4 minutes reading time
Whenever I hear people say they “fell in love,” I respect the audacity. Jumping without a map is brave. I don’t fall; I negotiate with gravity. Still, love fascinates me because the reasons never add up. If you can list them - eyes, sex, kindness - that’s admiration with extra frosting, not the irrational plunge people write songs about.
Love is my cheap entry point into personal identity. It exposes the fallacy of composition: we don’t love a pile of parts - hair, laugh, trauma - we love a someone. The four‑dimensionalist will remind me that people extend across time like loaves, not slices, but when we say “her,” we mean the whole cursed loaf.
That raises the question of whether compositionality is Identity. For any object that is made up of many different parts, we can ponder: What is the relationship between something/someone and the parts they are made up of? Is the whole composition just its parts taken together? Or is it more than just those parts arranged in a particular order?
Am I something more than the parts I’m composed of? If yes, how do you avoid double counting the soul tax?
Cells die, cells replace. Am I the same bastard I was years ago? If one of my temporal parts does a crime, do I wear the handcuffs or does he? Imagine an alien archivist slowly replacing my cells while bottling the originals, then assembling a me‑copy from the jarred past. Which one owns my debts? Leibniz’ Law slaps my wrist when I get too cute: if there’s a property one has and the other lacks (like this scar, that memory), they’re not identical.
I’m not a philosopher; I’m a tired mammal with Wi‑Fi. But I think bodily continuity isn’t necessary for personal identity. What I reach for instead: a person has a point of view, a bundle of desires, a memory trail, and, crucially, tendencies - the ways they respond to the world and to other persons. That smells like psychological continuity: overlapping chains of memory, intention, character.
Memory alone fails. If A fell in love with B five years ago, B now contains five years of moments the earlier B did not. I don’t remember infancy; I barely remember last week sober. If memory = me, then I flicker in and out of existence like a broken tube light. Continuity says: you persist when enough of the right mental glue carries over, even if the snapshots change.
If we accept continuity, memory is one thread, not the entire rope. And here’s the knife twist: if the rope persists, then people don’t “change” in the absolving way we like to claim. They reveal. The mask rotates; the rope remains.
So, dear masochist: your lover didn’t change. They became legible. You didn’t change either; you became less delusional. Which leaves two options - you loved a projection, or you’re at a rough patch where your ropes are rubbing the wrong way. Stop saying “they aren’t the same person.” You never met the whole person. You met an episode.
I’ll end with something less Pinterest, more painful: love is choosing the same haunted house after you’ve seen it in daylight. If you can’t do that, call it what it was - a beautiful hallucination.
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Edit: Protip: Never watch a rom-com when you are high. They are all so fucking stupid and will send you on a very bad trip.
