For centuries, love has become increasingly understood through a very narrow, picturesque lens that larger society continues to cannibalize itself on. According to Genesis 2:24, “a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” In the preceding passage, Adam claims Eve to be from his flesh, a metaphor for uniting two individuals by way of marriage in God’s image. This version paints the traditional portrait of Love as a sacred bond between two complete individuals and marriage as the ultimate union. We idolize the ultimate form of love as Agape, God’s unconditional love for humanity. Yet, in the modern era, the canon of Christian love has been reduced to a cushy kind of removed, painstakingly plain love that is never threatening, always beautiful, and only half the time, promises lasting marriages that are, at best, somewhat happy or barely tolerable. In this instance, love is defined by chance, speed, and mingling with fellow lost souls who have convinced themselves they are whole when they are not.

A different version of love, on the contrary, diverges from this tradition. Real, tangible love, though perhaps impossible to describe in words, is about one’s own lack and offering that lack to others. When one’s ego, identity, selfhood, and individuality start to unravel, one knows that they are in the petrifying clutches of love and have little chance of making a great escape. This feeling is foreboding precisely because love is about giving yourself as you are, and more specifically, giving what you don’t already have.

According to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, love is offering what you don’t have. Lacan suggests that to say one is in love is to expose oneself for one’s lack—a very dangerous and destructive move. In this declaration, one admits they are incomplete and has to reckon with their own nothingness. Love, according to Lacan, strips away this idea of identity as some mysterious solid core to be unlocked by love; this phantasmic framework of having an unchanging, solidified, and essential identity, rather, is obstructed by love. To say “I am” and attach to a definitive identity reveals an even greater misconception of who you are and what really drives your passion, madness, and desire.

For all of human existence, love has created panic that erupts into fear and fear that erupts into crisis; when someone loves another, especially a person who may not love them back, they are vulnerable. Today, this vulnerability is interpreted and read as embarrassment on a mass scale or as being impoverished of any ounce of self-respect. The one who loves is the one who volunteers to be robbed, emptied, turned inside out, and examined for all their wrinkles, sags, and microscopic flaws.

This concept of love as vulnerability contains an infinite number of profiles that are elusive and daunting. Most importantly, Love threatens the ego in very particular and menacing ways.

When one encounters the budding feelings, the initial pull of love and reaches out, attempting to grasp it, the experience is like having a phantom limb for the first time—feeling so strongly, they do not immediately acknowledge that their arm is amputated, missing, and absent. Their previously understood sense of self, in a way, has vanished. When experiencing love, what is absent in oneself is revealed in a way that is similar to revealing your hand in defeat in a game of poker; cursed with a losing hand, having a poker face ultimately couldn’t save you in the end. Experiencing love feels like one’s protective armor is miraculously melted back into iron, revealing an empty bodice and the self as only a silhouette.

When love pursues you, love is equipped with this advanced surgical precision that allows it to perform open-heart surgery and dissect every ounce of self-mastery, autonomy, one believes they have over themselves. Love knows how to dissolve a person’s entire constructed identity into a blood bath of chemicals that will eventually race down a sketchy motel drain. Love is never about sameness, completion, or repairing someone else; it’s about completing the cycle of decomposition, decay, and ultimate transformation for a relationship.

The reason why being “struck” and “falling head over heels” is so accurate, enthralling, playful, and nerve-wracking all at the same time is because love, at its core, leaves us naked and returns us to the bottomless abyss we came from and now reside in. There is no stability in a type of love that pierces through our very being and spurts out our most intense fears, doubts, and insecurities. Nevertheless, the kind of love that challenges us and creates chaos leads us to stage a symbolic death in order to transform for those we truly love—loved ones who we perceive as authentic, admirable, and worthy of self-sacrifice time and time again.

Written by Sidney Uy Tesy, Photography: Jacki Burns, Design: Cella Deer, Social Media: Zaara Hashmy, Styling: Avery Eklins

Bow and Eros