The Other Remains the Other

On clinging, closeness, and the one thing no one can do for you.

I keep hearing it. Not as a lecture. Not quite as someone else's wisdom, though it started that way, as words I read years ago that wouldn't leave. Now it sounds like my own voice, low and steady, repeating the same lines until they finally land.

One must remember death, right? Will you die along with your wife?

The question is not cruel. It is simply exact.

Maybe someone will hold my hand at the end. I hope so. But they won't come with me. The breath will stop in one body, not two. Whatever I have built around another person, the jokes, the routines, the side of the bed, will stay behind. And if that is true of death, it is worth asking why I live as if the opposite were true.

When one has to die alone, then why can't one live alone? Learn to live alone.

I don't take this literally anymore. People aren't built to live alone. We need each other in ordinary, unglamorous ways: someone to notice we've gone quiet, someone to call when the car breaks down. What I take from it is smaller and harder. I need to be able to be alone. To sit in an empty flat on a Friday night and not feel like I'm disappearing.

For a long time I couldn't. The quiet felt like an accusation. Now I notice it isn't empty. It's crowded with everything I never made room for: unfinished thoughts, half-formed wants, the soft parts of me I kept handing to someone else so I wouldn't have to hold them myself.

Meet the other only as much as the sweetness remains.

This line stopped me, and then it worried me.

I know the kind of closeness it warns against: the twenty-four-hour version. Checking my phone every few minutes. Feeling slightly sick when a reply was late. Staring at the same face until it became both necessary and invisible. There's a point where closeness stops feeding you and starts consuming you. Where love begins to smell like fear. Where it's no longer two people choosing each other, but two people refusing to be alone.

In this, only heads ache and life becomes hell.

I've lived a version of that. The headache of over-attachment. The low panic when the other person asked for a weekend to themselves. The resentment that grew once I realised I had made someone else responsible for my peace. That wasn't love. It was need wearing love's clothes.

But I can't read "only as much as the sweetness remains" as permission to leave when things get hard. Real love has long unsweet stretches. Hospital corridors. Arguments about money. Years when a parent needs more than they can give back. Stepping away from clinging is wisdom. Stepping away from commitment the moment it stops being pleasant is just another way of avoiding myself. The real skill is telling those two apart, and I don't always manage it.

When you are alone, there is a lot within you that you can then develop.

This is the part I resisted longest. Alone, the noise drops, and things rise in that drop. Ideas I'd shelved. Questions I'd been too busy to ask. A stillness that surprised me. Someone can walk beside me, laugh with me, sleep next to me, but they cannot do this inner work for me. When I hand that job to another person, I don't just burden them. I abandon the only place where I actually grow.

No matter how close the other is, no matter how dear, the other remains the other.

I used to want fusion: one heart, one mind, a future woven so tight that separation would be impossible. It doesn't work that way. The other remains the other: beautiful, limited, free, temporary. I can love them. I can choose them every day. I can't make them into an extension of me. Every time I've tried, we've both ended up smaller.

My prayer is that you may have a loving relationship with the other. But no matter how much love you give, the other can never become God for you. Whether it is your husband, your wife, your mother, your father, the other remains an ordinary, worldly being.

This is the softest and hardest line of all.

I can pray for a relationship full of tenderness and honesty. I can give it my best years. But I cannot turn one human being into the answer to my deepest hunger. They are not the source. They are an ordinary person carrying their own fears, their own unfinished stories, their own eventual departure. And when I stop demanding that they fill the God-shaped space in me, something unexpected happens. I start seeing them as they are. Not a saviour. Not a mirror. Just another person walking the same temporary road, who happens to be walking it next to me.

So I practise. Badly, some weeks.

I practise remembering death so I stop postponing life.

I practise being alone so that company becomes a choice, not a craving.

I practise noticing when closeness turns into need, and stepping back from the need, not the person.

I practise staying through the unsweet parts, because that's what love actually costs.

I practise building what's already inside me instead of outsourcing my wholeness.

And I practise loving without making anyone into God.

The voice is still here. Quieter now. Clearer. It doesn't ask me to reject love. It asks me to stop using love as a hiding place.

Most days, that feels like freedom. Some days it just feels like Friday night in an empty flat. I'm learning those can be the same thing.