Two Solitudes — รักคือกริยา ไม่ใช่อาการTwo Solitudes — Rilke, Fromm, and bell hooks on Love as an Act

Just past six in the morning, outside the blood-draw room of a public hospital. Queue number 38 belongs to an old woman in a floral blouse and an old man in a grey shirt. He carries a ziplock bag of medicines, three appointment cards, and a small thermos; she holds the queue ticket. They do not talk. They do not hold hands. But as the nurse's voice counts closer to their number, he is up and standing by the door before she has begun to move. She slips her ring off and drops it into his shirt pocket without asking. Then he folds up her left sleeve for her — the arm where the vein is hard to find. He knows before the nurse has to ask.

In those ten minutes nobody says the word love. There are no flowers and no soundtrack. There is only a set of small movements meshed so closely they are almost invisible — like two carpenters who have worked together so long that neither needs to say who takes which end. I was sitting two rows back, and one question followed me home: was what I had just watched a feeling, or a craft?

We are taught to know love in the grammar of symptoms — falling, fluttering, trembling, chemistry — all things that happen to us, never things we do. Last time we talked about friendship — Aristotle's claim that no one would choose to live without friends, though he had all other goods — and now we move one arm's length closer, to the person we choose to wake up beside. The question of this essay is the question from that blood-draw queue: if love is not a symptom but a verb, how do we conjugate it in an ordinary week of an ordinary life?

A poet, a psychoanalyst, and two writers who passed a single definition between them across twenty-two years will help us answer — with a married couple in a leaking shed in Paris standing by to confirm it with their whole lives.

Two solitudes, greeting each other

"…a love that consists of two solitudes protecting and bordering on, and greeting each other."

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, letter 7 (Rome, 14 May 1904), tr. A. S. Kline (2021)

In 1902 a nineteen-year-old Austrian officer cadet named Franz Xaver Kappus sent his poems to a poet he admired and asked for a verdict. What came back was ten letters across five years, which Kappus later collected into the small book we know as Letters to a Young Poet. The seventh letter — the one this sentence lives in — was written from Rome in mid-May 1904, and it is worth recording that Rilke himself was only twenty-eight at the time: not a sage on a mountaintop but another young man feeling his way through the same country.

What the letter actually says is longer and harder-handed than the line that gets clipped onto greeting cards. Rilke tells Kappus that for one human being to love another is "perhaps the most difficult thing granted us, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely a preparation." And because it is that difficult, young people — beginners in everything — cannot yet love: they have to learn it. He warns that when love arrives, the young tend to fling themselves at each other, dissolve into one blur, and call the blur union. The path Rilke proposes runs against every instinct: use love as a high occasion to ripen, to become something in yourself, to become a whole world in yourself — for the sake of another person.

So the two-solitudes sentence is not a sweet nothing. It arrives at the end of a long argument, as the picture of what grown love looks like. And notice the middle word: protecting — bordering — greeting. Many of the versions shared online drop the second verb, leaving "two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other," which sounds warmer and loses the whole point. "Bordering" (grenzen) is the heart of the sentence. The greeting is possible precisely because the fence still stands. When the fence comes down, what remains is not a greeting; it is a swallowing.

What the sentence asks of us: do not assign the other person the job of answering the emptiness in you. Become a whole house of your own first, then open the windows to each other. And in fairness to you, the reader, a note: this is a letter of advice to one unmarried young man, not a peer-reviewed finding. Rilke gives us an image beautiful enough to hold in the hand; whether the image matches real lives is something we will go and check below.

Standing in, not falling for

"Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a 'standing in,' not a 'falling for.'"

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (Harper & Row, 1956), ch. II

Fifty-two years after Rilke's letter, a psychoanalyst who had fled Nazi Germany, Erich Fromm, published a slim book called The Art of Loving (1956) and opened it with a question that sounds like a tease and is entirely serious: "Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort." Most people, Fromm says, quietly believe love is a matter of luck and lightning — nothing to learn, only something to wait for.

He dissects that belief into three errors. First, we obsess over being loved rather than over loving — we invest enormously in being lovable, in charm, looks, success, as if the only problem were how to get loved, not how to become capable of loving anyone. Second, we think the problem is the object, not the faculty — we simply have not met the right person yet, and once we do, everything will flow by itself; which is like a person who wants to paint but refuses to practise, and instead tours the countryside looking for a landscape beautiful enough to make him good at painting. Third — the one that stings — we confuse the intense initial experience of falling in love with the permanent state of standing in love, and when the intensity fades on its natural schedule, we conclude the love has ended just as it was beginning.

The sentence above sits in chapter two, where Fromm argues that the active character of love can be put most simply as this: love is primarily giving, not receiving. And the giving is built from four elements present in every form of love: care, responsibility, respect and knowledge — notice that all four are verbs travelling in the clothing of nouns. Not one of them is a symptom that happens by itself while we do nothing.

Fromm is often misread as sneering at the sweetness of falling in love. He does no such thing — he never forbids anyone to fall. He only points out that the evidence of love is not located there. Gravity can drop you into love without a minute of training; there is no kind of gravity anywhere in the universe that will hold you standing. Standing takes muscle, and muscle is acquired in exactly one way: practice.

Love is as love does

"Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action."

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (Simon & Schuster, 1978), as quoted and adopted by bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000), ch. 1

This sentence has been shared a million times under the name of bell hooks, the feminist thinker who wrote All About Love — and the true story is only slightly more complicated, and considerably better. hooks opens the first chapter of her book by confessing that she spent years searching for a workable definition of love and was "deeply relieved" when she found one in a book by the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, published twenty-two years earlier. The definition: love is "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." And then Peck extends it with the line that became legend: love is as love does.

So the credit belongs to two people. Peck forged the blade; hooks carried it onto a wider field than the therapy room — family, community, the politics of love — and she credits the definition's owner openly in her opening pages. That small act of honesty is itself an example of the thing she is writing about: seeing another person accurately and saying so is one of love's verbs too.

What hooks adds, and what sharpens the definition considerably, is its logical consequence: if love is a verb and not a feeling, then the definition draws a line no feeling can ever draw — love and abuse cannot coexist. A home where harm is done, by hand or by word, is not a home where people "love each other but can't show it." It is a home where the verbs of love are not being performed. And the ingredient list hooks assembles reads more like a recipe than a poem: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment and trust, together with honest and open communication.

My own view is that the greatest service of the Peck–hooks definition is not its eloquence but its checkability. A feeling cannot be audited — it rises and falls with blood sugar, sleep, rain and traffic — but an action always leaves a trail: the calendar shows who got our hours, a washed dish was washed by somebody, an apology either happened or it did not. That is why I trust the question "have we loved each other this week?" more than "do we still love each other?" — the first can be answered with evidence, the second only with the mood of the day.

One caution, and only one: do not turn the sentence into a cane for beating your partner — "if you really loved me you would…". The definition is designed to be a mirror first — how many of the things I did this week count as verbs of love? — and only afterwards a ruler laid against the relationship.

A leaking shed and three dreams

Paris, 1894. A Polish physics student named Maria Sklodowska met a quiet young physicist named Pierre Curie. That summer she went home, and his letters followed her. In one of them — she kept them, and printed them later in her memoir of him — stands what may be the strangest courtship line in the history of science: "It would, nevertheless, be a beautiful thing, in which I hardly dare believe, to pass through life together hypnotized in our dreams: your dream for your country; our dream for humanity; our dream for science." Notice the order. He put her dream — Poland, the one dream that could take her away from him for good — first, before the two dreams they shared. Here was a man courting a woman by respecting her borders. Ten years before Rilke wrote his seventh letter, Pierre had already performed it.

They married in July 1895 in what Marie called the simplest service possible — a civil ceremony, no religious rite — and, as the introduction to the American edition of her memoir records, the gift money meant for a trousseau went on two bicycles, for riding out into the French countryside together. Her summary of their married life is a plain sentence that makes you stop: "We lived a very single life, interested in common, as we were, in our laboratory experiments and in the preparation of lectures and examinations." And another: "During eleven years we were scarcely ever separated, which means that there are very few lines of existing correspondence between us, representing that period." The couple with the fewest love letters may simply be the couple that was never far enough apart to need them.

The world remembers the medals and the elements named after their work. The actual scene of this love was a wooden shed behind the School of Physics and Chemistry in Paris, where the two of them spent years extracting a new element from mountains of ore. Marie described the workplace herself: a wooden shed with a bituminous floor and a glass roof that did not keep the rain out, no interior arrangements at all, stifling in summer and freezing in winter — and then she wrote the sentence that deserves engraving: "We lived in a preoccupation as complete as that of a dream." Some evenings, after dinner, the two of them walked back to the shed to look at what they had made: glass tubes of their products laid out on tables and boards, "and these gleamings, which seemed suspended in the darkness, stirred us with ever new emotion and enchantment." That was date night for the Curies: two people standing silent in a leaking shed, watching light they had dug out of stone.

And here the story answers Rilke, Fromm and Peck in a single scene. Pierre had work of his own — the crystal studies he loved and had pioneered — and when Marie's results began to reveal something larger, he set his own research aside to cross over and join hers. This was no dissolving of selves. He remained his own physicist; she remained her own chemist. Two solitudes, borders intact, greeting each other daily across a laboratory bench — and when the day came that one needed the other, the crossing of the fence was chosen freely, not forced by the fence's collapse.

On the morning of 19 April 1906, in the rain, Pierre stepped into the Rue Dauphine and was run over by a horse-drawn wagon. He was killed instantly. Less than a month later the physics faculty of the University of Paris voted to offer his chair to Marie — the first woman ever made a professor of that university. She wrote of the decision in one short line: "I accepted this heavy heritage, in the hope that I might build up some day, in his memory, a laboratory worthy of him." Love is as love does — and when one of the two is gone, the verb can still be conjugated: she taught his course onward and carried the third dream to the end of the road. The sentence she chose to sum up those eleven years contains no word for love at all, and is full to the brim of Fromm's fourth element, knowledge: "In our life together it was given to me to know him as he had hoped I might, and to penetrate each day further into his thought."

What the research says — and doesn't

Now for the laboratory's turn. John Gottman and Robert Levenson followed 73 married couples between 1983 and 1987, sat them down to argue about a real disagreement on camera, and divided them by the balance of positive to negative behaviour during the clash^[5]. The couples whose balance tilted clearly positive were more satisfied, in better health, and less likely to head toward separation; the others showed more negative emotion, more defensiveness, more stubbornness and withdrawal. Out of this family of studies the Gottman Institute distilled the most famous number in the marriage literature: during conflict, stable couples produce roughly five positive interactions for every negative one — the 5:1 "magic ratio."

But the part the posters leave out must be told too. The boast that Gottman can "predict divorce with over 90% accuracy" was examined at the root by Richard Heyman and Amy Smith Slep^[6]. The accuracy figures came from equations fitted after the fact to data whose outcomes were already known, and almost never tested against a fresh set of couples whose fates were still unwritten. When the two researchers ran that test — crossvalidation — on real data, accuracy and predictive value dropped precipitously. The journalist Laurie Abraham put it in plain language: the celebrated 1998 study used just 57 newlywed couples, and once the real base rate of divorce in the population is figured in, the same kind of prediction would be right less than half the time. The lesson is not that Gottman is wrong through and through — the broad direction stands firm: small, steady positivity matters more than occasional sweetness, and defensiveness, stonewalling and withdrawal genuinely corrode a marriage — but a number as exact as 5:1, and a phrase like "94% accurate," are half science and half marketing.

The other line of work is attachment theory, which John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth built from watching infants with their caregivers. Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver tried translating the framework to adult romantic love^[7] and found that the three infant patterns — secure, avoidant, and anxious-ambivalent — appear among adults in roughly the same proportions, and that each pattern tracks, predictably enough to matter, how we love, how we grow jealous, whom we trust, and how we leave.

But the caveat matters more than the theory: do not read it as a verdict. A meta-analysis pooling 127 studies and more than 21,000 people found the stability of attachment patterns from infancy to adulthood to be only moderate (r = .39), and across intervals longer than 15 years, no significant stability could be detected at all^[8]. Put another way: childhood is a starting point, not a prison. People who grew up insecure can build security anew inside a good relationship — which sounds like what, exactly? Like the practice of a craft, precisely as Fromm insisted.

Try it this week

If love is a verb, this week is the practice field. The two experiments below are designed to be small enough to actually do, and strange enough not to collapse into hollow routine.

Ask yourself again on Sunday

Back to the blood-draw queue one last time. That old couple has almost certainly never read Rilke, knows nothing of r-values, and never counted that morning as positive interaction number so-and-so of the week. But a sleeve folded up on the correct arm without a word being spoken is not a miracle and not luck. It is what small verbs look like after they have been conjugated daily for forty years. The love we hope to have when we are old is not for sale when we are old. It is paid in daily instalments — and the first one falls due this week.

Next time we talk about the visitor who calls at every house, not excepting the most loving ones — anger, and how sages East and West teach us to hold it without being scalded: /blog/good-life-anger