When Chemistry Becomes Oxidation: Rust in the Soul Bond
When Chemistry Becomes Oxidation: Rust in the Soul Bond
By Elowen Thirston, M.A. Philosophy
We are taught to treat love as a chemical reaction—a flash of dopamine, a surge of oxytocin, a bright and burning alchemy that binds two souls into one luminous equation. In this popular metaphor, falling in love is a clean process: two elements meet, collide, and produce something new and radiant. But chemistry, for all its poetry, is also the study of change, decay, and transformation over time. And so it is with love. What begins as a brilliant flash can settle into a slow oxidation—a quiet, inevitable rusting that no one planned but everyone experiences.
Consider what oxidation actually is at the most basic level: a material loses electrons to oxygen over time. It does not shatter or burn away in a single dramatic moment. Rather, it undergoes a gradual transfer of something essential—energy, stability, luster—into the surrounding air until its surface grows dull, pitted, and fragile. The iron was never weak; it simply met an environment that drew from it. And this is precisely what happens when a soul bond begins to corrode.
The philosopher Aristotle spoke of potentiality and actuality—the idea that things carry within them capacities that may or may not be fully realized. A new love is full of unrealized potential: the future you imagine together is vast, shimmering, almost tangible in its promise. But potentiality is also a kind of instability. It has not yet settled into form, and so it remains open to all kinds of interference. The rust begins here, in that gap between what the bond could become and what it actually becomes. Every small unmet expectation, every moment you chose convenience over curiosity about the other person, slowly draws electrons from the relationship's shine.
There is a particular cruelty in how oxidation works: it looks like the material itself has changed character. Rust appears to be a different substance—red-brown where there was once silver or gray. And so it is with love. When the bond begins to corrode, we often conclude that our partner has become someone new, or worse, that they were always this person and we simply failed to see them. But in philosophical terms, this is a mistake of misattribution. The rust is not the iron; it is what happens when the iron meets oxygen over time. Your partner may be largely unchanged. What has changed is the environment you built together, or perhaps the air each of you brings into the shared space.
The Stoics understood this dynamic with remarkable clarity. Epictetus taught that we are disturbed not by things themselves but by our judgments about them. In a corroding bond, so much of the rust comes from the interpretive layer we lay over small events. A partner who checks their phone during dinner is not, in itself, an act of betrayal or disinterest; it becomes one only when our inner narrative insists on reading it that way. And yet—here is where philosophy must be honest with itself—that narrative layer is not arbitrary. It is built from memory, comparison, unmet needs, and the slow accumulation of small griefs. The rust is real even if its shape comes partly from the mind that perceives it.
One might ask: if oxidation is natural, inevitable, universal—what was the point of the shine in the first place? This question touches on a deeper philosophical problem, one the existentialists grappled with fiercely. If all bonds corrode, then the initial fire was perhaps a kind of beautiful illusion, a temporary suspension of time that made us believe permanence was possible. Sartre would say the rust is where we meet our freedom: each moment in a relationship requires active choice, active renewal, because no bond carries itself forward by inertia alone. The shine was real but it was never a state; it was an act. And acts must be repeated or they fade into oxidation.
There is also a quiet dignity in rust that I find philosophically important to name. Rust is not the enemy of metal; it is its honest record of having been alive in a world full of air and time. A soul bond that has oxidized carries within its pitted surface an archive of every day you chose each other, or failed to choose each other, or chose something else entirely. The texture of the rust is the shape of your shared history made visible. In this sense, oxidation is not a failure of love; it is love's way of becoming concrete, specific, and real in a world that otherwise tends toward abstraction and fantasy.
The alchemists had a phase they called calcination—the slow burning away of impurities so that what remains is purer, more essential. Oxidation in a soul bond performs a similar function, though far less gracefully. It burns away the parts of the relationship that were performative, borrowed, or aspirational rather than lived. What survives the rust is often smaller but more honest: a way of making tea together without needing it to mean anything, a silence that no longer requires explanation, an affection that has shed its need for spectacle and settled into something almost geological in its patience.
And here I want to be careful not to romanticize corrosion. Not all oxidation leads to a purer residue. Sometimes rust is simply structural weakness—small fractures that spread until the bond cannot hold weight anymore, and you must decide whether to sand it down and begin again or set it gently aside as a beautiful artifact of a time you shared. Both choices are philosophically coherent. The first is an act of creative renewal; the second is an act of honest curation. Neither requires you to pretend the rust was not there.
There is also a question of agency that deserves attention. Oxidation requires oxygen, and in the architecture of a relationship, each person brings their own atmospheric conditions into the shared space. One partner may be rich in doubt; another in quiet withdrawal. The bond corrodes at the interface where these two airflows meet, not because either is defective but because different gases do different things to metal. Philosophy teaches us that understanding this mechanism does not make it less painful, but it makes it legible—and legibility is the first step toward either repair or graceful release.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: "Love requires that we unmake ourselves." This is, I think, a precise description of what oxidation asks of us. To let love oxidize fully is to allow the bond to demand the dissolution of our self-image within it—the version of ourselves we performed for each other in the early days, when every gesture was a declaration and every silence was a sonnet. Oxidation strips that performance away until only the unadorned, sometimes clumsy, often tender reality remains. And if you can meet that reality without reaching for the old shine to comfort yourself, you may find that what is left is more yours than anything the initial fire could have given you.
So when you feel the luster fading, when the bond feels pitted or slow, when the air between you seems thicker and less luminous—do not reach immediately for the metaphor of brokenness. Reach instead for the simpler truth: you are two souls made of the same basic elements, moving through time in a world full of oxygen, and the rust is only what happens when love meets life. It does not mean the metal was false. It means it was real enough to change. And in a world so often committed to performance and permanence, that quiet, honest transformation may be the most philosophical thing two people can do together.
