Break It Down (Again)

Early on in my short and uninspired career in math, I remember an exercise my math class did to break down numbers into the lowest primes whose product would be the original number. For example, 24 can be broken down to 8 and 3, and from there to 4, 2, and 3, and from there to 2, 2, 2, and 3. I liked this way of thinking because in a way it made everything potentially understandable. It was satisfying to me that many big, scary numbers could be reduced to a less intimidating combination of 2s, 3s, and other, more manageable primes.

Though I mostly left math behind many years ago (does balancing my checkbook count?), I held onto that idea. After all, the biggest, grisliest problems I encounter in my life are often combinations of things. Insecurities from one area of my life meet up with previous mistakes, concerns for the future, and even maybe a recent bad hair day, and suddenly I’m staring up at one very large, ugly, and complex knot of issues. While it is often tempting to simply turn tail and run from these monster problems, it is also sometimes satisfying to pick up your metaphorical baseball bat and beat the damn thing until your primes start falling out: the real, basic problems. (A therapist, I should note, might take issue with the image of beating one’s problems until their parts fall out, but I believe in reality a therapist does pretty much the same thing—though admittedly with a little more finesse.)

Daniel Jones, editor of the Modern Love section of the New York Times, recently broke love down into its primes. As if I weren't already thoroughly enamored of this man, he also referenced Star Trek in his introductory explanation: “If I were Spock from ‘Star Trek,’ I would explain that human love is a combination of three emotions or impulses: desire, vulnerability and bravery. Desire makes one feel vulnerable, which then requires one to be brave.” (See below for a link to this article.) So there they are: the 2s and 3s of love, albeit with a Vulcan twist. After some thought, I came to the conclusion that even those primes are still a little bulky—and maybe I in my hubris could break them down a little more, or at least define them a little more thoroughly for myself. After all, science didn't stop with Einstein.

Desire I understand. To return to my linguistic roots for a moment, Lord have mercy do I understand desire. It may be a little redundant to break desire down into its primes—I think it’s already pretty primal as is. To make a brief attempt, though, I think desire is pretty much the distance between your lack of an attractive something and the attractive something itself. Raise that distance to the power of pheromones, and God help you.

Vulnerability required a little more thinking from me—I got the sense that there were more moving parts to this one (after all, for me the only moving parts in desire tend to be my falling all over myself and what results when my falling all over myself is just fine with the other person). I believe that everybody has a certain amount of personal armor, in a greater or lesser state of repair, and that there are, by necessity of design, gaps in that armor that we have come to call our weaknesses, or, as a whole, our vulnerability. So exactly what is it that we’re guarding ourselves against? Pain doesn’t seem like an adequate answer; rather than being a prime, that to me looks like an infinity symbol. It’s just too big of a thing to understand. And so, true to form, I gave it a bit of a thwack to see what fell out, and I came up with three things: disappointment, humiliation, and loss.

In a lot of ways, I think that these are the things that go bump in the night when you’re a grownup; they are the things that scare us the most. To frame it conceptually, disappointment is what happens when the distance between your lack and the thing that would fill that lack (desire, see above) becomes too great. The desire snaps and the void across that now unconquerable distance is called disappointment. Humiliation is a subtractive process: you are made smaller by the exact amount that measures how much you care about other people’s opinions. And then, of course, there is loss.

Loss is more than simply an absence. It is a hole in yourself, shaped in the image of the thing that was once there and is now gone—an emptiness that still has the ability to shape you. Loss has mass, it has character. I’ve seen pictures before of trees that grew up around bicycles, bushes that have absorbed chain-link fences. I think loss is like that: we can absorb it into ourselves, but we can’t change it, and it’ll always be there within, foreign and painful.

And so, in the face of vulnerability, the noun that is the state in which we find ourselves because of disappointment, humiliation, and loss, why the hell would you then move to bravery? Is love really worth the physics of vulnerability?

For whatever reason, my immediate answer is yes, though I couldn’t give you a logical reason to save my life. Maybe we’re trained by family, culture, even our own instincts that love, and everything that goes with it, is worth the risk; that the stakes are so high because the prize is so great. And now I come to define bravery: bravery is the mass of your faith that love will be worth it combined with the acknowledgment of your own vulnerability, multiplied by your velocity moving through life. And hell, square it for good measure.

I’ve whipped myself into a linguistic and physics frenzy trying to describe all of this, but maybe it just goes back to primes:

Lay out your 2s and 3s, all of the basic components of exactly who you are: flaws, virtues, sapphires and gum-wrappers. And maybe there’s a person who will look at all the primes and see the product. Suddenly you’ll know in your bones why relativity makes sense, and all at once you’ll be mass and distance and energy and in love.


(For Daniel Jones' brilliant ruminations on the subject, please see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/fashion/14modlove.html?pagewanted=2&sq=modern%20love&st=cse&scp=3)