Plenty of people don’t grow up with a good example of love. I was one of them. Therapy didn’t hand me a fix so much as a diagnosis: the way I’d learned to move through the world was overcompensation. A weak quad never announces itself. The knee quietly takes the load it was never built to carry, and the knee is what gives out. I’d been shifting weight into it for years and calling it strength.
There’s a name for the pattern. The way you first learn love, from your earliest caregivers, becomes the template you run as an adult: secure, anxious, or avoidant. It decides who feels safe and who you keep waiting at the gate (Hazan & Shaver, 1987, who first framed romantic love as an attachment process). Mine had me building castles.
I’m also a hopeless romantic. I’ve watched How I Met Your Mother through eleven times, because Ted keeps believing in the thing against all the evidence, and so do I. Shows like that run on truisms, the kind of line you’d roll your eyes at on a mug. I wanted the truisms about love to become jennisms: things I’d actually tested, not just inherited.
So I studied it: the neuroscience of the first months, the psychology of why we fall and why we stay. That is what finally let me tell the true lines from the cringe ones you repeat without checking.
Most I save and forget. This one I couldn’t put down. It’s four seconds of a woman at a café table in Union Square, holding a coffee, saying one sentence to the camera. No story, no setup. Just the line. My own life has read it back to me more than once since.
Interactive · fable · neuroscience · psychology · philosophy
The same moment, four ways
I keep the lines, then I want to know why they land. I have spent whole evenings deciding what a single text meant instead of just being on the date, reading delayed replies like evidence, bracing for an ending before anything had even started. So here is the same arc, from the first glance across a room to the long after, read all at once: the fable I saved, and what the neuroscientist, the therapist, and the philosopher each say is actually happening underneath it. Not to decode anyone, but to finally tell which feelings are data and which are just fear, and to stop suffering the whole relationship in my head before it has had the chance to be real. Move along it.
No saved line lives here yet. This stage is all body, mind, and idea.
Before you have decided anything, your sympathetic nervous system fires: heart quick, pupils wide, palms damp. It is the same arousal as fear, which is why it is so easy to misread.
Dutton & Aron, 1974: men who had just crossed a high, swaying bridge were far likelier to call the woman who stopped them.
Attraction is not random. The attachment system you built with your first caregiver reads whether this closeness feels safe or like a risk.
Bowlby & Ainsworth, attachment theory.
Plato's Symposium begins right here, with eros as the pull toward a beautiful body. The whole ladder of love is what you climb from this first rung.
Plato, Symposium.
Sources: Dutton & Aron 1974 (misattribution of arousal) · Fisher, Aron & Brown 2005 and Acevedo et al. 2012 (fMRI of romantic love) · Marazziti et al. 1999 (serotonin) · Schneiderman et al. 2012 (oxytocin) · Sternberg, triangular theory · Bowlby & Ainsworth, attachment · Plato, Aristotle, Stendhal (1822), Fromm (1956), bell hooks (2000). Empirical figures verified against the primary source.
The line I couldn’t put down
“the right person won’t make you wait outside their castle.”
@andiefuentes · Union Square, New York · 2026
I had to sit with why it stung, and it stung because I am usually the one with the castle. I am the one who makes people wait.
See the Argentine fable as a storybook →What I did with it
The retelling · in my words
I’m the one who makes people wait. I’ve always been late, and somewhere I decided that was power, not a flaw. But the truth is uglier: I’ve been wronged enough to fear disappointment, so it became a toxic cycle of testing people. I’d make myself hard to be around and push to see if they would stay, because staying felt like the only proof the love was real.
I called it finding out how much he wanted me. It was really finding out if I could be wanted without doing anything to earn it.
Then I heard the right person won’t make you wait outside their castle, and it caught me, because I’ve spent my whole life being the castle. I don’t think the lesson is stop being a princess. I think it’s that I keep building the gate, and the right one is the person I don’t make stand outside it.
What I want
A guy asked me what I wanted. I don’t know if I can answer that. It means committing to a set of expectations.
The retelling · in my words
There’s an idea that you have to be complete on your own before you can be there for someone else. I think it’s more a partnership built on human connection than two finished people.
What I want most, after what I want for my family, is someone to build a world with me. Complete with a museum of memories: adventures, laughing, being present.
And nothing is a waste. Heartbreak can happen even when the connection is real. It comes when you’re each only present at times, when the other person is pulling away.
I don’t hold expectations. I hope someone is fully present with themselves. I hope they entertain me when I screech and dance around a room and babble about everything and nothing, because I love that version of Jenn. I would be more disappointed in myself for letting her shrink than for any of the ways it could go wrong with someone. The right relationship encourages your expansion.
The drawer · the lines I save, studied
More from the collection
The rest of the lines I’ve kept about love, each one held up to the light: what it’s really saying, and whether it survives the check.
“Love is my mom picking up the phone on the first ring.”
my own
The study
This whole essay is about me being the castle, the one who makes people wait. This is the opposite, and it is the model I actually have. My mom picks up on the first ring, every time: no gate, no test of how much I want her, no earning the answer. That is what secure love looks like before you have words for it, reliable and immediate. The castle line stung because some part of me already knew this was the standard.
The deeper bookshelf
The neuroscience explains the machinery. But there is an older conversation about what love looks like when it comes from fullness instead of need.
Fromm starts from the wound. The deepest human need, he says, is not sex, not belonging, not even survival. It is to overcome separateness. Every religion, every addiction, every orgiastic state, every act of conformity is an attempt to escape the prison of being alone inside your own skull. Love is the only answer that does not require you to lose yourself in the process.
“The deepest need of man is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.”
Erich Fromm · The Art of Loving, 1956
Fromm calls the version that comes from need “symbiotic love” and the version that comes from wholeness “productive love.” The castle is symbiotic love wearing armor. The distinction maps to one of his sharpest lines:
“Immature love says: I love you because I need you. Mature love says: I need you because I love you.”
Erich Fromm · The Art of Loving, 1956
And giving is his proof that you are on the right side of that line:
“Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power.”
Erich Fromm · The Art of Loving, 1956
In The Sane Society, written a year before The Art of Loving, he frames love as one of the existential needs that define a sane human life. Transcendence, for Fromm, means the need to rise above passive existence and become a creator rather than a creature. Love is one of the two paths to transcendence; the other is destruction. The urge to create and the urge to destroy share a root: both are attempts to transcend helplessness. The difference is whether you build or burn.
“Man is driven by the need to transcend the role of the creature, the accidentalness and passivity of his existence, by becoming a creator.”
Erich Fromm · The Sane Society, 1955
He identified five orientations of love, each a different face of the same capacity. Brotherly love is the most basic: equal, horizontal, the recognition that the stranger is not actually a stranger. Motherly love is unconditional, the only form that requires nothing in return. Erotic love is exclusive, fused, the desire to merge completely with one other person. Self-love is not narcissism but the prerequisite: “If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all.” And love of God, which Fromm reads as the longing for unity with the whole, not obedience to a deity.
The Greeks had already split it finer. Eight words where English has one:
selfless, divine, asks nothing back
C.S. Lewis called it the only love that is not a need. The other loves require their object; agape radiates at everything with no condition attached. It is the surplus love: when a connection produces more than it consumes, the extra has to go somewhere, and agape is where it goes. Its presence is diagnostic. A love that generates agape is feeding you. A love that extinguishes it is extracting.
the love between equals who choose each other
Aristotle ranked it above eros and named three grades: friends of utility love what you provide, friends of pleasure love how you make them feel, and true friends love who you are, wishing your good for your sake and not theirs. His warning was about time: you cannot know a person until you have eaten salt together. Philia is the load-bearing wall. Eros without it collapses when the novelty does.
the love you did not choose but cannot lose
The love of parent and child, and the only love that arrives as a default state: nothing earned, nothing performed. Between adults it is the slowest to appear because it cannot be manufactured. It accumulates as someone becomes familiar in the deep, family-like sense. The quietest love, and the one most tests of belonging are secretly asking about. The question is never only desire; it is whether you can rest here.
the love that wants to merge
The Greeks feared it as a madness that overrides the will. Plato rehabilitated it in the Symposium as a ladder: desire begins with a body and, followed honestly, climbs toward the person, then toward what is beautiful in them, then toward beauty itself. The body is the doorway, not the destination. Eros as escape closes its eyes. Eros as knowledge keeps them open.
what remains after eros quiets
From the same root as pragmatic: love as deed, as practice. The love of couples who have stood together long enough that the standing is the point, built from patience, compromise, and choosing each other on the boring days. It is the only love that cannot appear early. It is what the other loves compound into when they keep getting practiced, which makes it less a feeling than a record.
Fromm’s prerequisite, not narcissism
The Greeks split it in two: a hubris that consumes, and a healthy form that makes every other love possible. Fromm took the second reading. If you can only love others and never yourself, what you are calling love is need wearing a costume. Philautia is the reserve the other loves draw on. You cannot give from nothing.
the anxious loop the castle was built from
Possession dressed as devotion. The Greeks read it as eros curdled: desire plus fear of loss, jealousy offered as proof of caring, the beloved treated as territory. Attachment research found the same loop centuries later and named it anxious attachment. Mania is the counterfeit that makes the taxonomy necessary, because from the inside it feels identical to intensity. The test is your baseline: love steadies it, mania destabilizes it.
flirting, teasing, the early dance
Ovid wrote an entire manual treating it as an art. It gets dismissed as the shallow love, but it runs a test nothing else runs: whether someone can hold lightness without dropping it. It is the first love long couples lose, and the reason the ones who keep it are still laughing decades in. Play is not the opposite of seriousness. It is the proof that the seriousness can be carried.
Fromm’s five orientations map onto this older taxonomy but do not cover it entirely. Agape maps to both his brotherly love and his love of God. Eros maps to erotic love. Storge maps to motherly love. Philautia maps to self-love. But pragma, mania, ludus, and philia have no Fromm equivalent. The Greeks saw faces of love that Fromm’s framework, focused on the productive-versus-symbiotic axis, chose not to name.
The taxonomy is not a menu. The loves are not alternatives you pick between; they are layers that arrive in a sequence and compound. Philia usually comes first, because friendship is the cheapest love to test and the most expensive to fake. Ludus is the bridge: play is how two people find out whether the friendship can carry weight without becoming heavy. Eros arrives in the middle, and the Greeks were right to distrust any connection that starts there, because desire is the easiest love to counterfeit and the worst one to build on. Storge comes late, since belonging cannot be requested, only accumulated. And pragma is not in the sequence at all. It is the sediment the sequence leaves behind, which is why no single night, however complete, can produce it. When several of the loves show up together with one person, that is the signal worth taking seriously: not the intensity of any one love but the co-occurrence of many.
Baldwin wrote about love the way a war correspondent writes about the front. He knew it was dangerous and went anyway. His best passages do not comfort. They diagnose.
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
James Baldwin · The Fire Next Time, 1963
The castle is one of those masks. It looks like protection but it is a prison with nice curtains. Baldwin saw that the alternative to the mask is not vulnerability in the soft-focus way the internet uses the word. It is a fight:
“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
James Baldwin · Nobody Knows My Name, 1961
And in Giovanni’s Room, the novel he wrote about a man who destroys the person he loves because he cannot accept what his own desire reveals about him, he put the cost of the mask in one paragraph:
“You want to be safe. But the only way to be safe is to give up the illusion that you can protect yourself.”
James Baldwin · Giovanni’s Room, 1956
Baldwin and Fromm are saying the same thing from opposite ends. Fromm says: love is the active power that breaks through separateness. Baldwin says: the masks we use to manage separateness are the things love strips away. The castle is the mask, and the mask is the separateness, and separateness is the wound.
Adler, who preceded Fromm by a generation, saw the same pattern from the angle of action. He thought the biggest danger in life was not failure or heartbreak but excessive caution:
“The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.”
Alfred Adler · The Science of Living, 1929
Too many precautions is the castle. And the most invisible precaution is overthinking: running every scenario, rehearsing every argument for why it will fail, building a courtroom in your head where the trial never ends because a verdict would mean you have to do something. Adler called it the hesitating attitude. The person who will not stop analyzing whether to love is not being careful. They are being defended.
That is what makes overthinking toxic. It disguises itself as diligence. It feels like responsibility, like you are taking the question seriously. But deliberation without movement is a castle with better interior design. Thinking about love is not love. Worrying about loss is not protection. The overactive mind does not prevent heartbreak. It prevents the life that would make heartbreak worth risking.
Kierkegaard diagnosed the root a century before Adler named the symptom:
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
Søren Kierkegaard · The Concept of Anxiety, 1844
The person who overthinks is not afraid of the wrong answer. They are dizzy from the fact that they get to choose at all. Adler’s antidote was blunt:
“Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.”
Alfred Adler · attributed
Nicholas Britell scored If Beale Street Could Talk the year I first read Baldwin. He named the tracks after the Greek loves: Agape, Eros, Storge, Philia. The strings carry the love. The brass carries the aspiration. The distorted piano carries the injustice. He translated the taxonomy into sound, and hearing it made the Greek words feel like something I had always known but never had a name for.
Maslow splits it differently: D-love (deficiency-love, from need) and B-love (being-love, from fullness). The therapy journal maps the D-love loop: feel closeness, push away, they persist, override values. The castle is D-love architecture. What is happening now is the shift toward B-love, and the shift happened because the inner work happened first, not because the right person arrived.
Morrison said it in five words harder than any treatise:
“You your best thing, Sethe. You are.”
Toni Morrison · Beloved, 1987
And before any of them, the Bhakti poets of southern India wrote devotional verse to a god who required no temple, no priest, no transaction. Just presence. The Bhagavad Gita, which was on the UChicago bookshelf the same year as the attachment theory papers, calls it nishkama karma: act from alignment, not from the calculation of what you will receive.
“I love the Handsome One: he has no death, decay, nor form; no place or side; no end nor birthmarks. I love the Beautiful One with no bond nor fear, no clan, no land, no landmarks for his beauty.”
Akka Mahadevi · 12th c., trans. A. K. Ramanujan
Rilke compressed the entire thesis into one sentence Fromm kept returning to:
“Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.”
Rainer Maria Rilke · Letters to a Young Poet, 1929
Twelve thinkers, two millennia, the same mechanism: when you give from fullness, the giving does not deplete. It generates. The deeper reading list is on the India study abroad page, where the bookshelf that held the Gita also held the Bhakti poets who said it first.
Devotion & poetry: the full lineage →The poems I keep
The drawer up top is the lines I save off a screen. This is the other half: the poems that outlived everyone who first repeated them, every one saying what the bookshelf says, that love from fullness keeps no ledger.
The shelf · actual poems, uncovered
Seven of them, folded like spines. Open one to read the verse and why I keep it.
1999 · Daniel Ladinsky, after Hafiz
Why I keep it
The whole castle is a tab I keep on people. This is the love that never sends the bill.
Passed around everywhere as Hafiz. It is really Ladinsky’s own poem, written after Hafiz, not a translation: the feeling is fourteenth-century, the words are 1999. I keep it anyway, with the credit set straight.
A fable is just a lesson you’re willing to admit you needed. I’ll keep adding to this as the lines pile up, and the ones I have a real retelling for will get a room of their own.
And the value underneath all of it, the one that lets the castle come down at all: leaving ego at the door.
Sources
The studying part, if you want it: what I read to tell the true lines from the cringe ones.
- Attachment. Hazan & Shaver, 1987: romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process; Bowlby & Ainsworth: the original attachment theory the adult version is built on.
- The brain in love. Fisher, Aron & Brown, 2005: fMRI of early-stage romantic love; Acevedo et al., 2012: the reward circuit still firing in long-married couples.
- The chemistry. Marazziti et al., 1999: serotonin in new love sitting near OCD levels; Schneiderman et al., 2012: oxytocin predicting whether new couples last.
- The misread. Dutton & Aron, 1974: mistaking fear’s racing heart for attraction.
- The frameworks. Sternberg’s triangular theory: intimacy, passion, commitment; bell hooks, All About Love, 2000.