“I do desire we may be better strangers.”
Perhaps the most elegant insult in Shakespeare’s repertoire. Orlando delivers it in As You Like It after Jaques proposes that they meet “as little as we can.” It is a graceful way of saying that the relationship would improve with less contact.
Shakespeare knew another kind of better strangeness.
In Sonnet 39, separation allows the speaker to praise the beloved as someone distinct from himself. Too much closeness can blur the very person we want to know. Distance sharpens love by creating the space in which desire, praise, and recognition become possible.
Perhaps intimacy has the same problem. Knowing someone well can make us stop noticing them.
The difficult question is not how close we can get, but how near we can remain without taking away the distance in which another life becomes its own.
The critic Byung-Chul Han argues that we live in an “inferno of the same,” where even difference becomes something we can consume and compare. We conform to nonconformity; irony is the new earnestness, and anything weird or different wins the prize.
For Han, love requires something harder: encountering another person who cannot be absorbed into ourselves. Unlike our idea of them, they can talk back.
We spend much of our lives believing in getting closer. Closer to another person. Closer to God. Closer to people across political, religious, national, and ideological lines. Conversation, reconciliation, ministry, marriage, friendship—all suggest that distance is the problem and proximity the cure.
But even God complicates that.
Renowned mystic Meister Eckhart makes even our understanding of God something we must let go of. Whatever we name as God cannot contain God. The divine is beyond anything we can master or claim, as far away as the furthest star and as close as our next breath. Transcendence and intimacy are not opposites. Perhaps human love has a similar structure.
Some people become clearer when they are farther away. A child must eventually become someone you can no longer manage. The dead can become strangely present precisely because they are inaccessible. People who sleep in the same bed can become remote. Someone thousands of miles away can know immediately what you mean.
And reconciliation does not finally mean eliminating the distance between people. It requires enough distance that neither person disappears into the other. Perhaps actual closeness depends less on overcoming distance than on learning which distances make sense.
I used to think I had this figured out.
In the unity-candle ceremony at weddings, the couple typically uses two lit candles to light a larger one, extinguishing their own. At one of my first weddings, the couple agreed to a variation without knowing quite what I intended to make of it. I had them walk up to the already-lit unity candle and light their own, showing that love enhances individuality. It’s not a merger but a joint venture.
The trouble with two becoming one is deciding who disappears.
I had a great quote to set this up. In a letter to the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:
“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude.”
I was moved by this. The couple wasn’t listening. The bride’s mother was furious. To her, this was blasphemy: a denial of romance, closeness, and the purpose of marriage.
I was not repentant, but I was humbled. I had been so intent on preventing anyone from disappearing that I had said too little about what joining another life requires. Love cannot merely protect two solitudes. It also asks something of them.
People give up privacy, convenience, independence, sometimes sleep. A child disrupts solitude altogether. Friendship makes claims. Marriage does too. If closeness can become possession, distance can become self-protection.
Never again was I so bold at a wedding, at least intentionally.
Efforts to protect love from risk can take the life out of it. Closeness, intimacy, and “transparency” now often pass for authenticity. Distance and disagreement can look like failures of relationship. But perfect access to another person would not be love. Neither would perfect independence. Love is never guaranteed. We keep wanting to make it so.
The distance between two people need not be a failure of love. It can be one way love keeps the other person real.
T. S. Eliot ends Little Gidding with an image that gathers together much of Four Quartets: “the fire and the rose are one.” The fire purifies and consumes. The rose opens and gives itself. Their unity comes after a long meditation on time, loss, suffering, and the temptation to possess what we love.
Intimacy, too, asks for unity without erasure. Nearness and distance do not finally cancel one another. The fire remains fire. The rose remains rose.
And they are one.
Notes and reading
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, “Love.” Weil places this thought beside her warnings against possession and against loving an imagined person.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act III, scene 2; Sonnet 39. In the sonnet, separation allows the speaker to praise the beloved as distinct rather than part of a “single one”: “Even for this let us divided live.”
Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros, trans. Erik Butler (2017). His “inferno of the same” describes how narcissistic sameness displaces encounter.
Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, trans. Oliver Davies (1994), especially the sermon on poverty of spirit, traditionally numbered 52. Eckhart’s prayer to be freed of “God” challenges the conceptions we use to contain the divine.
Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Paula Modersohn-Becker, February 12, 1902, collected in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892–1910, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton. The passage concerns love’s obligation to respect another person’s solitude and development.
T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” (1942), Four Quartets, sections III and V. Eliot distinguishes detachment from indifference before concluding with the union of fire and rose. My application of this to intimacy is my own.
Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.
