Yesterday, I was curious about why Patrick loved Jenn, so I asked him a lot of questions to try to get at the answer. What traits of hers stood out to him? What were the emotional impressions she left on him, that would explain the intensity or endurance of the connection?
He rejected these questions as even being able to get at the truth, because a lot of these things that we rattle off to others don't explain the love's existence so much as they are post-facto rationalizations. "My love for Jenn is a fact," he said.
I certainly understand that when I love someone, I just do. And depending on who is asking and when they're asking, I come with a changing assortment of "reasons" for why I love, or why the attraction is there. The assortment is never exhaustive, because it couldn't possibly be, but I was still interested in hearing something.
So I put it in a metaphor, for the types of answer I was looking for, from him. Let's say love is an amorphous cloud, one that's ever-shifting. (The dynamism is important, because saying love is a fact suggests to me that it is static, and it is not.) Of course, it's hard to convey something amorphous and changing to somebody else, when they can't see/feel it. But some ways I suggested involved:
- naming some points on the outline of the cloud as it is now
- describing the longest vectors that could traverse the cloud
- discussing the element that takes up the greatest composition of the cloud
- identifying the parts of the clouds that shift the least, despite all the movement otherwise
And I was proud of myself for rattling off all of these ways, knowing that - while none of them would fully capture the entirety, each would say something to the effect of what I was looking for. (A model, as Patrick would say, even a bad one, gives you more information than you had before.)
I think we settled on discussing, not the point at which he fell in love, but the first major decision he based on that love. Which, incidentally, was also the last point, he identified, where he could have killed that love easily.
***
Later on, Patrick would tell me a long story involving Faraday, and Maxwell, and Lorentz, and Poincaré - or how the field of representation theory came to be. There was something about how viewing phenomena from different points required different functions/equations, and how it was important to figure out what stayed the same, or changed the least. And I connected that back to the cloud metaphor.
Who would have thought.
***
I had to tell Patrick that if someone could love me the way he loved Jenn - as a fact - it would be the greatest work of my life to make sure that the hate never fully stepped in.