalted. Platonic love should be, too. Whatever you call it when you fall in love with strangers as well. Flattening all love so that all forms of it are the same doesn’t feel diminishing of love but like praise of it. Imagine it as a big, flat disk that you break off pieces from each time you feel it. Only the disk isn’t the right analogy because a disk will eventually run out. It’s more like if the possibilities of loving were a desert that you could disseminate grain by grain. Even that may not be enough for some. In a perfect world, nothing would be.

***

Weddings are how we celebrate romantic love. And it was incredible—to see almost everyone we love in one room, to make promises in front of all those people, to dance. The honeymoon is meant to be an extension of that celebration, an opportunity to be in a traveling bubble of romantic love. We expanded the bubble by inviting six of our friends to join us in Antibes. One of those friends asked me a question on the trip that I can’t quite remember anymore, but I remember that it made me realize my distinction between loving someone romantically and loving someone platonically basically doesn’t exist. I mean that, if I could, I might marry my friends one by one. I would promise them anything.

And that is what I mean—that abundance doesn’t make my love for Marshall feel any smaller or inconsequential, but bigger. More is more is more is more.

***

I love Tamir because he is thoughtful. I love Racien because she is calming. I love Christian because he can’t help but curate. I love Lauren because she has never forgotten anyone. I love Peter because he cleans the breakfast table in the morning. I love Emily because she knows what to say. I love Marshall because he loves everything, and earnestly. It is not fake when Marshall has one bite of a steak and says, “I love this steak!” or walks into a party for five seconds and says, “I love this party!” He really does love it. Isn’t that the way to be?

***

Even in the Uber, you can love people in New York. On the way back up to Williamsburg from Sunset Park, after a long and perfect day, I resisted temptation to revisit my old playlists from when I lived and walked there, and instead listened to “You Belong To Me” by Patsy Cline over and over. It was romantic. We sat in nighttime traffic and I found myself looking into other people’s windows to my right and didn’t realize that, to my left, there was a clear and unobstructed view of Lower Manhattan and its bridges. Lauren understands this. We would look into windows forever if we could. Because who wouldn’t be charmed by the woman washing her dishes in the big window several stories below?

You have to be in love with strangers, or else how will you ever love anyone else.

***

If I examine my summer for the amount of love it has held, the sense of failure disappears. Even so, it feels easier to write about the failure than it does to write this, about how necessary it is to fall in love on a daily basis, because failure has grit and narrative and love is cliché. It’s too earnest, too corny, too cringey, too much.

But I know it’s real because I’ve felt it so many times, not just this summer but for so long. Especially since knowing Marshall, whose gleeful abandon for loving everything is so true that it isn’t annoying and is only inspiring. That I get to use him as a lens through which to view the world is the greatest gift I’ll ever get.

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