Jazz Feelings
Consider a jazz musician in the midst of improvisation. It might seem that true creative freedom would mean playing without any constraints—no key or time signature, no underlying chord progression—pure expression. But any jazz musician will tell you that the opposite is true. It's precisely by knowing these constraints that they find their greatest freedom to create. This is where we encounter a paradox—that the highest form of freedom emerges through voluntary constraint—just like falling in love.
Think about when you fell in love or the last time you fell in love. Now try to explain exactly why you fell in love with that person. It’s easy to find yourself listing attributes—their smile, their kindness, their wit—but this is missing something essential about the nature of love itself. Because we meet people all the time that we could list the same traits about but we don’t end up falling head over heels for people anytime someone hit our love bingo card. It's like trying to explain why a particular piece of music moves us by listing technical elements: the chord voicings, the rhythmic patterns, the melodic intervals. While these elements matter, they completely miss the ineffable magic of the whole.
Consider what happens when we try to rationalise love. "I love you because of your beautiful eyes, your brilliant mind, your kind heart." But this kind of reasoning immediately reveals that we're not talking about love at all. If love were merely a calculation of attractive qualities, it would be nothing more than that bingo card or a musician mechanically combining pleasant-sounding notes without any real artistry.
When we examine things closer we realise that the reasons we give for loving someone only become clear to us after we've already fallen in love. It's as if love creates its own retroactive justification. We don't choose to fall in love because of certain qualities; rather, these qualities become meaningful to us because we've fallen in love.
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that love begins as an act of absolute freedom—we freely choose to love someone—but the moment we do, something remarkable happens. The very nature of that choice transforms and becomes, as Žižek describes it, "the most radical chain that you can imagine, but it's a free chain."
Just as a jazz musician's free decision to work within a particular key signature suddenly makes certain notes feel inevitable, our initial free choice to love becomes suffused with a sense of necessity. Not because we can't live without the other person, but because the choice itself acquires a different quality. Think about what this means. When we're truly in love, the initial moment of choice doesn't feel arbitrary anymore—it feels meaningful, as if it couldn't have been otherwise. The freedom of the original choice isn't negated; rather, it's transformed into something that feels both free and necessary at the same time. We still choose to love, but that choice now feels like the recognition of something profound rather than a mere preference or decision.
This transforms our entire understanding of freedom in love. The very phrase "falling in love" captures something profound about its nature. Like a jazz musician caught up in the flow of improvisation, we freely enter into something that then takes us over completely. We choose to let ourselves fall, yet the falling itself is beyond our control. It's not about keeping our options open versus committing to someone—it's about the paradoxical experience of freely surrendering to something that feels both chosen and inevitable at the same time. We find ourselves swept up in a force that we willingly entered into, yet somehow it feels like it was waiting for us all along.
Once we've fallen in love, often there's no going back. It can feel as if we can hardly imagine life without the other at all. In 'The Metastases of Enjoyment,' Žižek writes that “Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.” Like a melody that won't leave your head, love occupies us completely.
But Žižek would want us to go even further. When we love someone, we initially fall in love with an idealised image of them. Yet true love emerges when this idealisation falls away, and we encounter the real person—with all their flaws and imperfections—and love them even more. This is what Žižek calls the process of desublimation, something earlier developed by thinkers like Freud and Adorno. Like a musician moving beyond technical perfection to find their authentic voice, complete with its distinctive quirks and imperfections.
When someone asks you why you love your partner, remember that any reason you give will necessarily fall short. Because the truth is, you don’t love them for any reason at all—and that's exactly what makes it love. Like the most transcendent moments in jazz, it's not about the individual notes anymore, but about something far more mysterious and profound that emerges when we freely choose to bind ourselves to something greater than ourselves.