I used to think love was easiest to recognize at its most dramatic: the promise to stay forever, the willingness to give up everything, the moment one person rescues another. Those images are powerful because they compress love into a single decisive act. They make it visible.
But most love does not happen at that scale. It lives in repetition: remembering what matters to someone, noticing what they are not saying, telling the truth without trying to win, and returning after the intensity of a moment has passed.
The more I think about it, the less I understand love as a feeling that happens to us. Love is a way of paying attention. It is an ongoing choice to see another person as real—not as a role in our story, not as a solution to our loneliness, and not as someone whose life should disappear into ours.
The love that remains in memory
Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun follows Sophie as she looks back, twenty years later, on a holiday she took with her father, Calum. The trip survives through fragments: a video camera, jokes, small embarrassments, sunlight, music, and moments whose meaning the child could not yet understand.
Calum loves Sophie. We can feel it in the effort he makes to give her joy and in the tenderness of his attention. Yet love does not make him transparent. There is a private pain in him that Sophie cannot reach, partly because she is a child and partly because every person contains rooms that even those closest to them cannot enter.
That is what makes the film so painful to me. It refuses the comforting idea that loving someone means fully knowing them, or that being loved is always enough to save a person from suffering. Sophie receives real love from her father, but only later can she recognize the shadows surrounding it. Memory becomes her way of returning to him—not to solve him, but to hold together the father she knew and the man she could not yet see.
Aftersun reminds me that love is often incomplete in the moment. Sometimes we understand an act of care only years after it was given. Sometimes the person who loved us could offer warmth but could not explain their pain. Love can be sincere and still limited by timing, illness, fear, or the boundaries of what a person knows how to express.
To love, then, is not to claim complete access to another person. It is to pay close attention while accepting that some part of them will remain beyond us. This is not distance or failure. It is respect.
The danger of making sacrifice the proof
In Euripides’ Alcestis, Admetus is allowed to escape death if another person will die in his place. His parents refuse. Alcestis, his wife, agrees, giving her life so that he may continue his. Heracles eventually brings her back, but the return does not erase the question at the center of the story: what kind of love asks one life to be exchanged for another?
Alcestis is remembered as extraordinarily devoted, and her sacrifice can look like love in its purest form. Yet the story also makes me uneasy. If the highest proof of love is a willingness to disappear, then love becomes a test that only self-erasure can pass. One person continues; the other becomes evidence of how deeply they cared.
I do not want to understand love that way.
Sacrifice belongs to love—time, comfort, pride, and convenience often have to be surrendered. But sacrifice should protect a shared life, not establish that one life matters more. When giving becomes permanently one-directional, devotion can hide an imbalance. Love should not require someone to become smaller so that the other can remain unchanged.
For me, the ethical question is not “Would I die for you?” It is more ordinary and more demanding: Can I live beside you without asking you to abandon yourself? Can we change for one another without either of us disappearing?
The strongest love is not the destruction of the self. It is the expansion of the self until another person’s flourishing genuinely matters—while remembering that flourishing must still include your own.
Philia: love as a shared life
The Greek word philia is usually translated as friendship, but its historical meaning is wider than modern friendship alone. It can include affection between friends and family members and the bonds that hold a community together. In Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes relationships based on pleasure, utility, and virtue. The deepest form is not sustained merely by what the other person provides, but by valuing who they are and sharing in the activity of living well.
This idea gives me language for something I want every kind of love to contain: friendship.
Romantic love is often described through intensity—longing, exclusivity, chemistry, the feeling that one person has become the center of the world. Philia asks different questions. Do we enjoy the reality of each other, not only the fantasy? Can we think together? Can we disagree without turning difference into abandonment? Do we help each other grow into people we can respect?
Friendship makes love less theatrical and more durable. It shifts the focus from being chosen once to choosing how we treat each other repeatedly. It allows affection to become a shared practice: conversations that change us, work done side by side, private jokes, honest correction, comfortable silence, and the gradual construction of a history that belongs to both people.
It also restores equality. A friend is not a possession, a dependent, or a savior. A friend is another center of experience. To love someone with philia is to care about their good for their sake, not only because their presence makes our own life easier or more pleasurable.
What love means to me now
Love cannot guarantee that we will save one another. It cannot prevent every misunderstanding, absence, or loss. What it can do is make a space in which two people are more fully seen, more truthfully known, and more able to become themselves.
That space has to be made again and again. Perhaps that is why love is less like a revelation and more like a practice.