themarginalian.org · 7 hours ago

How to Fall in Love Better: a Field Guide to Enlightened Enchantment – the Marginalian

Drawing on anthropologist Patrick Curry's *Art and Enchantment*, Maria Popova traces the distinction between the loves that diminish us and the loves that make us more real - not through romantic idealism, but through the harder, stranger truth that genuine enchantment is something that happens *to* a person, not something they engineer. "Enchantment is not something you do; it's something that happens to you," Curry writes, and in that surrender lies the difference between possession and wonder. True love, on this account, is not a feeling to be bottled or secured but an ongoing encounter with another's irreducible mystery - closer to the musician's relationship with music, always exceeding the grasp that would contain it. What the essay quietly reveals is that our deepest capacity for connection depends not on will or want, but on the willingness to remain open to what cannot be commanded - to let another person stay, as Nick Cave says of his wife of three decades, "as much a mystery to me now as when I first saw her."