Sweetbitter Love

Letting go by never letting go

A hedge fund trader taught me how to love. I had no idea what a wretched thing I was, until I met him. We met anonymously on Twitter in early-2022, love at first write. Real love, no min-maxing, no tweaking and twisting bits and pieces of your face and your body and your personality to fit some standard shell. Real love, not market logic. You’d think he’d be some Wall Street wanker, the meanest market machine of all. Always hedging, always derisking. He was ruthless at work, no doubt. His mind was a perfect terror, a Turing machine that drew derivatives from mere memory. Only I saw his tenderness, his soul that he poured into me through so many pieces of art and letters. Abstract portraits of me, lyrical little stories, handwritten Valentine’s Day cards with poetic flourish. (It’s so unfair that one person can hoard all these talents). During our breakup, I started thinking about what I must have cost him. Time he could’ve spent researching stocks that he spent on me instead. $100,000? $500,000? No, millions upon millions. He would never think this, much less say it. But I must’ve kept costing him and costing him until I couldn’t anymore, until we dissolved.

This year, I searched for art to manage the breakup, at first favoring Portrait of a Lady on Fire where two women who cannot be together remake Orpheus and Eurydice in their image. In the Greek myth, Orpheus descends into the Underworld to retrieve his beloved Eurydice on one condition: he must not look back at her. Just before he breaches the surface, he turns around. A mistake? Maybe. Or maybe Orpheus wanted to look. He wanted the memory over the living reality, and made the poet’s choice, not the lover’s. All good breakups are some flavor of the poet’s choice. We clawed our way through a long, slow, mutual ending, calling it “living in copeland,” the delusional liminal space where we pretended that he hadn’t changed his mind about having children. I think I took it especially hard because, between the two of us, he was always the one so certain about our future, while I was less sure. From the very start, he said we’d always be together. When I had doubts and whispered “Turn around and look at me,” he refused. But I should’ve known better. After all, a trader’s mind cannot see absolutes, only probabilities. He was 99% sure we’d get married, 1% sure he didn’t want children. The percentages flipped slowly, then all at once. One day, he honored my voice. He turned around to look at me one last time. And that was that. Love was behind us. Gone. Orpheus with his lyre in the land of the living, Eurydice lost to the hollow Underworld.

I searched for more means to cope and seized upon a different piece of Greek mythos, love interpreted in Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson. As Sappho says, Eros is glukupikron: bittersweet, better translated as sweetbitter. It lives in paradox, in the shape of a triangle between the lover, beloved, and the distance between them. Love is a contradictory desire, like hunger. Once you eat the food, you cease to be hungry. Once the person you love becomes one with you, then they cease to exist as a desired other. “Whoever desires what is not gone? No one.” There’s science behind this ancient instinct; desire needs distance to stay alive.¹ Collapse distance into familiarity, and love dies a thermal death: no risk, no novelty, no imagination. Collapse the triangle, and Eros suffocates in safety. Only in the absent-present can Eros breathe. This interpretation comforted me, knowing that I keep him by not having him, that I can make both the lover’s choice and the poet’s choice at the same time.

I started seeing this impossible triangle everywhere. Physics is built on one, too: quantum mechanics explains the microscopic, Newtonian manages the macroscopic, and relativity rules the cosmic. Each reflects reality, but there is no theory of everything. Our cosmos lives in a tension no one can fully resolve. Love, like our universe, is held together not by union, but by the distance that keeps everything from collapsing into nothing. Recall a classic physics puzzle: when three celestial bodies interact, their gravitational forces create chaotic orbits so complex they cannot settle into a stable pattern. In Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, three suns keep destroying all life on a planet they orbit. We had discussed the series at length, but we never realized that we lived on that planet, that our love was also a three-body problem. Our histories, our creations, and our distance. Lover, beloved, and the distance between us.

The First Sun is History

“Your story begins the moment Eros enters you.”

Socrates, as quoted by Anne Carson in Eros the Bittersweet

The past is Newtonian. Deterministic, linear, bound by rules—like memory’s fixation, like old love that keeps repeating in your mind. So I go back to the beginning, tracing my memory of his gap-toothed grin, his face winking in the twilight rain.

I knew he truly loved me only a few weeks into our relationship. One night, he suggested a magic ritual. In his hedge fund days, he was assigned all sorts of esoteric, occult books to read. A small red volume from the 1800s about energy transference sunk its claws into him. He’d used its teachings for a sick family member, and was determined to save me too. By then, I’d struggled with suicidal depression for nearly twenty years, so why not try something a little crazy? So I followed him; laid down, placed my hands right, synced my breathing with his, closed my eyes until I sunk into hypnagogia, blurring dreams with reality between his droning intonations. The next morning, he asked what color I felt. “Red,” I replied without hesitation. “A dark one.” He consulted the book again to confirm the strange oppressive hue. At the time, the only effect I felt was my love for horror dissipating; I couldn’t stomach all the glorious gore as much anymore. As for him, he was shivery by the end, and slept far longer than his normal 4-5 hours a night. Looking back, it was this ritual that kickstarted a whole slew of new behavioral changes—trying ketamine infusions, changing careers, starting therapy again—that finally killed the passive voice in my head telling me to kill myself. Looking back, he really did sacrifice his own precious life force to save me. He loved me before I could love myself. Love yourself first, says the culture. Work on yourself until you deserve love. Now I know what terrible propaganda that was. Only after being loved can you see technicolor. Only after being loved can the world crack open.

I tried my best to love him back. He too, could be difficult to love. Self-made men wear scars. Though healed, the old wounds pull and wince. Even now I feel protective of him and his past. The best way to shield him and still be truthful is to say that his brilliant mind was haunted by statistics, and that I had no magic spells to banish any of his ghosts. I couldn’t salt his earth like he did for me. Looking back, our pasts alone were set on a collision course. Yet we saw no sudden end in fire, but rather a long slow freeze. We held onto each other like ice, hoping against all hope that it would keep its perfect shape. “Ice-crystal in the hands is at first a pleasure quite novel,” Carson writes, “But there comes a point—you can’t put the melting mass down, you can’t keep holding it.” You can try to suspend time, holding both presence and absence at once. You can try to violate Heisenberg’s principle, finding a particle’s position and momentum at once. You can try to keep ice intact in a warm palm, even with the certainty of melting. That is the lover’s mistake: to think you can hold on without destroying what you love.

The Second Sun is Creation

Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.

Anne Carson in Decreation

The future is quantum. Probability, uncertainty, entanglement—the unknowable state until observed, your life branching out like Sylvia Plath’s fig tree, until you choose the path. I imagine our co-created future, the one where the market demands everything of him, the one where our children demand everything of me.

In our almost-future, he would eat the same breakfast and follow the same routine to limit distractions from the physical world. Avocado, eggs, and pomegranate seeds. A long walk. Then he would lock himself in a soft squishy box of a room and sit in perfect stillness all day, only pushing buttons to execute trades. Time collapses. He goes into his trances again, merging with the machine—a vast web of nodes, vibrating with collective energy. If he feels the right signs and feeds the right energy back, he’s rewarded. He is beyond thought, beyond reason. He is pure intuition, some preternatural feminine mystique. Nothing short of catching on fire could sever him from his cold god. To me, the market is a Lovecraftian horror, a soulless, cosmic force that punishes and rewards with unfeeling caprice. I’m just a fly caught in its web. But daily he walks willingly into its maw. Sometimes I would bring him coffee. A supplication. My offering at the altar. The coffee would run cold most days. Only at nightfall would he return to me and say what he often says: “I love the market, but the market doesn’t love me.” I love you, and you will always love the market more than me, I think, but don’t say. Perhaps I would’ve resented him for it eventually, though I don’t resent him now. How could I, staring into the face of something so resplendent? His true calling, his creation myth? I sit with this triangle: me, him, and the market. Lover, beloved, and the distance between us.

I imagine myself, too, as my opposite—a homemaking tradwife. All the sweet, warm rituals that others desire, like marriage and kids, have always felt suspicious to me. But I could change. I could convert to his religion. I could abandon the hustle and bustle of a city for rural peace and quiet. I could decorate a mansion with flourish and aplomb. I could become soft and round and pregnant. I could feed our small litter of genius children with the finest fish from Japan. I could live the fantasy life of a fantasy woman, some Substack version of Ballerina Farm. I could be his perfect muse. In this almost-future, I find my own creation myth too—my children, born from my flesh and blood. My little horrors would consume me whole, and I would welcome them with open arms. Just like that, another triangle emerges: me, him, and our children. Lover, beloved, and the distance between us.

I reached out to him once in the early summer days of 2025, asking whether we could make it work. I’d convinced myself that I saw his signs everywhere, wanting my return: his favorite number on the side of a boat in China, his math equations decorating my hotel shower walls. I’d convinced myself that I could give up everything—my city, my freedom, even my writing—for him. But he could never accept someone who extinguished her sun to spin around him. It took a gentle reminder about our diverging futures to shatter my delusion completely. He did leave me one final gift: the name of that esoteric magic ritual book. He hadn’t touched that book in over two years, but the same week he reread it, I had reached out to him again. Serendipity. Synchronicity. Quantum entanglement. “No question there’s energy beyond the scientifically explainable. Use it for good,” he wrote with a heart emoji. I wrote back, “I’ll always love you. That energy will always be there.”

The Third Sun is Distance

No one in love really believes that love will end.

Anne Carson in Eros the Bittersweet

The present is relativity. Time dilates, mass shifts, meaning warps—relativity introduces perspective, a frame of reference. Everything you see through relativity depends on who you are, when you are, where you are. I felt the geographic distance then, with him often thousands of miles away. I feel the real distance now. And with it, I’ve gained perspective. Having children was only the first fissure. From the cracks, the sweetbitter truth surfaces.

He never loved a fantasy woman, some perfect muse. He loved a hard girl from a hard house. He loved a melancholic catnapper who slowed down his heart rate and put him to rest. When he was around me, he slept more and dreamed less. He chatted with me for hours everyday, trading away his trading for the mundane—getaway vacations and warm tea on balconies. I’m his favorite drug, he always told me. A cliché. But I never got him high; I was a better downer than the best barbiturate, smoothing away his ambition like waves lapping at stone. Maybe if I could raise his pulse, stir his drive, ignite his chase towards the outer edge of his brilliance instead of being a relaxing comfort…maybe we could’ve been something. But he needs a wife, not a sedative. And I need to be more than a drug, more than a resting place, more than a muse.

For three years, he reminded me that I was special, though I never believed him. I always thought him so remarkable, while I was average at best. Worse, I casted myself as a malefic force, a black hole that somehow seized a star. He’s destined to challenge the greatest traders of all time, Soros and Simons and every titan in history. But I didn’t think he could become peerless with me by his side; he would only circle the drain. From afar, I imagined people seeing his light spin around my darkness, spiraling and spiraling, never becoming a great blazing sun. And so I flung him back out into the stars, into the dark forest. Watched him touch escape velocity, where I cannot reach him.

That was the story I believed when I saw no light of my own. But now I know that I was never some cold gravity well. I didn’t pull him down; I held him steady. I was the one place where his mind could sleep. He was extraordinary—but I could become extraordinary, too. I only started writing because of our breakup. Only now am I beginning to burn. I too, am a living star, not some dark eternal.

So we had to part. In all universes we would’ve parted in some way. Whether divorce or sickness or death, I tell myself that I saved the agony for earlier rather than later; I tell myself that reality would have ground us to dust, made us into something sullied and sordid. He called me coral cat, an affectionate term for how often I sleep, but my sleepiness he found so charming could turn into laziness he despises. I called him whiplash, an affectionate term for how often he changes his mind, but his openness I found so charming could turn into flightiness I despise. We could have ruined each other. Instead, we loved each other enough to spare us the slow, unremarkable death of being forced into impossible shapes.

From within letters, Eros acts / Eros…can teach you the real nature of what is inside you.

Anne Carson in Eros the Bittersweet

My life can be split into two parts: before him and after him.

Before him, I knew little of love. I’d collected other people’s definitions of it over the years: memes and pop songs, bell hooks’ idea that love is action and not a feeling, Zizek’s claim that if you have reasons to love someone then you don’t really love them. He showed me an unreasoned, nearly unconditional love. Love as magic rituals and writing—though I repeat myself. Writing is ritual, after all. In copeland, he hand-wrote me a breakup note, read aloud one last short story inspired by us, and begged me to share my writing with him too. I refused. I didn’t want to tether him to me through my new medium, my new lifeline. If only he knew how many private letters I wrote to him, how many public pieces I wrote about him,² how I named my publication after a term he taught me. If only he knew how his absence threads through me, that everything I do is still stitched with his color.³

After him, I know that writing is the truest form of love, an “alphabetic relic” that keeps distance intact so that I can hold without having. As Carson writes, “the written word fixes living things in time and space, giving them the appearance of animation although they are abstracted from life and incapable of change.” Writing is a technology for sustaining the paradox, for keeping the in-between alive between lover and beloved. Writing is the lover’s choice and the poet’s choice at once. Writing is the ice in my hand that never melts. Writing is the triangle that always resolves. In the third and last book of the Three-Body Problem series, the unsung protagonist writes his love into three fairytales and flings them across light-years, knowing he will never stand beside his beloved. His unreturned love becomes the key to cosmic salvation. I understand this hero perfectly now. Writing is my transmission across the distance, my fairytale where impossible geometry is possible. Writing this, it’s almost like we’re still together, saving the universe.

I accept that I can only let him go by never letting go. Love has always left its unique footprint on me; I have never stopped loving any of my former loves. And this was my greatest love by far, with its tensile beauty of a spider’s web, intact only when untouched. His love, the tender, sweetbitter revelation that I was not meant to live without love, doesn’t vanish just because our future did. I am taking his love and feeding it back to myself. I am becoming the person who can stand in presence, not just in the absent-present. And one day, I’ll offer an unreasoned, nearly unconditional love to someone who wants my strange, daily weather. Through all of it, the writing must go on. It is the only place where holding on and letting go weave the same thread, the one planet whose three suns spin in a stable orbit, the closest thing I have to a theory of everything.

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Thank you for the ideation/feedback:

Matthew Beebe, Michael Dean, CansaFis Foote, Dolores Lucero, Promise Tewogbola, Ved Shankar, and Anthony Marigold

1. Esther Perel, a psychotherapist with expertise on relationships, writes about this in Mating in Captivity

2. I adapted a Note into the second part of this essay

3. Adapted from my favorite W.S. Merwin poem:

Your absence has gone through me

Like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its color.