Love In Impossibility

Love takes many forms. It’s kind of like a shadow moving with us or a shapeshifting cupid-lizard. Sometimes it looks like a soulmate, sometimes it looks like pizza, a cat, or sharing your Netflix password with a friend.

We talk about love through the lens of Shakespeare sonnets and Hollywood explosions. Grand gestures, slow‑motion reunions, and people dramatically leaving their luggage at the airport without being tackled by security and going in for a big smooch. But what we’re really talking about there isn’t love itself, it’s the story of love. We’re rehearsing the plot, not the event. We’re fascinated by the narrative, but not by the messy, violent, ego‑shattering disruption that actually happens when you fall in love.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “the nature of true love is to love the unlovable, just as true forgiveness forgives the unforgivable, faith believes the unbelievable, and hope finds hope where all else seems lost.” Hope triumphs precisely because it emerges from despair. It’s born in the void, in a space where nothing else remains and that is also where love begins. Just like a surprise guest who shows up three hours late but is still the life the party. It’s tempting to misread Chesterton’s words as an appeal to endure toxicity, martyrdom or abuse. Like love is only love if it’s linked to suffering or to simply love those who hurt us. But that’s not it.

Love isn’t about doubling down on loving someone in the face of cruelty. It’s about embracing the impossible. Opening to the undefinable X at the core of affection. Because as soon as you start listing reasons for love, you trap it like an idol which becomes a false likeness of its essence. You can’t love someone because of their features or habits. The moment you try to define love, it slips away. Real love, like God in certain religious traditions, cannot be depicted without distortion.

Take for example, the modern sage, Kim Kardashian. Coming down from on high to deliver us the perfect checklist. Kim lists every quality she wants in a partner: good listener, good with kids, stable career. Yet fundamentally the fact that she has such an elaborate list, rather than being evidence of finding the perfect man is of course a way to forestall the need for a partner in her life. The list reads like a wall between her and intimacy. Interestingly enough, if she were to find a partner, it would be unlikely that this would be someone who simply ticks the boxes. Instead it would be somebody who makes the list of requests seem unimportant.

Which is to say that true love is always retroactive. A person becomes your type only after you’ve fallen for them. In that sense, the “unlovable” in Chesterton’s phrase is simply that which can’t be pre-figured or prepared for. It’s the love that defies your expectations of what love should look like. Which is why love tends to appear when we stop looking for it. When you’ve learned to enjoy your own company. Not through consumer self-love with another bath-bomb or self-help book, not through curating a cute-as-fuck image online, but through genuine ease with your own solitude. Only then you become open to being loved.

We all know the old dating tip; the easiest way to make someone fall for you is to not try at all. In our age of online dating algorithms and relationship advice columns, that line gets twisted into something more like “just be slightly mysterious and emotionally unavailable, but also send them memes at 1 a.m.” The truth isn’t that indifference is sexy, but that people sense wholeness. The inverse also appears. The performative “nice guy,” for instance, isn’t rejected because he’s kind, but because his niceness masks need. Real attraction begins when need dissolves. When you no longer require love to complete you, paradoxically you become most ready for it.

Žižek calls love violent, which is true. Not in a cruel abusive sense, but in how it shatters self-sufficiency. You spend years building a fortress of independence only for someone to barge in and unsettle everything. This disruption is the sublimity of love. It emerges when you no longer think you need it, and yet, true love also preserves a sense of solitude. The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that lovers are “guardians of each other’s solitude.” Which is a beautiful paradox; together and yet separate, whole yet incomplete, which is what makes love sublime.

Chesterton links love to forgiveness, faith, and hope because all four share that paradoxical structure. Forgiveness, for instance, only becomes real when it feels impossible. Merely tolerating others is a liberal virtue but forgiving takes guts, it’s a divine act. Tolerance maintains hierarchy, who has the power to “tolerate” who but forgiveness abolishes it. True forgiveness doesn’t arise from gracious superiority but from despair, from the moment you think you can’t forgive. Like hope, it retroactively creates the space it occupies. In fact, all the virtues Chesterton describes exist within absence. Love arises when it appears to be gone, hope glimmers where it seems extinguished, forgiveness blooms in the soil of bitterness.

Faith follows the same pattern. It’s not belief sustained by evidence but belief despite the void. Which isn’t to champion a wizard in the sky who is simultaneously his father and his own son, but to see it as Chesterton did. Something like saw prayer is not a message sent in a spiritual bottle to heaven which hopes of an answer but as the message itself. Faith performed through its apparent futility. When you pray, the content isn’t what you say but it’s that you say it at all. In a secular sense, faith is the act of committing to meaning even when all meaning feels lost. Kant once called the sublime that which exceeds comprehension, like a beauty that overwhelms rather than pleases. The Kantian sublime doesn’t rely on heaven above, it begins here, within the human limit.

That’s what Chesterton captures: love, forgiveness, hope, and faith are sublime not because they echo divinity, but because they create divinity through their own impossibility. They emerge from the cracks in our lives, not from the clouds. This logic overturns the old metaphysical order — the idea that perfection lies in some radiant beyond.

For Kant, and later Hegel and Žižek, the sublime arises precisely in the fall, in the moment of failure, in the mess of falling in love. It’s in what appears broken or incomplete. Love is not the reflection of a heavenly ideal, but its earthly invention. It’s generated from the void, not received from above. Which brings us back to Chesterton’s original quote. To love the unlovable, forgive the unforgivable, believe the unbelievable, hope where hope is gone, these are not moral commands, they’re everyday ontological revolutions. They flip the order of creation, showing that the good, the true, the beautiful don’t preexist our failings but born through them.

To love is not to ascend but to dive, not to grasp certainty but to make peace with absence. The real transformation happens in the moment you stop trying to pin down what shape it should take, when someone walks into your life who retroactively makes all other paths feel impossible. The disruption might be terrifying, impossible, but somehow exactly what you never knew you needed. The mystery is that from within the void, from the exact moment you've given up, something infinite rises.