Why Love Needs No Reason

Why the deepest commitments in life — to people, to craft, to ideas — resist justification. And why that’s not a flaw.

***

Last spring, after a late roll at the gym, a friend asked me why I train. Not casually, the way people ask about hobbies over coffee, but with genuine confusion, the way you might ask someone why they keep returning to a place that has hurt them. I had been limping for two weeks. My fingers were taped. I had a bruise across my ribs that made it painful to sleep on my left side. He looked at me the way a doctor looks at a patient who refuses treatment.

I opened my mouth and the words collapsed.

Not because I had nothing to say. Because everything I had to say was wrong. I could feel the answer in my chest, dense and certain, the way you feel the floor beneath you before you open your eyes in the morning. But the moment I tried to translate that feeling into language, it cheapened. Every sentence I reached for was a postcard of a cathedral. Accurate, technically. A lie, spiritually.

I said something about discipline. Something about the community. He nodded politely, and I could see he had filed it under "things Fardin does that Fardin cannot explain." His conclusion, that the inability to explain indicated an absence of meaning, was the most common and most devastating error a rational person can make.

## The Paradox of Justified Love [#the-paradox-of-justified-love]

There is a parlor game that masquerades as depth. Someone asks, "Why do you love them?" and you are expected to answer. You reach for qualities. She is kind. He understands me. We share the same values. The answers feel true in the moment of saying them, the way a photograph feels true when you first look at it. Then the questioning continues, and the photograph starts to curl at the edges.

You love her because she is kind. But kindness is not rare. Thousands of people are kind to you in small ways every week. You do not love them. So kindness is not the reason. It is a quality you have selected after the fact to explain a commitment that preceded any quality you could name. Understanding, shared values, physical attraction: the same logic dissolves each of them in turn.

Strip the reasons away, one by one. Remove them the way you would remove scaffolding from a finished building, and watch what happens. If the building stands, what you are looking at is love. If it collapses, what you had was never a building at all. It was scaffolding pretending to be a structure, a contract dressed in the language of devotion.

Every reason you give for loving someone is simultaneously an argument against your love. If you love her because she is kind, your love is hostage to her kindness. The moment she is unkind, and she will be, because she is human and humans are unkind on Tuesdays and when they are tired and when the weight of being someone's reason for existing becomes too much to carry, your love faces a crisis it was never built to survive. The reason that was supposed to be the foundation turns out to be the fault line.

Dostoevsky understood this. In *The Brothers Karamazov*, a woman confesses to Father Zosima that the more she loves humanity in the abstract, the more she despises individual human beings. She can love the idea of a person. She cannot love the person who snores, who forgets, who disappoints her on an ordinary Wednesday for no dramatic reason at all. Zosima delivers the verdict I have never been able to forget: "Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams."

Love in dreams is love with reasons, the love you describe on dating profiles and in wedding toasts. Love in action is what remains when the reasons have all failed their auditions, when the person in front of you is simply there, and you discover that your commitment to them has nothing to do with any quality they possess and everything to do with a decision you made at a depth you cannot access with language.

## What the Stoics Got Wrong [#what-the-stoics-got-wrong]

Marcus Aurelius, writing to himself in a tent at the edge of the Roman Empire, developed a philosophy of love that has seduced twenty centuries of readers. Love, but hold loosely. Appreciate what you have while accepting its impermanence. When your child is sick, kiss her forehead and whisper to yourself: tomorrow she may die. Not as cruelty, but as preparation. Emotional risk management elevated to spiritual practice.

I spent years admiring this. Marcus Aurelius seemed like the adult in the room, the man who had solved the problem of attachment by refusing to attach fully to anything.

Then I started training, and I learned he was wrong. Not about loss. About commitment.

On the mat, when you attempt a submission, there is a moment where the technique lives or dies. Not the moment of entry. The moment of commitment. The fraction of a second where you have positioned everything correctly and the only thing left is to close the distance between attempt and execution. In that fraction, you must commit your entire body. Hips, shoulders, grip, breath, weight. Everything.

If you hedge, if you keep an escape route open, the technique fails. Not because you lacked skill. Because commitment is not a supplement to technique. It is the technique. The half-committed armbar does not become a cautious armbar. It becomes no armbar at all. The mechanics require totality or they require nothing.

Marcus Aurelius would have you love your daughter while whispering that she might die. This is the philosophical equivalent of attempting an armbar while keeping your hips open for the escape. It feels wise. It is a guarantee of failure dressed in the language of preparation. The daughter does not receive a father's love. She receives a father's hedge.

Nietzsche had a better instinct. Amor fati. Love of fate. Not the good parts. Not on the condition that fate cooperates with your preferences. Love of fate as it is, including the parts that break you. Nietzsche did not say: love fate because it makes you stronger. He said: love fate, period. The "because" would ruin it.

Rilke, in the *Letters to a Young Poet*, put it more gently, but the core was the same. He told the young poet Franz Kappus that the task of a human life is not to seek answers to the great questions but to live them. To inhabit them the way you inhabit a room, not trying to escape through the window of an answer but sitting with the question until, someday, perhaps without noticing, you have lived your way into the answer. The Stoic says: prepare for loss by holding loosely. Rilke says: live so deeply inside your commitments that loss, when it comes, finds something worth destroying.

I know which one I want to be.

## Kierkegaard's Leap [#kierkegaards-leap]

God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah and sacrifice him. Not as punishment. Not as a test where the teacher already knows the answer. As a demand without justification, a command that contradicts everything God has previously promised, issued to a man who has built his entire life on those promises.

Kierkegaard spent an entire book, *Fear and Trembling*, circling this story the way a man circles a fire that is too hot to approach and too bright to look away from. What was Abraham thinking on the walk up the mountain? Not what was he feeling. What was he *thinking*?

Kierkegaard's answer is the most honest thing I have ever read in philosophy: Abraham was not thinking. Not because he was stupid. Not because he was fanatical. Because he had arrived at a place where thought could not follow. Reason had carried him to the edge of the cliff, had catalogued every argument for and against what he was about to do. And then reason stopped. The cliff edge was its boundary, and beyond it was something that reason could name but not enter: faith.

The knight of faith looks like everyone else. He goes to work. He eats dinner. But inside, he has committed himself to something he cannot justify, not out of ignorance but out of a full and devastating awareness that justification is not available to him. The leap is not the absence of reason. It is what happens when reason completes itself, reaches its own limit, and discovers that the territory beyond is not empty but full of something it cannot name.

This is what love is. The commitment you make when every reason has been examined and found insufficient, when the rational thing to do would be to walk away, and you stay. Not because you have found a reason the analysis missed. Because the analysis was never the right tool for the job.

Rumi knew this eight centuries earlier. "Reason is powerless in the expression of love." Scholars have spent centuries trying to figure out whether this was mysticism or philosophy or poetry, as though the sentence needed to be filed in the correct drawer before it could be true. It is true in every drawer. It is true on the mat and in the text editor and in the conversation at two in the morning when someone you love asks you why, and you cannot answer, and the inability to answer is not a failure of your love but the most precise testimony to its depth.

## The Cost of Hedging [#the-cost-of-hedging]

I want to be specific about what hedged love looks like, because it does not announce itself. It disguises itself as wisdom, as maturity, as emotional intelligence. It speaks the language of self-care and healthy boundaries and reasonable expectations. And it hollows out everything it touches.

The hedged friend is always available but never vulnerable. He will meet you for coffee and listen to your problems with genuine attention but will never tell you his own. He keeps one foot out the door. Not dramatically. In the things he does not say. In the way he is always, always fine.

The hedged developer keeps an exit strategy from every project. Picks technologies not because they are the best tool for the problem but because they are the most portable, the most resume-friendly. He is not building something. He is maintaining optionality. And optionality, pursued as a terminal value, is the enemy of everything that matters.

The hedged sparring partner never fully commits to the sweep. Seventy percent of his body, thirty percent in reserve. The sweep never lands. Not because the technique is wrong, but because the technique requires a body that has decided, fully, that this sweep is happening, and a body holding thirty percent back has made no such decision.

These are not cautious people. Caution is a tactical decision made in service of a larger commitment. The cautious general retreats from one battle to win the war. These people have no war. They have only an endless series of small retreats, each one rational, each one defensible, each one removing them further from the possibility of total investment in anything at all.

Simone Weil understood this. In *Gravity and Grace*, she distinguished between attachment that binds you to the beloved as a possession, and attention: pure, undivided, selfless seeing. The kind that does not ask what the object can do for you but simply sees it, fully, without the filter of your own needs and fears. This attention is the opposite of attachment. It is love freed from the gravity of self-interest, and it requires a totality of commitment that the Stoics would have found terrifying.

You cannot give this kind of attention while hedging. Seventy percent of attention is distraction with a generous self-assessment.

## The Things Before Reasons [#the-things-before-reasons]

I train because I train.

I wrote that sentence in the first version of this essay, and it is the only sentence I kept, because it is the only one that was already true. Everything else was explanation, context, scaffolding. This sentence is the building.

I did not arrive at training through a cost-benefit analysis. Those calculations can be performed. They have been performed, by actuaries and sports scientists and people who write self-improvement articles for websites that measure everything. The calculations are not wrong. They are irrelevant. They describe the phenomenon the way a chemical analysis describes a meal. Accurate. Entirely beside the point.

The first time I was choked unconscious in training, I drove home with a feeling I could not name for three days. It was not fear, though fear was part of it. It was not exhilaration, though exhilaration was part of it. It was the feeling of having encountered something real, something that could not be negotiated with or reframed or optimized away. The mat had tested me in a language that did not use words, and I had answered in that same language, and the conversation had been more honest than any conversation I had ever had in a classroom or a meeting or a late-night argument about philosophy. My body knew something my mind was still weeks away from articulating: this is where I belong. Not because of the reasons. Before the reasons.

This is what I mean by pre-rational. Not irrational. Not anti-rational. Pre-rational. The commitment exists in a layer of experience that is older and deeper than the framework of justification. It is the layer where a mother reaches for her child before she has decided to reach. Where a musician's fingers find the chord before the theory names it. Where the words of a poem arrive in the mouth whole, before the conscious mind has approved them. Reason is not excluded from this layer. It is simply not sovereign there. It is a guest, not the host.

Rilke told the young poet: "Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." This is not advice about patience. It is advice about the proper relationship between living and thinking. The things worth doing are not the things you arrive at through argument. They are the things you were already doing before the argument began, the things that were true about you before you had words for them, the things that would survive the destruction of every reason you have ever given for them.

I write code because writing code is how I think. Not a metaphor. A description. The act of translating intention into syntax, of taking a vague architecture that exists only in feeling-space and making it precise enough for a machine to execute, is the closest I come to understanding what I actually believe about how things should work. I do not write code and then understand. I understand by writing code. The activity and the comprehension are the same event, and if you asked me to justify the hours, I could give you answers about career and craft and contribution, and all of them would be true, and none of them would be the truth.

## The Weight of Your Own Hedging [#the-weight-of-your-own-hedging]

I did not write this essay to make an argument. Arguments are for things that can be decided by evidence and logic, and the territory I am trying to describe is precisely the territory where evidence and logic have done their work and stepped aside. I wrote this essay because I believe, with a certainty I cannot defend, that most of the people reading it are hedging.

Not dramatically. Quietly. In the small ways that compound across a lifetime until one morning you wake up and realize that you have never been fully committed to anything, that every relationship and every project and every belief you hold has a back door built into it, that you have spent your life accumulating options and exercising none of them.

You have a friend you have not called in months, because calling would require a vulnerability you have not budgeted for this week. You have a project you believe in but have not started, because starting would mean committing to something that might fail, and you have arranged your life so that failure is always theoretical. You have someone you love, and you have not told them, because saying the words would collapse the quantum state of your affection into something definite, something that could be rejected, something that would cost you the comfortable ambiguity of almost.

I know this because I have done all of it. I am not writing from a position of mastery. I am writing from a position of recognition. The mat taught me what full commitment feels like in my body, and once you have felt it there, you cannot help but notice its absence everywhere else. The feeling of a fully committed sweep, where your hips and shoulders and grip and intention are all moving in the same direction with nothing held in reserve, is so different from a hedged attempt that they might as well be different activities. And once you have felt that difference on the mat, you start to feel it in your friendships. In your work. In the way you love.

Kierkegaard wrote that the knight of faith makes two movements. The first is infinite resignation: the acceptance that what you love may be taken, that the reasons for your commitment may all prove false. The second movement is the one Kierkegaard himself admitted he could not make, could only describe from the outside with the longing of a man pressing his face against a window. The second movement is: you commit anyway. Not despite the risk. Not because the expected value is positive. You commit because commitment is not a response to certainty. It is a response to something older and deeper than certainty, something that has no name in philosophy because philosophy is the discipline of naming, and this thing dissolves under the pressure of being named.

I train because I train. I write because I write. I love the people I love because I love them, and if you asked me for a reason, I could give you a hundred, and every single one would be a lie, not because the qualities I would name are not real, but because listing them would imply that my love is a conclusion derived from premises, when it is in fact a premise from which everything else in my life is derived.

The things worth doing are the things you would do even if you could never explain why. Not because explanation is impossible. Because explanation, applied to things of this depth, is a kind of betrayal. It takes something whole and breaks it into parts and says, "See? This is what it is." But the whole was always more than the sum, and the act of breaking it was the act of losing the very thing you were trying to show.

Commit to something. Not because it makes sense. Not because you have a backup plan. Commit the way you commit to a sweep on the mat: with everything, all at once, nothing held in reserve. Feel the terror of that. Feel how alive you are in the moment of total investment, how the world sharpens into focus the way it never does when you are hedging.

This is not recklessness. Recklessness is commitment without awareness. What I am describing is commitment with full awareness, commitment that knows the cost and does not flinch.

Love needs no reason. Not because love is blind. Because love sees further than reason can follow, into a territory that reason maps as empty but that is, in fact, the fullest place a human being can stand.