We Are Who We Are With

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about how I relate to the people in my life, what connections I’m reaching for, and how things like love, intimacy, attention, beauty and trust all fit together. I’ve always had a general sense that we are who we are with. The people close to us shape us, sometimes more than we shape ourselves. I wanted to understand how the deep thinkers out there made sense of that, so I started digging.

The one I kept coming back to was Spinoza. He thought that so much of what we are is bound up in how other things affect us, and that the people around us can make us more fully ourselves or less. That felt like a better way of saying something I’d always half believed. What follows is what I’ve come up with so far.

One more thing before I start. The love I’m writing about is the love between partners, which is different from the love a parent has for a child, and that one deserves its own essay. A parent’s love is given to a life they helped create, long before the child can choose anything. A partner’s love is given knowing the other person is free to decide how to receive it and whether to return it. Everything that follows lives inside that freedom.

Beauty comes second

I used to believe we fall for people because of what we see in them, the shape of a face or the sound of a laugh or the way someone moves through a room, and that love grows out of that. I don’t think I believe that anymore. I think it mostly runs the other way, and that we find people beautiful because we love them.

Think about someone you’ve loved for a long time. Their body has changed. Maybe there’s gray at the temples now, or lines around the eyes that weren’t there ten years ago. If the beauty had come first, the love should have faded along with it, and yet you can look at them and find them more beautiful than you did at the start.

Spinoza argued that beauty is the name we give to the way something affects us, and that we don’t desire things because they’re good so much as call them good because we desire them.¹ Harry Frankfurt made a similar case about love itself. We don’t love people because we weighed them up and found them valuable. The love comes first, and the value follows from it.² Whatever beauty we see in the people we love, our love helped put it there.

There’s something that doesn’t explain, though. Love makes beauty, but it seems it doesn’t reliably make desire. Spinoza defined the two separately, and I think he was right to.³ You can look at someone with real tenderness, see everything good in them, and still not want them. Esther Perel argues that love and desire often want opposite things. Love wants closeness and knowing, and desire tends to feed on distance and the unknown, so the same years of safety that deepen one can quietly starve the other.⁴ None of that makes the idea wrong. It means the beauty love gives us isn’t the only kind there is. What desire and romance actually are, and where passion comes from, is a question I’m still working through.

So where does love come from in the first place?

What love is made of

Spinoza’s answer starts with the idea that every living thing is trying to keep going and to grow. He called this the conatus. When our power to live and act increases we feel joy, and when it shrinks we feel sadness. Love, in his definition, is joy that we connect to a cause outside ourselves. When someone leaves us more alive and more capable than we were, we love them for it.⁵

This is where my sense that we are who we are with finds its footing. Spinoza thought nothing is more useful to a person than another person, someone who understands us and wants what we want.⁶ The way I picture it is a little like a scientist revising a theory. We each carry a model of how the world works, what people will do and why they’ll do it. When someone acts on us, we read it through that model, and when they do something we didn’t expect, we update. Over the years the people closest to us do a huge share of that updating, until they’re part of the scaffolding we use to understand ourselves and move through the world.

Martin Buber would push back on that picture. He distinguished between treating someone as an It, something to observe and measure and use, and meeting them as a Thou.⁷ A model is always an It. If I only ever loved my model of someone, I’d be loving something I made. Loving a person means accepting that they’re separate from me and always partly beyond what I can predict.

Which leaves the question of how love grows at all when it rests on someone we can’t fully predict.

The bid

John Gottman spent decades studying couples, and one of the things he noticed seems almost too small to matter. People are constantly making what he called bids for connection. Someone points out a bird outside the window, or sighs at the end of a long day, or sends you a dumb meme in the middle of the afternoon. Each one is a quiet way of asking to be noticed.⁸

Most bids are tiny, which is why they’re so easy to miss, and each one carries a little risk. When you make a bid you’re asking to be seen, and you have no control over what comes back. It doesn’t help that we all bid differently. One person reaches out by asking about your day, and another fixes the leaky faucet without being asked and hopes you’ll notice. We tend to watch for the kind of bid we’d make ourselves, so a lot of them slip right past us. The “love languages” book gets at a related idea, though it’s a much simpler version of what’s actually going on.⁹

This is a more grown-up version of something I wrote earlier this year, when I argued that asking someone to be curious about you spoils the very thing you’re asking for. I still believe curiosity and desire only mean something when they’re freely given. What I’ve come to see since is that a bid doesn’t ask for either of them outright. It asks to be seen implicitly, by showing interest in someone and exposing a little of yourself along the way, and then it leaves the other person free to answer or not. Nobody can make another person curious about them, but nobody can get curious about a version of you they’ve never been shown.

Spinoza would be uneasy with all this. Waiting on someone else’s response is what he called hope, a joy that is never free of doubt, and he didn’t think a life resting on hope was a strong one.¹⁰ I understand the worry, but I don’t see another way in. Nobody gets to be known without first risking that they won’t be, and I think what Spinoza underestimated is what can happen to that hope over time.

Turning toward

Gottman described three ways to answer a bid: you can turn toward it, turn away from it, or turn against it. The couples who stayed together turned toward each other far more often than the ones who split.¹¹ It rarely took anything grand. Most of the time it was just looking up from the phone and actually answering.

That kind of attention is harder than it sounds. Most of the time, what we’re looking at is our model of the person, the picture we’ve built of who they are and what they probably mean. Answering a bid well means setting that picture down long enough to meet the person who’s actually there, which is Buber’s distinction again, played out over something as small as a bird at the window.

When it happens, something passes between two people. Spinoza noticed that seeing someone we love feel joy brings us joy too, so the one who reached out feels seen and the one who answered gets the quiet pleasure of having been the reason.¹² That small shared moment is what I call intimacy.

From hope to security

One caring response is a kindness. Hundreds of them, over years, become a place you can live. Every time you reach out and someone meets you there, a little more of the doubt goes quiet, and Spinoza had a name for the joy that’s left once the doubt is gone: security.¹³

This is my answer to his worry about hope. A bid does start out fragile, but when it’s caught again and again it settles into something you can stand on. Once it does, we bid more, and braver. We start saying the things we used to keep folded up and put away, because we’ve learned they’ll be held.

Security still has to be looked after. The people looking after it are tired and distracted and still changing, and the person you built trust with years ago isn’t quite the person beside you now. You aren’t quite the same either.

One door opens others

It’s important to emphasize that intimacy isn’t only physical. There’s the intimacy of being understood, of thinking out loud with someone, of laughing at the same stupid thing, of sitting in silence together without needing to fill it. My personal intuition and feeling is that depth in one of these tends to open a door to the others.

Spinoza gives a reason it spreads. Feelings that occur together become linked, so one tends to call up the other later, and the ease you feel with someone in one room of your life starts drifting into the rest of the house.¹⁴ He also warned that a love fixed on one thing alone turns restless and grasping.¹⁵ A love that reaches into every room has more to hold onto, and more ways to find its way home.

The deepest version of this, for me, is when physical and emotional intimacy grow together and keep growing. Spinoza didn’t think mind and body were two separate things. He saw them as one thing seen from two sides, so exploring someone’s body and exploring their mind are two ways of exploring the same person.¹⁶ He also distinguished between pleasure that touches only one part of us and joy that runs through the whole of us, and he thought only the second was always good.¹⁷ That’s the difference I feel. Each kind of intimacy can be deep on its own, but together they let you be known and wanted at the same time, which might be the most exposed and the most secure a person can feel. Wanting to give that to someone, for the joy of watching them feel seen and understood and pleasured all at once, is the closest thing I know to the pinnacle of love.

I’ll admit the giving isn’t entirely selfless. Part of why I give so freely is that it’s what I hope to receive, and it only works with someone I want to explore in the same way. Spinoza thought that’s just how love is built. When we love someone, we want to be loved back.¹⁸

Being surprised

If you could know someone perfectly, you’d never learn anything new about them, and I don’t think you could love them in quite the same way. The moments when someone does something I never would have predicted are the ones that remind me they’re their own person, more than my model of them. That makes surprise one of love’s quieter gifts.

I think curiosity is where love starts. Nobody loves out of nothing. We begin with a guess about someone, built from whatever we already believe about people, and then we get curious enough to find out whether the guess holds. If what we find brings us joy more often than not, love follows, and beauty after it.

Curiosity also has to be kept alive, and I think that takes both people. The person you love has to keep growing and be willing to share how they’re changing, which is its own kind of bid. You have to accept that they’ll keep changing and stay curious about how and why. When those two things meet, their growth becomes something you share instead of something that pulls you apart.

Not every surprise feels like a gift, though. The philosopher W.V.O. Quine described our beliefs as a web, where the ones at the edge are easy to revise and the ones near the center hold up everything else.¹⁹ Finding out the person you love has a soft spot for old jazz is a change at the edge, and it’s delightful. Finding out something that touches the center, about what they want from their life or from you, means rebuilding a big part of the web, and that can feel like the floor giving way.

In both cases the person may not have changed at all. Our picture of them did, and how much it hurts depends on how much we had built on that picture.

When it breaks

Not every bid is caught. Sometimes it’s dropped and sometimes it’s stepped on, and usually not out of cruelty. Someone was tired, or didn’t understand what was being offered, or laughed at the thing you told them in confidence because they had no idea it mattered. There was no malice in it at all, and it still lands like a door closing.

Sometimes nobody is even wrong. Two people can carry completely different ideas about what love should look like, what’s private, how much space is too much, what an apology sounds like. Gottman found that roughly two-thirds of the conflicts couples have never actually get solved, because they come from differences in personality and values that don’t go away.²⁰ The couples who lasted were the ones who kept talking about those differences with some kindness and even some humor.

Spinoza understood why these breaks hurt so much. Hate, for him, is love turned inside out, a sadness we tie to an outside cause, and he argued that when we come to hate something we once loved, the hatred runs stronger than if we had never loved it at all, so the deeper the trust, the farther the fall.²¹ More often it isn’t hatred, just a slow pulling back. When bids keep getting missed, people stop making them, and they keep the bird outside the window to themselves. And whenever a love changes shape, some part of us keeps reaching for the old version long after it’s gone, like a hand going for a light switch in a house you’ve moved out of.

And yet Spinoza also wrote something I find almost unbearably hopeful. Hatred that is fully overcome by love, he said, turns into a love greater than if the hatred had never been there.²² The psychologist Ed Tronick found something like it in mothers and infants. Even attentive parents miss their baby’s cues much of the time, and what mattered most for the child was repair, the parent noticing the miss and coming back.²³ Every repair teaches that a break doesn’t have to be the end.

When the hurt came from ignorance, Spinoza offers a way back in. He believed that the better we understand why something happened, the less power it has to wound us, and someone who hurt you because they didn’t know is someone who can learn.²⁴ Grace in that moment means being honest. You tell them, you let them see what they stepped on, and you give them the chance to come back. The one who caused the hurt has to turn toward it, and the one who was hurt has to make one more bid, maybe the hardest one there is: this hurt me, and I still want you.

That bid, if it’s caught, might be the most intimate moment of all.

What we choose

If love creates beauty and value before we have any reasons, then it seems like something that happens to us. But a long love also feels like something we keep choosing. This is where I part ways with Spinoza, who didn’t believe in free will at all. He did think a feeling can’t be willed away, only displaced by a stronger one, and I agree with him that far.²⁵ But I think we get to choose a lot of what causes our feelings. We choose what we pay attention to, which bids we answer, whether we come back after a break. Do that long enough and the choices become part of who we are, the way Aristotle thought we become kind by doing kind things.²⁶

Which comes first, the love that happens to us or the love we choose? I honestly don’t know. Maybe it starts as one and grows into the other. What I do believe is that if we are who we are with, then choosing who we’re with, and how we show up for them, is one of the few ways we get a hand in who we become.

A love that’s been lived in

Connection is fucking hard. We’re imperfect people trying to love other imperfect people, each of us carrying a private map of what love is supposed to look like, and the maps never quite match. We miss bids and step on things we didn’t know were there and grow in directions the other person didn’t see coming.

Moving forward with tenderness, I think, means holding two people’s needs at once. The person you love deserves what they want and need, and so do you. Rilke described the best love as two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other, and I take that to mean loving someone includes protecting the parts of them that will never be yours.²⁷ Sometimes two people find common ground. Sometimes they don’t, and that’s tragic in the old Greek sense, where two real goods are in conflict and nobody is wrong.²⁸ Even then, Spinoza leaves us something. The highest joy he thought we could hope for was a clear and settled sense of our own worth, and nobody else’s feelings can take that from us.²⁹

When two people do find their way, what they build is hard to replace. Spinoza thought a feeling with many causes is stronger and steadier than one with few.³⁰ A new love rests on a handful of moments. An old one rests on thousands: bids made and caught, some dropped and picked back up, small doubts quieted one at a time, trust grown across every kind of closeness. Over all those years the other person stops being someone you simply know and becomes part of how you see everything. Each year with them forces another revision to the model you carry of who they are, and since that model is part of the scaffolding you use to understand yourself, you get revised right along with it. The deeper the intimacy and the more you’ve lived through together, the more of them gets built into you, until you’re partly made of the people you’ve spent your life with. That’s what I mean when I say we are who we are with.

That’s why, years in, you can look at someone whose face has changed and still lose your breath a little. You aren’t seeing less of them than you used to. You’re seeing all of it, every year at once, and it’s beautiful because you love them.

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A note on how this was written

I want to be honest about how this piece came together. I haven’t read all of the books and thinkers named here. I came to it with my own foundation: a working philosophy, Spinoza as a backbone, and a handful of ideas about affection, intimacy and connection that I’d been turning over for a while. From there I wrote it in conversation with an AI, Claude. It brought in thinkers who agreed or disagreed with me, asked me questions that pushed on what I actually believed, and helped me put the result into words. We went back and forth, sometimes for a long time on a single idea, until I had something that felt true to me.

So the ideas and convictions here are mine, and so are the experiences behind them and quite a few of the words. Many of the references came to me secondhand, through that dialogue, and I’ve tried to represent them fairly. If I’ve gotten someone wrong, I’d be glad to hear it, and I’d encourage anyone curious to go to the sources themselves.

Further reading

If you want to go to the sources, these are where I’d start.

• Spinoza, Ethics. I’d use Edwin Curley’s translation, in A Spinoza Reader (Princeton, 1994). If you want to start free, R.H.M. Elwes’s older translation is on Project Gutenberg; the wording differs (Curley’s “confidence” and “cheerfulness” are Elwes’s “confidence” and “merriment”), but the numbering is the same. Skip ahead to Part III, which is the theory of the emotions, and keep the Definitions of the Affects at the end of it open as a glossary, because nearly every Spinoza term in this piece is defined there. The citations above use the standard shorthand, so E3P38 is Part III, Proposition 38, S is a scholium, C is a corollary, and DA is one of those Definitions of the Affects.
• Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2006), if you want a guide through the Ethics rather than going in cold.
• Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza (Harcourt, 2003), a neuroscientist’s case that Spinoza got the emotions mostly right.
• Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton, 2004). Short, and the clearest argument I know that love creates value instead of responding to it.
• Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity (2006), on why love and desire pull in different directions.
• Martin Buber, I and Thou, in the Kaufmann translation.
• John Gottman and Joan DeClaire, The Relationship Cure (2001), for bids and turning toward, and Gottman and Nan Silver, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (1999), for perpetual problems.
• Edward Tronick and Claudia M. Gold, The Power of Discord (2020), on mismatch and repair.
• W.V.O. Quine and J.S. Ullian, The Web of Belief (1970).
• Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, especially letter 7.

Footnotes

1. Beauty as a name for how things affect us: Ethics I, Appendix. Calling things good because we desire them: E3P9S, and again at E3P39S. ↩

2. Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton, 2004), ch. 2, “On Love, and Its Reasons.” ↩

3. Desire is DA1 and love is DA6, in the Definitions of the Affects at the end of Ethics Part III. ↩

4. Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (Harper, 2006). ↩

5. The conatus: E3P6 and E3P7. Joy and sadness as an increase or decrease in our power of acting: E3P11S, DA2, DA3. Love as joy with the idea of an external cause: E3P13S and DA6. ↩

6. E4P18S and E4P35C1. Spinoza’s version is specifically about people who live by reason and so agree in nature, which is a higher bar than just liking each other. ↩

7. Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923), trans. Walter Kaufmann (Scribner, 1970). ↩

8. John Gottman and Joan DeClaire, The Relationship Cure (Crown, 2001). ↩

9. Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages (Northfield, 1992). It came out about a decade before Gottman wrote about bids, so it’s a parallel idea rather than a popularization of his. ↩

10. Hope is DA12. That hope and fear can’t be good in themselves is E4P47. ↩

11. From Gottman’s six-year follow-up of newlywed couples: the couples still married had turned toward each other’s bids 86 percent of the time, and the couples who divorced only 33 percent. See the Gottman Institute’s “Turn Towards Instead of Away”, and Emily Esfahani Smith, “Masters of Love”, The Atlantic (June 12, 2014). ↩

12. E3P21. ↩

13. DA14. The Latin is securitas, which Curley and most English translations render as “confidence.” ↩

14. E3P14. ↩

15. E4P44S on love that fixes on one thing, and E5P20S on the sickness that comes from too much love for something that’s always changing. ↩

16. E2P7S and E3P2S. ↩

17. The Latin terms are titillatio (pleasure, or titillation, in one part) and hilaritas (cheerfulness, through the whole), defined at E3P11S. Cheerfulness can’t be excessive and is always good (E4P42); pleasure in one part can be excessive and bad (E4P43). ↩

18. E3P33. ↩

19. W.V.O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Philosophical Review 60 (1951), and the more readable W.V.O. Quine and J.S. Ullian, The Web of Belief (Random House, 1970). ↩

20. John Gottman and Nan Silver, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (Crown, 1999). The figure is 69 percent; the Gottman Institute summarizes it in “Managing Conflict: Solvable vs. Perpetual Problems.” ↩

21. Hate is DA7. Hate toward something once loved being stronger is E3P38. ↩

22. E3P44. ↩

23. Edward Tronick et al., “The Infant’s Response to Entrapment between Contradictory Messages in Face-to-Face Interaction,” Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 17 (1978), the original still-face study; Edward Tronick and Andrew Gianino, “Interactive Mismatch and Repair: Challenges to the Coping Infant,” Zero to Three 6, no. 3 (1986): 1–6, the study of mismatch and repair across the first year; and Edward Tronick and Claudia M. Gold, The Power of Discord (Little, Brown Spark, 2020), the book-length version, which reports that even healthy parent and infant pairs are in sync only about 30 percent of the time. ↩

24. E5P3 and E5P6. ↩

25. Spinoza’s denial of free will: E1P32, E2P48, and the Appendix to Part I. A feeling can only be displaced by a stronger, contrary one: E4P7. ↩

26. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, ch. 1. ↩

27. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, letter 7 (Rome, May 14, 1904). ↩

28. This reading of Greek tragedy is mostly Hegel’s, built around Antigone. See G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford, 1975). ↩

29. E4P52S. The Latin is acquiescentia in se ipso, translated as self-esteem or self-contentment. ↩

30. E5P8 and E5P11. ↩