Emotions are weather; they arrive, occupy, pass. The feelings of love (warmth, longing, tenderness, joy) are weather too, and they come and go even in the truest love, as every long marriage knows. But love itself is not on that list. Love is the seeing that the other is not other — and a seeing is not a mood. It does not require warmth to be present, the way the sun does not require a cloudless day to be the sun. At three in the morning, walking a screaming infant, feeling nothing but exhaustion and the wish to be unconscious — the walking goes on. Ask that parent if they love the child and watch the question fail. The weather is miserable; the love is the ground. It is the difference between being loved as a performance — only when warm, only when pleasing — and being loved as a fact. Children can tell them apart from the next room.

And because love is a seeing and not a sentiment, it has teeth. This is where the greeting cards must be burned. Love is not niceness. Niceness is frequently fear with good manners — the wall intact, the small someone managing its reflection, please everyone, refuse no one, be no trouble. Love, seeing clearly, sometimes says no. It tells the truth that costs the evening. It holds the boundary against the alcoholic’s third request, not because the wall is up but precisely because it is down — because flowing with the destruction would be flowing against the person. The surgeon cuts. The mother pulling her child from the road is rough. There is an anger that is love at full pressure — the prophets’ anger, flipping the cheaters’ tables in the temple courtyard — and there is a calm that is only cowardice with a spiritual accent. Do not confuse the soft with the awake. Love is exact, like light: it shows everything, warms what it touches, and does not negotiate about what is there.