Aristophanes, in his theory of love from the Symposium, wrote that in the miraculous event that a person finds his or her other half-the same half she was ripped away from when the gods split every essence into two bodies-she knows it. “When one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself… the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment,” Aristophanes argued. “These are the people who pass their whole lives together, and yet they could not explain what they desire of one another.”

This metaphor goes deep when you think about it. Ripped edges are rarely neat and tidy, and when torn, sometimes pieces fall away. The connecting edges may never be a perfect fit for their other halves, but they’ll almost match with others. The missing bits, overlapping pieces, and mismatched patterns are made whole by our actions, and the skill of doing this is what we call the intersection of maturity and love.

Also, why does it have to be one two halves? Why can’t it be multiple pieces? That’s polyamory, or what happens when we meet multiple loves at different times in our lives.📚