Love, Or Infinite Distance From The Other

The love of the other, taken to its highest form, is analogous to total, relational exile.

The lover looks at his beloved and sees not a wife but rather a human being. To hear of her desire for divorce and rejoice that she may live a life closer to herself. He looks into her eyes and sees the reflection of fragility, impossibility, and the divinity of a living being. In such a case, to love without exile manifests the possibility for her to be harmed, to be reduced from ineffable, to be erased from her own humanity. To love without exile is the result of moral distance, or the reduction of person into thing.

To be a living thing, to be human, is a fragile game. Very well, she could leave for work in the morning and die in a car crash in the evening. Each day is unearned, and it is always uncertain if she shall wake in the morning: this is why each day is the result of grace. To claim another's being as your own, to impose the self onto their being each day you remain together, is the desecration of grace.

A question that remains unexplained by neuroscience: what makes another person who they are? What particular configuration derives the beloved? From the birth of a child, why did they form in the wake of consciousness? Of all humans beings that have ever lived, there exists no person with the same, exact configuration as the beloved. A miracle of one. The lover may only approximate understanding of such a miracle; the lover will never truly know their beloved.

Those who love within moral distance find themselves loving a counterfeit shadow of impossibility under the veil of union.

The divinity of the other derives from their fragility of being a breathing miracle.

Indeed, this divinity is the source of the highest moral obligation, an obligation that lives beyond and above the realm of man, beyond any realm of law or culture: to see and not devastate the other's inherent divinity. To witness.

Marriage exists in the realm of man, and it is subservient to witnessing the other. In this sense, all that truly matters, if a couple were to pursue pure love, is their daily orientation towards witnessing rather than possessing. Anything in the realm of man, like marriage, is a contingent indifferent in contrast to this daily pursuit.

To hear her speak and truly hear her words, to know your own needs and radically respect her wishes, to see not a miser but a miracle suffering in anguish: such encounters are the intimations of the love of God.