This week, I’ve been sharing five essays drawn from my new book, . Each explores a way we hold ourselves at a distance from being alive, and what fuller participation asks of us.
Day One: Your Life Keeps Happening Without You explored the distance between functioning and inhabiting. A life remains competent and orderly while the person living it becomes increasingly absent from their own experience.
Day Two: You’ve Analyzed Yourself Out of Your Own Life examined what happens when self-understanding becomes continuous self-supervision. Insight has value, but interpreting every experience leaves little room to enter it.
Day Three: Loved for Who You Aren’t considered the loneliness that survives acceptance. When belonging depends on presenting an acceptable version of ourselves, the relationship endures without enough of us inside it.
Day Four: Stop Waiting for Something to Believe In challenged the expectation that life must wait until certainty returns. Losing an inherited framework leaves real questions, but their unfinished state does not disqualify us from loving, choosing, or taking part.
Day Five: The Grief Comes on Both Roads brings the series to love and mortality. Withholding ourselves offers protection at a price: we lose some of the relationship while the person is still here, without securing an exemption from the grief ahead.
These questions have accompanied the evolution of my work for years. Writing about life after religion brought me into contact with struggles that extended beyond the loss of faith. People were trying to recover self-trust, enter relationships more honestly, and find their footing after an inherited account of life no longer held. I began developing the language of existential health to address our relationship with meaning, identity, mortality, belonging, and the responsibility of living a life no one else is able to live for us.
That pioneering work has since taken several forms, including the publication of the ** first peer-reviewed paper devoted to existential health as a field**, the creation of the
The Practice of Being Alive brings this work into a more personal register. I wanted to explore how we live with realities that understanding alone will never resolve, including the vulnerability of caring deeply about another person. I know the desire to hold someone close and somehow keep the future from touching them, and I know how easily that desire becomes a condition we place on our willingness to love.
This final essay begins where that bargain fails. The people we love remain beyond our power to keep, and the years we spend protecting ourselves from that fact belong to our lives too. What we do with those years is the question I want to leave with you.
There are moments when I look at someone I love and feel the future intrude. We are having an ordinary conversation, or sharing a meal, and I become aware that this arrangement of our lives will not last forever. Nothing has happened. The person is still here, but the knowledge of losing them has entered the room.
I used to think the task was to get past that awareness so I could return to enjoying myself. Now I wonder how much of what we call enjoying life depends on keeping its conditions out of sight. We want the intimacy of loving someone without the vulnerability their importance creates. We want to give ourselves to a relationship while retaining some authority over what happens next.
In The Practice of Being Alive, I write about love without possession. By possession, I mean more than treating another person as property or trying to control their decisions. I also mean the quieter demand that what we love must remain available to us, in a form we recognize, for as long as we need it.
That demand is understandable. It also asks something of love that love has never been able to provide.
Loving someone changes our relationship with time. Their existence becomes part of what we anticipate, depend upon, and organize our lives around. A future that once belonged largely to us now includes their face, their habits, their particular way of being in the world.
This is part of intimacy’s richness. Someone becomes woven into the ordinary structure of a day, until their presence no longer feels like an addition to life but part of its texture. We learn what they mean by a certain silence. We hear something funny and begin saving it for them before we have finished laughing.
Yet the same familiarity that makes a relationship sustaining also makes its vulnerability difficult to bear. We know exactly what would be missing. The prospect of loss acquires details, and those details follow us into moments we would prefer to experience without interruption.
There is nothing defective about this response. We are beings who remember and anticipate, and love gives both capacities something precious to work on. The difficulty begins when anticipation takes over the relationship, turning our attention from the person before us toward the task of securing their continued presence.
Someone is telling us about their day, and part of us is measuring the distance between us. A child is becoming more independent, and we receive their growth as evidence of our diminishing importance. Our awareness of change begins to govern encounters that deserve more room than our fear allows.
Possession rarely announces itself honestly. It often speaks in the language of devotion, emphasizing everything we have given and how deeply we care. The demand emerges through an expectation that our investment entitles us to a particular future.
A parent’s love becomes entangled with the expectation of continued dependence. A partner experiences disagreement as a threat to the bond. A friendship grows strained when one person’s changing life no longer supports the role they have always played. In each case, the relationship is being asked to preserve an arrangement that once made someone feel secure.
I recognize this pattern from the religious world I once inhabited. Love was spoken of generously, but belonging often depended on remaining recognizable to the people who claimed to love you. A change in conviction threatened more than agreement. It disrupted a shared understanding of who everyone was allowed to become.
Leaving that world did not automatically remove its habits from my relationships. It is possible to reject an institution’s authority while continuing to expect the people closest to us to protect us from uncertainty. The desire for guarantees travels easily from theology into everyday life.
There is a difficult question here about what our care permits. Do we remain interested in another person as their life develops beyond our expectations? Or does our affection become a negotiation over how much change we will tolerate before withdrawing it?
Commitment still includes obligations. Honesty, reliability, and attention give relationships a structure in which trust grows. But no promise grants us ownership of another person’s interior life, and no history of devotion relieves us of the work of meeting them as they are now.
Some people respond to vulnerability by tightening their hold. Others reduce the amount of themselves they bring into a relationship, keeping affection carefully within limits they hope to survive. They remain involved while avoiding the depth that would make another person difficult to lose.
This seldom feels like a grand decision. It happens through small deferrals: the conversation kept practical, the tenderness turned into a joke, the appreciation assumed rather than expressed. Over time, restraint becomes the relationship’s normal climate, and both people adapt to receiving less than either once hoped to give.
There are circumstances in which distance is necessary. A relationship marked by coercion, repeated betrayal, or disregard does not become worthy of greater access because life is short. Protecting ourselves from someone’s conduct is a different undertaking from trying to protect ourselves from the vulnerability of loving anyone at all.
The second undertaking carries a cost that often remains hidden until much later. We assess how badly a loss might hurt without giving equal attention to what our precautions are costing now. Withholding appears successful because it produces no obvious crisis. The years still contain companionship, shared responsibilities, and photographs in which everyone looks present.
But something is being lost during those years. Affection stays unspoken, curiosity diminishes, and the person beside us receives an edited version of our involvement. We have reduced the risk of being deeply affected by making the relationship less capable of reaching us.
In the book, I put it this way: “The grief comes on both roads. Only one of them has the love on it.” That is a hard sentence for me because it exposes the weakness in the bargain. Distance offers no exemption from loss; it changes how much life we share before loss arrives.
That sentence needs care. It is not a claim that the most devastated person loved most deeply, or that emotional restraint makes someone’s affection less real. Grief has too many forms, and relationships have too many histories, for suffering to serve as a reliable measure of either.
Nor does love make every loss meaningful. A death does not become acceptable because the relationship was beautiful. There are losses people never experience as gifts, lessons, or necessary chapters in a larger story, and they should not have to redeem what happened in order to speak honestly about it.
Leaving religion taught me that grief also follows the loss of a world we once inhabited. We grieve the community, the shared language, the identity that made us recognizable to ourselves, and the future we thought had been promised. Some of what we miss sustained us; some of it required us to become smaller. That mixture makes the grief difficult to explain, especially when others interpret our sadness as evidence that we should return. Yet staying carried losses of its own, including the honesty and freedom we would have surrendered to preserve our place. The grief comes on both roads here too, although what becomes possible along each road is profoundly different.
My concern is with the living relationship and the terms on which we enter it. The possibility of future grief creates a problem that no amount of loving well will solve. We are deciding how to participate under that condition, without knowing what our participation will eventually cost.
Even the language of “agreeing in advance” to grief has limits. Nobody truly knows the meaning of a loss before living through it. We do not sign an informed contract with mortality when we fall in love, become a parent, or let a friendship become indispensable.
What we gradually discover is that another person matters beyond our ability to protect the arrangement. Their importance has already exceeded our control. Maturity involves acknowledging that fact without making them responsible for undoing it.
This is where love belongs within my work in existential health. A healthy relationship with being alive includes the ability to care about things whose future we cannot secure. It asks us to remain involved in a world where significance and vulnerability arrive together.
Existential health does not describe a condition in which mortality stops troubling us or uncertainty loses its force. Such a standard would make ordinary human attachment look like a failure. The question is how these realities shape our conduct, our attention, and the amount of life we allow ourselves to inhabit.
Someone might appear remarkably composed because very little is allowed to matter enough to disturb them. Another person might feel considerable fear while continuing to offer affection, listen honestly, and respect a loved one’s freedom. Outward calm tells us too little about the quality of either person’s participation.
For me, this shifts the focus from mastering emotion toward developing the capacity to remain present while affected. We need enough steadiness to hear something difficult without immediately controlling the conversation. We need relationships beyond any single bond, so that one person is not made responsible for holding our entire world together.
That capacity has practical and social conditions. Exhaustion narrows generosity, isolation intensifies dependence, and insecurity makes change harder to bear. Our ability to love with greater freedom is supported by communities and circumstances that give us somewhere to bring our fear.
The work therefore extends beyond telling individuals to loosen their grip. It includes building forms of belonging in which people have support without surrendering their agency. A community contributes to existential health when it helps us bear life’s vulnerability while leaving room for the lives of others.
Loving without possession takes its most demanding form in ordinary encounters. It requires attention to the gap between the person we expect and the person trying to speak to us. Familiarity is useful, but it also tempts us to believe there is nothing left to discover.
A partner changes their mind about something that once united us. A friend begins wanting a different kind of life. Someone we have known for decades reveals an experience that unsettles our understanding of them. In these moments, love involves tolerating the loss of an old picture long enough to encounter a living person.
That does not require agreement with everything they choose. We retain our judgment, our limits, and our own changing needs. What it requires is enough honesty to separate their actual conduct from the discomfort of discovering that they exist beyond our account of them.
I think some of the loneliness inside long relationships begins here. People continue to be cared for as remembered versions of themselves, while their present lives go largely unrecognized. The relationship contains considerable loyalty, but too little fresh attention.
To meet someone again is to accept that our knowledge of them remains unfinished. It involves asking a question whose answer we do not already possess, then allowing what we hear to change the conversation. There is affection in that willingness, along with the humility of admitting that love has not made us omniscient.
Across these five days, I have been writing about the distance between a life that continues to function and a life we actually inhabit. We have explored the limits of self-understanding, the loneliness of partial recognition, and the waiting that begins when certainty becomes a condition of participation. Love brings those questions into the presence of someone whose life matters to us.
There is no final insight that settles the vulnerability involved. Understanding mortality does not make a farewell easy, and recognizing another person’s freedom does not eliminate our fear of distance. Whatever wisdom we develop has to find its way into how we spend an evening, receive a confidence, or respond when someone needs us to listen.
I do not always welcome this. Part of me would still prefer an arrangement in which I could love fully and know that everyone I love will be all right. I understand the appeal of that promise because I have wanted it myself, even after leaving behind the beliefs that once offered it.
What remains available is smaller and more immediate. Someone is here whose presence I value, and I have an opportunity to let them know it. There is a conversation I could enter with more attention, an affection I have left too long to implication, a familiar person whose changing life deserves my curiosity.
The future will not become secure because I do these things. But an ordinary day will contain more of the love that was available within it, and another person will have less reason to wonder wheth…
