Failures Of Love
At some point in our lives most of us have experienced a form of temporary madness called love. We are sailing through life with our routines and habits. We have got ourselves reasonably together and all our cups ordered on the shelf exactly where they should be. Then we meet someone who completely destabilises our perfectly curated existence and all hell breaks loose.
Suddenly we want to appeal to them, we want them to return our glances, and we start doing things we would never have predicted. To hell with the cups on the shelf, we think. We research their favourite films. We second-guess each sentence before we say it. We start becoming, in small and large ways, someone slightly different from who we were. It is insufficient at this point to say simply be yourself, because when you are in love, whether you want it or not, you start behaving differently. Nietzsche was right that there is always a touch of madness in love.
Love presents itself as a fundamental, structural undermining of the security of your own subjective position. The other person has power over you. This is also why some people, when confronted with a crush, become quietly angry or resentful. If your entire identity is built around control, falling in love feels like a hostile takeover.
And of course, at some point the central question surfaces: do you really love me. For Lacan, this is one of the most dangerous questions precisely because it is impossible to answer. If your partner says no, you are devastated. If they say yes, you immediately wonder whether they mean it. The affirmation of love becomes the very thing that destabilises the truth of love. You have built a trap with no exit. Love cannot be directly signified because what you love is not exactly the person in front of you, it is the idea of the love they carry for you.
This is where the subject supposed to desire comes in. When you are in love with someone, you position them as the one who is supposed to know whether or not they truly love you, and therefore whether or not your own feelings are legitimate. You think that if their love were somehow certain and perfectly expressible, your own uncertainty would be resolved. But this is to posit a certainty that love structurally cannot provide. Because love is always tied to trust, and what is trust if not the ability to act and engage without any guarantee in advance. Love is two people stepping into that uncertainty together, anticipating that the other will show up, falling in love again each day in new and different ways. If you are in love there is no other option.
Which is the destabilising nature of an authentic encounter with love. There is no concrete signifier of it. No amount of flowers, no ring, no anniversary dinner completes it. Love is sublime precisely because it has no signifier that marks it as accomplished. It is always in process, always incomplete.
This means love is, in a precise sense, a form of failure. You have to love each day and try better each day. As Beckett wrote, fail again, fail better. There is no success except the ongoing embrace of that failure, sticking it out together and calling it a life. The question of what they can do or say or buy to prove their love misses the point entirely. The exchange can never be completed. And the moment you realise that your partner is not the person who holds the secret to love, you are freed to step into the breach yourself. The subject supposed to desire turns out not to possess the truth of desire, and that is when you begin to love.