Love as surrender

 Weakness disguises itself as choice, and we rarely spot the difference until we're already committed. Marguerite Yourcenar's claim that love punishes us for failing to stay alone hints at something most people sense but can't quite articulate -that entering into love requires a kind of defeat, a lowering of the defences we've built to protect ourselves. It's not romantic, and it's not meant to be. She's suggesting that love is evidence of our inability to remain sufficient on our own.

The statement feels almost cruel because it suggests that love emerges from a shortcoming. We fall in love because we can't help it, because solitude becomes intolerable, because the self alone doesn't feel like enough. And once we've admitted that to ourselves, once we've shown that vulnerability - we're exposed. The other person knows we need them, and that knowledge changes the entire dynamic. We're no longer negotiating from a position of wholeness.  We're negotiating from a position of necessary dependence and that’s the punishment Yourcenar seems to be pointing at.

What makes this perspective worth thinking about is that it runs counter to nearly every cultural story we're told about love. We're encouraged to believe that loving someone is an overflow, a surplus of feeling that we're fortunate enough to possess and share. But Yourcenar, writing in the mid-twentieth century as a woman who lived much of her life outside conventional domesticity, was open to a different possibility: that love often reveals deficit rather than abundance. She'd witnessed how women especially were positioned as incomplete without romantic partnership, and how readily they accepted that incompleteness as natural rather than constructed.

There's a harshness in Yourcenar's statement that seems worth defending against the softening impulse. She says love is punishment. Punishment implies consequence for a failure, for not meeting some standard. Her standard here is self-sufficiency, and by that measure, anyone who loves has already failed. They've been tried and found wanting in their ability to exist alone.

This echoes something the philosopher Simone Weil would articulate around the same period, though through a different lens. For Weil, we must be willing to be radically alone in order to think clearly, to resist the gravitational pull of collective opinion and desire. Weil saw this capacity for solitude as essential to spiritual and intellectual integrity. Yourcenar, less concerned with spirituality perhaps, was interested in the psychological mechanism at work. For her, love doesn't happen between two self-possessed individuals who happen to choose each other. It happens when two people who've proven inadequate to solitude recognise something in each other that promises to fill the gap.

The implications of this don't settle neatly. It doesn't mean love is therefore meaningless or should be rejected, Yourcenar is suggesting we might need to stop pretending it's something other than what it is. We don't love primarily because another person is exceptional. We love because we're not sufficient, and because the discomfort of that insufficiency becomes unbearable. The other person is partly a solution to a problem we have with ourselves, and partly a distraction from it. These things coexist in most love, whether we acknowledge them or not.

Yourcenar wrote this in observation, the way someone might describe the mechanics of a system they've studied carefully. And that tone, clear-eyed without being bitter, might be the most honest response to her claim. Love will punish us because we've already admitted we can't be alone. We've already lost the game. The only question left is whether we can look at that loss without the usual romantic dressing, without asking it to mean something other than what it is.

© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026.