My Relationship With Love

I’m not sure if I can tell what love is, but I think I’m closer to it than before. It wasn’t until I decided to write on this topic that I realized I have nowhere near the same depth of understanding of “love” as I do of “death.” Why is that? Is it because I’ve never thought seriously about love, because I’ve always been surrounded by love without knowing it, or because I’ve never truly experienced real love?

I’m not sure what “love” is. My mom says I’m the person she loves the most, but I’m almost certain she loves my dad more. The “love” my mom gives me seems to allow her to destroy me at will—break me, damage me, shatter me, torment me—as long as it doesn’t kill me, it’s fine. Is that love? But she offers small favors now and then and claims she would stand by me when I need her, though I don’t ever remember her actually doing that.

My dad never says he loves me, but I know he supports me now. He claims he’s always wanted to support me, but his support came with conditions. I had to achieve what the world defines as “success,” had to meet the standards of a “good life,” a “good job,” a “good future.” I needed to prove to him that I could do it. Not assumed—it had to be proven. Not unconditional—it came with very specific conditions. His impatience, his yelling, his “hating iron for not becoming steel,” according to him, was love. But suffocating love—is that love? It makes me feel uncomfortable, stifled, like I have no room to grow or choose. Is that love? I seriously doubt it. I feel anxious, belittled, misunderstood; I want to explode, to scream—is that love?

An ex-boyfriend once told me he loved me a week into our relationship, and I was so scared I broke up with him. He never said it again. He said love is a feeling. But everything about him was based on feelings. To me, love should be something more enduring, more solid, something that can’t be changed easily—more multidimensional, deeper, something that transcends time and space, something lasting.

My least favorite line in Interstellar is when Anne Hathaway insists on going back to save Matt Damon, saying something like “love can transcend time and space.” I remember thinking, this director clearly doesn’t understand physics. After making so many deeply scientific films, he still insists on inserting this kind of unrealistic romanticism. There is no substance that can transcend time and space. Space-time is gravity, gravity is space-time. If love does exist, it might not be a thing from the 3D world. Emotion has never been something logic can explain.

It is said that we live in an 11-dimensional universe, and everything we experience is the projection of that 11-dimensional world into our 3D reality. It’s as if we are living on the membrane of a bubble, and that membrane is the three-dimensional world. Everything we experience is a projection from a higher-dimensional reality into ours. Like wind causes ripples on the surface of a lake—we are the lake surface, unable to comprehend what’s under the water, nor what’s in the sky. When the wind blows, we ripple. But not because of ourselves—because of the wind from outside.

I think emotions and consciousness are probably similar—they are like electricity, which needs to be induced to create current. And light is one with space-time and gravity. If space-time is distorted, light is distorted. In other words, reality in all dimensions only comes into being in the moment light shines on it. Darkness is chaos, possibility, potential. When light shines into darkness, observable reality comes into being. But the unobservable doesn’t mean non-existent—it just means it hasn’t been induced into observable, patterned reality.

From this perspective, “love” might also be a higher-dimensional energy, and what’s left after it passes through us is only the residue. Like quantum entanglement: even if two particles appear far apart in our 3D world, in a higher dimension, they are together.

Maybe that’s what love is.

Love, perhaps, is the renewed awareness of a truth: we were together all along.