the key to love is understanding

maybe the best relationships are just really good conversations

Nietzsche speaks of this

i can't believe people date people they don’t want to talk to

A friend once told me he broke up with his girlfriend because he couldn’t have a meaningful conversation with her. At the time, I was genuinely bamboozled, because I’d never heard someone say it so plainly. Isn’t conversation obviously the most important thing? I remember wondering, what are you even connecting over, if not that? To me, that sounded lonelier than being single. To be in such close physical proximity to someone and still feel conceptually and conversationally alone seems a profound kind of isolation, as if the body is present, but the mind is elsewhere, unreached, unreaching.

Maybe that’s why, for me, love has always meant talk. Real love, the kind I dream about, feels like an endless conversation, one that never really stops, just takes pauses to eat or sleep or kiss.

endless conversation as a love story

If life goes well for me, I hope my dream relationship will just feel like one long, continuous conversation. I don’t mean that metaphorically, but literally — a never-ending dialogue of becoming. I want to walk and talk, lie in bed and talk, sit across from each other at dinner and talk. I want to reflect on our days together, ask strange questions, spiral into metaphysics, laugh about dumb things, and learn the specific, rippled texture of each other’s minds, studying their soul’s cartography, one contour at a time.

Voice and language so precise and personal that when one of us dies, as is the nature of life, the conversation doesn’t end. It continues in the empty space, in the wondering: What would they have said? The dialogue stretches into the beyond, because conversation lives on and on. This is romance, to me.

To me, this is intimacy: mutual prompting, mutual witnessing, an endless back-and-forth of seeing and being seen, a daily work of co-created shared language. The people we love participate in our becoming, as much as they observe us. They reflect parts of us we didn’t know were there. Their curiosity rearranges us and their listening sharpens us. They make us new, as James Baldwin knew:

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”
— James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

But I’ve learned, over time, that people experience and search for love in different forms. For some people, love is service. For others, it’s safety, or admiration, or thrill. The Greeks, of course, knew this already and had separate words for separate forms: Philia, for deep friendship. Eros, for romantic and sexual passion. Agape, for selfless unconditional love. Storge, for familial affection. Still, I believe the lines blur more than we think.

friendship is the foundation

Recently, some friends and I were debating whether “friends-to-lovers” is a good romantic arc. One person argued that it makes no sense: you should know upfront if someone is attractive and make your intentions clear. I think I get it, because there’s something honest and direct about that approach, something clean about desire that announces itself from the start.

Art by Salvador Dalí from a rare 1969 edition of Alice in Wonderland

But I’ve always moved differently. Every person I’ve had a crush on began as a friend. For me, romantic interest tends to grow sideways , quietly, gradually, almost imperceptibly at first. It begins with admiration, then I notice I feel safe around them. I respect how they move through the world. I enjoy how their mind works. And then one day it clicks: oh, I also want to kiss you. I’ve never fallen for someone I wasn’t already in deep emotional rapport with, because, to me, friendship is the seedbed of love.

For me, desire doesn’t strike like lightning, but unfolds like light blooming at the edge of dawn: slow, soft, and impossible to ignore once seen. A kind of eros braided with trust. The wanting is latent, waiting, and then, under the right light, in the right moment, it reveals itself, unmistakably.

We try to put love into separate boxes with platonic vs romantic, but from my own experiences, I have found the real magic happens in the in-between space, when someone already cares about you and then starts seeing you differently.

This is also why online dating has always felt a little uncanny to me. To begin an interaction from a romantic frame, with pre-selected attraction, filtered bios, curated intentions, feels strangely out of order. I don’t want to be handed the script before the scene has even begun. I want love to sneak up on me mid-conversation, mid-laughter, mid-realisation that I want to keep knowing you forever.

basically

if love is conversation, then conversation is a craft

If dialogue is the root of connection, then maybe we should take it seriously, and get better at having them, and at noticing when we’re not. We complain that people are “boring,” without ever wondering if we asked anything interesting. But I think the best conversation is a co-authored rhythm, like a salsa dance, whereas some people treat it like stand-up.

There’s a certain responsibility in recognising that the quality of our interactions isn’t just about who we’re with, but how we show up. Did I ask good questions? Did I say anything real? Did I give them the signal that it’s safe to stop performing and just be?

Part of the problem is that we’ve accepted a kind of conversational poverty. We reduce whole exchanges to “small talk” and dismiss them outright, but what even is small talk? Psychologist Matthias Mehl defines it like this: “If afterwards I know nothing more about you than I knew before, then that will be small talk.”

Which means it’s not about the topic at all, despite the common definition. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about dogs or death or dish soap, because you can still learn someone’s worldview through the most ordinary surface, if it’s done right. The real question is: are we exchanging anything real? Are we risking a little piece of ourselves?

In one of my favourite essays from April and the Fool, they write:

“All intimacy is a kind of shared language, and language is co-created. I’ve learned that I can often go first.”

Maybe we can all go first. Even on the first date, the first chat, the first strange sentence. We can ask better questions, offer stranger answers, be willing to get a little weird, out of search for possibility.

Because if love is conversation, then we owe it our best words. Or at the very least, our truest ones.

we all crave being known, whether we know it or not

I think we all, subconsciously or not, crave a love that sees us, unearths us, that listens like it’s trying to understand a new language. I think no one is actively seeking out a surface-level, unknowing relationship (unless you are, please do let me know if this is the case).

Art by Sydney Pink from Overcoming Creative Block

But not everyone realises it’s possible. Some people don’t even know you can be known that deeply. It’s not their fault, because we’re rarely taught how. Most people aren't emotionally unskilled by nature, just unpracticed. We never learned how to ask the kinds of questions that open someone up, or how to sit with the pauses, or how to tell the truth in ways that invite closeness rather than repel it.

The good news is: I firmly believe it’s a learnable art (aka, yes this is another skill issue, like most things. I continue to believe skill issue is a useful meme, as I said here). Deep love is available to everyone, but requires cultivated attention, the emotional skill of listening, and a willingness to risk being seen.

love should be more ambitious

Of course, other expressions of love matter. Gifts, acts of service, physical affection are beautiful. But without understanding, they’re just gestures, because good conversation, and the understanding it signifies, is the foundation. Without it, everything else becomes mimicry of actual love.

I think we could all be more ambitious about what love could actually be. Most of us have never experienced the kind of love that transforms you and expands your interiority, so we don’t realise it’s out there. But it is and it exists. Once you’ve experienced it, you can’t go back to the mimicry, because it feels like a sorry excuse for the real thing.

I think it’s worth the search, even if it means staying single longer than you’d like, even if it means risking disappointment again and again, as I often say on this blog. Because that kind of love , the kind where someone truly sees you, and you see them, and the conversation never ends, is profoundly transformative. It’s rare, yes, but real. And when it happens, it feels like the closest thing we have to touching the divine.

the unpredictability clause

There’s one more piece I’ve been thinking about, maybe a necessary condition for enduring fascination.

“I’m only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll say, I’ll lose interest. The people I stay close to are the ones who regularly surprise me.” - Venkatesh Rao, Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People

Not all surprises are equal. The most compelling are the non sequiturs - the mind-expanding ones that make you pause and think wait, what? rather than ah, I see. The kind of responses that scramble your internal scripts and make you think in unscripted ways just to reply.

Great conversation is cognitively enlivening, as a form of mutual weirdness, an intellectual tango where neither partner quite knows what the next step will be. I crave a love where we constantly surprised each other, never becoming frozen in a perception. We allow each other to unfold, to be dynamically in motion and become a new every day, to accept and be excited to meet every version, because you love the person’s essence, no matter how it is actualised. That is a deep, profound, safe love we all deserve love to feel.

in conclusion: life is just talking

“Isn’t life just talking, in the end?”

Talking is how we come to know ourselves, and each other. It’s how we create shared realities. It’s how we fall in love, and stay in it.

Life is just talking - and who we choose to talk to, over and over again, might be the most important decision we ever make.

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Other posts you might enjoy:

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Because sometimes music says what essays can’t, I made a playlist to accompany this piece, as a sonic reflection on the kind of love that listens, that lingers, that speaks without always needing words.

Also, got a song that feels like this kind of love to you? Reply or message me - I’d love to add it to the mix.

• The Key to Love is Understanding — BADBADNotGood, Jonah Yano

• I’ll Be Your Mirror — The Velvet Underground

• Dance 4 Eternity — Kid Cudi

• Kitchen — Kid Cudi

• Talk — Hozier

• Open — Rhye

• To Build a Home — The Cinematic Orchestra

• Like Real People Do — Hozier

• Real Boy — La Sera

• Real Love Baby — Father John Misty

Each of these tracks feels like a different corner of the same conversation: the kind of love where you see each other clearly, stay curious, and never stop exchanging signals.