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 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.
“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
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
Baldwin called it witness-love: the willingness to see someone fully and to let yourself be fully seen. 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
Seven 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 →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.