✦ The Beautiful Failure of Falling In Love ✦

By Prof. Elowen Vane — Department of Philosophy, Evening Edition

There is a peculiar cruelty in the way we talk about falling in love. We call it falling, as though gravity were our accomplice—as though romance were an accident of physics rather than a slow, deliberate act of philosophical inquiry. We say someone "fell" for you, as if your heart had been lifted from its proper shelf and dropped onto the floor with a dull thud. And we are satisfied with this metaphor because it absolves us: if I fell, then I did not choose. If love was an event that happened to me, then I need not account for it. I need not examine whether what I call love is actually just a very elaborate form of loneliness wearing a silk blouse and asking for my phone number.

Let's be honest with one another: most of us have never truly fallen in love. We have attempted to fall, the way a student attempts an essay on Kant without having read Kant. We know the shape of the thing from secondhand descriptions—movies, songs, friends' Instagram captions at 2 a.m.—and we assemble our version out of those fragments and call it authentic. The philosopher in me wants to be gentler about this than the philosopher in me is. But you asked for honesty in a online article column, so I shall give it to you with a smile: falling in love is not the opposite of choosing love. It is merely its most convenient alibi.

What I want to offer here—because a philosophy column that only deconstructs without reconstructing would be a rather funeral affair—is something more useful than irony. What I want to offer you is an invitation to fail at falling in love, and to treat the failing as the actual work. Not the preamble to romance. Not the clumsy rehearsal before the real performance. The failing itself, done with intention, is where intimacy becomes philosophically interesting. It is where two autonomous beings discover that alliance is not the negation of selfhood but its most generous extension.

Let me explain what I mean by "failing" in this context, because I suspect you are already imagining something more dramatic than I intend.

I. The Myth of the Seamless Union

The oldest and most persistent lie about romance is that true love means the dissolution of boundaries. We imagine two people becoming one, their egos melting like wax near a candle, leaving behind some luminous and undifferentiated we. This is a beautiful image. It is also, philosophically speaking, almost exactly what we should fear.

If I lose myself in you, where am I? If our union requires the erasure of my preferences, my silences, my private resentments and secret jokes, then the union has consumed me rather than included me. The mystics get this right: genuine communion between two souls is not annihilation but recognition. You see me, and I see you, and neither of us disappears in the seeing. We remain distinct figures on a shared canvas.

The problem with "falling" as metaphor is that it implies passivity. Falling suggests you were upright, then gravity took you, and now you are horizontal and out of control. But intimacy—real, sustained, post-competition intimacy—is not something that happens to two people. It is something two people do together, repeatedly, often when they would rather do anything else.

And this brings me to the phrase that appears in my own title for this piece: post-competition. I use it deliberately. Because here is a truth we rarely admit: much of early romance is structured like a contest. Who will text first? Who will make the grander gesture? Whose story is more compelling, whose laugh is louder, whose apartment has better lighting? We are not two people discovering each other so much as two performers auditioning for roles in a story we have both already written. And when the performance ends—when the lights come up and there is no applause—what remains?

What remains is the actual work of intimacy: the quiet, unglamorous, often frustrating process of two autonomous beings deciding, day after day, to remain in alliance with one another without requiring the other to be anyone but themselves.

II. Autonomy as a Prerequisite for Love

The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir understood this better than most. In The Second Sex, she argued that love becomes a form of oppression when it requires one person to surrender their project, their subjectivity, their "transcendence" in favor of the other's comfort or desire. We do this constantly and call it romance. I give up my Saturday morning ritual because you want company. You soften your opinions on politics because mine are more "marketable." We curate ourselves into a compatibility that looks like love from the outside but feels, up close, like two actors maintaining an illusion while quietly checking their watches.

Autonomy is not the enemy of intimacy. It is its foundation. A person who has not figured out—imperfectly, provisionally, always in revision—what they want, what they need, where their boundaries are, cannot offer a genuine alliance. They can only offer a performance of togetherness that collapses under the weight of any real disagreement.

So here is my first philosophical prescription for anyone reading this on a Tuesday evening with a glass of something warm in hand: fall in love with your own life before you expect it to be sustained by someone else's. Not as a precondition—because nobody has finished "figuring themselves out" by the time they meet someone interesting—but as an ongoing practice. A daily, unglamorous act of returning to yourself. Asking: what do I actually want in this moment? Am I doing this because it resonates with me, or because I've decided that wanting it would make me more lovable?

This is not self-help language. It is phenomenology. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote about the body as our primary means of being-in-the-world. And intimacy, at its most fundamental level, is a bodily encounter. Two bodies sharing space, temperature, rhythm. Before we are philosophical partners or emotional confidants, we are two sets of senses meeting in a room. And that meeting requires that each set of senses still belongs to someone. That the other body has not been absorbed into your own perceptual field and thereby made invisible.

III. Alliance as Ongoing Choice

Let me now turn to the second half of my title's central phrase: alliance. I chose this word over "union," "bond," or "commitment" for a reason. An alliance implies two parties with their own interests, their own capacities, their own reasons for being in agreement. It is not a merger. It is not a contract sealed by emotion. It is a working arrangement between autonomous agents who have decided—knowingly, repeatedly—that the project of shared life is worth the ongoing negotiation it requires.

An alliance can be updated. Re-negotiated. Amended. One party can propose a new term; the other can accept or revise. This sounds cold, perhaps bureaucratic. But consider how much more honest and dignifying it is than the alternative: two people in an unchanging "union" where any desire to change the terms is treated as betrayal.

Here is where the post-competition framing becomes essential. In a genuine alliance, there is no winner. There is no scorekeeping of who loved harder or sacrificed more. The relationship is not a zero-sum game where your need for space is my loss and your need for closeness is mine. Instead, we are two autonomous agents collaborating on a shared project—the ongoing, never-finished work of building something that honors both our individuality and our togetherness.

And this is where the failing becomes generative. Because any honest account of post-competition intimacy will include moments of genuine failure. Moments when you wanted to be fully open and you managed only half-transparency. Moments when your autonomy curdled into distance and your partner read it as rejection. Moments when your alliance was tested by a disagreement so basic that neither of you knew how to articulate what they actually needed from the other, and so you both defaulted to performance—saying "I'm fine" meaning "I need you to not leave," or saying "you never listen" meaning "please look at me."

These failures are not the opposite of intimacy. They are its raw material. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur spent a career arguing that we come to understand ourselves through narrative—through the stories we tell about who we are and what has happened to us. And intimacy, I would argue, is the most important narrative we ever co-author. It is not a story with a clean arc. It is an ongoing draft, revised constantly, full of crossed-out lines and marginal notes and chapters that were started and abandoned because the characters changed their minds.

IV. The Ethics of Tender Failure

There is a specific ethic to failing at love together, one I want to lay out as clearly as I can in this column, because it is the part most likely to be skipped over by readers who prefer inspiration to instruction.

First: fail with specificity. "I feel like you don't care" is not a failure; it's a small act of philosophical vagueness wearing the costume of honesty. A specific failure looks like this: "When I said I needed space and you read that as rejection, I was actually feeling overwhelmed by my own work and didn't know how to say that without making it about you." Specificity is not an accusation. It is a gift. It hands your partner the actual shape of what went wrong so they can meet you in the particular rather than the general.

Second: fail without requiring repair on someone else's timeline. This one is harder. When you have failed—when you have been distant, or self-absorbed, or not sufficiently attentive—the natural desire is for the other person to confirm that it's okay. To say "it's fine" and thereby restore the equilibrium. But in a post-competition alliance, neither party is owed an immediate restoration. You are allowed to sit with the failure. They are allowed to process it on their own time. The relationship does not require a seamless emotional continuity; it requires only that both parties remain committed to the ongoing work of making sense of what happened.

Third: fail without totalizing. One instance of inattentiveness is not evidence that you are not a good partner. One moment of selfishness is not proof that the relationship is fundamentally flawed. The tendency to turn one failure into a verdict on the entire alliance is a very human and very philosophical temptation—we call it induction, drawing universal conclusions from particular cases. Resist it. Let each failure be one data point in an ongoing inquiry rather than the final answer in a trial.

V. A Small Practical Philosophy for Tuesday Evenings

Because I am writing this for a online article, not a philosophy journal, let me translate the above into something you can do on a Tuesday evening with your partner or your roommates or yourself.

Try this: at some point tonight, before bed, ask yourself one question. Not "do they love me" or "am I enough." A smaller, more specific question: what did I want in the last hour that I didn't voice? Maybe you wanted to be touched and said nothing because you feared it would seem needy. Maybe you wanted to leave the kitchen but stayed because your partner was mid-sentence and you didn't want to interrupt. Maybe you wanted to say "I'm not as thrilled about this as I am pretending to be" and swallowed it because honesty felt like a small act of aggression.

You don't have to fix any of these. You don't have to run to your partner's room at midnight with a philosophical manifesto. You only have to notice them. To register that the gap between what you wanted and what you did is not a moral failing but a data point in the ongoing, unglorified work of being two autonomous beings in an alliance.

And if your partner does the same—asks themselves their own small question, notices their own unvoiced wants—the evening becomes something other than routine. It becomes a quiet, mutual act of philosophical practice. Two people, in a kitchen or a bedroom or a living room with the lights low, doing the unglamorous work of staying honest with each other and with themselves.

VI. Closing: The Unfinished Draft

I want to end this column where I began: at the metaphor of falling. Because here is what I believe, after all these years of reading philosophy and writing about it and, in my own imperfect way, living it: that we do not fall in love so much as we choose love, repeatedly, in small and large ways. We choose to stay curious when curiosity would be easier to abandon. We choose to ask "what do you need" instead of assuming we already know the answer. We choose to treat each other's autonomy as something to protect rather than a boundary to test.

And yes—there is still something like falling in it. There are moments when the work feels effortless, when two bodies move through a room with an almost invisible synchrony, and you think: this is what people mean when they say "soulmate." And those moments are real. They are not the whole truth, but they are part of the truth. The philosopher's job is not to dispel beauty but to give it context. To say: yes, that moment was beautiful; and here is why it was possible; and here is what you can do tomorrow to make room for more of them.

So: fail at falling in love. Fail with specificity, without totalizing, on each other's timeline. Stay autonomous. Stay allied. Keep the draft open. Because intimacy, like philosophy itself, is not a destination. It is an ongoing act of paying attention—first to yourself, then to the person beside you, and then, if you are very lucky and very patient, to the strange and beautiful fact that two separate people can choose, again and again, to build something together in a world that offers them every reason not to.

And that, I would argue, is not falling at all. That is rising, quietly, on both sides of the room, on an ordinary Tuesday evening, with the lights low and the work unfinished and the draft still open.

— Prof. Elowen Vane