Chapter Seven — The Entity of Love

One evening, during a cruise, I sat on the deck with a cup of tea and watched the people around me.

The sun had already set, but the sky still kept a pale blue hue. A pleasant breeze rose from the sea, and faint music could be heard from one of the nearby halls.

Not far from me sat an elderly couple.

The woman was reading a book, and the man glanced now and then toward the horizon.

They hardly spoke.

At some point he handed her a scarf that lay on the chair beside him. She took it, wrapped it around her shoulders, and went on reading.

A few minutes later she straightened his shirt collar, in a motion so natural it seemed she had done it thousands of times.

There was nothing extraordinary there.

And yet, I kept watching them.

I wondered how many years they had known each other, what they had been through together, and how many things they already knew about each other without needing words.

And then I thought about love.

About the way we understand it in our youth, and the way that understanding changes as we grow older.

When I was young, love seemed to me connected mainly to feeling.

To excitement, to attraction, to longing, to the desire to be close.

Over the years I began to notice other things too.

The small caring, the consideration, the patience, the willingness to stay beside a person through periods that are not simple.

But are these signs of love, or perhaps only the result of a shared life?

And can one definition of love possibly fit all people and all periods of their lives?

⸻

I tried to imagine love itself as an entity I could converse with.

I thought perhaps a young figure would appear in my imagination, full of life, as we are used to seeing in films and books.

But the woman I imagined looked about my age.

She had a pleasant face and curious eyes. She did not look like someone who knew all the answers, but like someone who had already heard many questions.

In my imagination she sat down on the empty chair beside me.

"Why did I choose to imagine you this way?" I asked.

"Which way?"

"As a woman my age. Not especially young, and not very old."

"Perhaps because you are thinking of me from the place where you are today."

"That could be. At twenty I would probably have imagined you differently."

"And what has changed since then?"

I looked at the couple sitting not far from us.

"I think I once mainly sought the feeling that love arouses. Today I am also interested in what people do when the initial excitement changes."

"And do you think this change means the love has weakened?"

"Not necessarily. But sometimes it is hard to know."

"Why?"

"Because people can live together for years out of love, but also out of habit, comfort, or fear of change. From the outside it can look very similar."

"So how do you distinguish?"

"That is exactly the question I wanted to ask you."

⸻

"Can love and habit exist together?" I asked.

"Certainly. People who live together for years develop shared habits. Some are born of love, and some of life itself."

"So the fact that a person knows their partner's habits does not prove they love them."

"No. But it can be one of the ways in which love is expressed."

"And what is the difference?"

"Perhaps one should ask what stands behind the act. Is there attention to the other person in it, or is it done without thought and without connection to what the other feels?"

I looked again at the man who had handed his wife the scarf.

He had not even waited for her to ask.

"But I cannot really know that either," I said. "I see only a small gesture. I have no idea what their relationship is like."

"True."

"They might be happy together. And they might hardly have spoken to each other for years."

"Both possibilities exist."

I thought about how easily we draw conclusions about other people's relationships.

We see a couple holding hands and assume they are in love.

We see a couple sitting quietly and assume the love has faded.

But perhaps the quiet is pleasant for them.

And perhaps the held hands hide a great distance.

"So love is something hard to see from the outside," I said.

"One can see expressions of it. But not always what takes place between two people."

⸻

"I want to ask you something about the years," I said.

"I am listening."

"Does love change with time?"

"People change with time. The relationships between them change too. So it makes sense that the way they experience love would also change."

"But can one love a person for decades with the same intensity?"

"What is intensity, in your eyes?"

I pondered the question.

"Perhaps the longing when you are apart. The desire to be together. The excitement when you look at each other."

"And if a person does not feel the same excitement they felt at the beginning of the relationship, does that mean they love less?"

"Not necessarily."

"So perhaps there is more than one way to experience love."

I thought about that.

At the beginning of a relationship we are still discovering the person before us.

There is curiosity, surprises, things we do not know.

But after years, the familiarity itself becomes part of the relationship.

We know the habits, the weaknesses, the stories we have already heard many times.

"There is something beautiful about a love that knows a person over time," I said.

"What is beautiful about it, in your eyes?"

"The possibility of being with someone you do not have to explain everything to. Someone who knows your history, who was there when things changed."

"And what can be hard about it?"

"Perhaps that very familiarity. Sometimes we stop being curious about a person because we are sure we already know them completely."

"And is that possible? To know a person completely?"

I smiled.

"I am not sure we even know ourselves completely."

"So perhaps even in a long relationship there is room to keep discovering."

⸻

The breeze strengthened a little.

The woman sitting across from us closed her book and placed it on her knees. She said something to her partner, and he smiled.

I did not hear what she said.

"There is a question I think about sometimes," I said. "Is love a feeling or a choice?"

"Why do you think you need to choose between the two?"

"Because feeling is not always present at the same intensity. There are days when we are closer, and days when we are tired, troubled, or angry."

"And do you think that on such days the love disappears?"

"Not always. But one also cannot simply decide to feel love."

"True."

"So what do we choose?"

"The way we behave, the attention we give, the willingness to listen and try to understand. But even these choices do not guarantee that a feeling will remain as it was."

I thought about that.

We can choose to make an effort for a relationship, but we cannot always promise what we will feel in years to come.

"And what happens when one keeps choosing the relationship, and the other no longer does?" I asked.

"Sometimes they manage to talk about what has changed and find a new way. And sometimes not."

"So love is not always enough to stay together."

"Not always. There is also trust, respect, compatibility, life circumstances, and mutual desire."

"And can one love a person and still decide to part from them?"

"Yes."

I looked at her.

"That is an answer that is sometimes hard to accept."

"Because we are used to thinking that if love is real, it is supposed to be enough."

"And perhaps we also want to believe that love can solve everything."

"But it cannot."

⸻

"And what about loves that are not romantic?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Love for children, for parents, for siblings, for friends. Sometimes I feel we use the same word to describe very different experiences."

"That is true."

"So what do they have in common?"

"What do you find in them?"

I thought about the people I love.

About the caring for children, the bond with family, friendships built over years.

Each of these loves arouses something different in me.

"Perhaps what they share is that I truly care what happens to the other person," I said. "Not only because things affect me, but because their well-being matters to me in itself."

"That is one possible way to understand love."

"But here too there are differences. Love for a child is not like love for a partner."

"True. The responsibility is different too, and the expectations, and the way the relationship changes over the years."

"Sometimes I think that love for children teaches us something special about ourselves."

"What, for example?"

"That we can care for another person with an intensity we did not know before. To want them to be happy, even when their choices are different from what we would have chosen for them."

"And is that always easy?"

"Not at all."

I smiled.

"Sometimes precisely because we love so much, it is hard to let another person make their own choices."

"So love too must learn to change as the person before you changes."

"I think so."

⸻

"And what about self-love?" I asked.

"What makes you curious about it?"

"Sometimes I hear that a person must first of all love themselves in order to be able to love others. I am not sure that is always true."

"Why?"

"Because I know people who struggle to accept themselves, and yet are capable of loving others with a great love."

"That is certainly possible."

"So what is the place of self-love?"

"How do you understand it?"

"Perhaps the ability to treat myself with the same measure of humanity I grant to others. Not to demand of myself to be perfect in order to feel worthy."

"And what happens when you forget to do that?"

I thought of the times when I was forgiving toward the mistakes of others, but very critical toward my own mistakes.

"I am probably harsher with myself than I would be with a person I love," I admitted.

"And why?"

"I do not know. Perhaps because I know all my thoughts, even those no one else hears."

"And do you think other people do not carry within them complex thoughts, contradictions, and weaknesses?"

"Of course they do."

"So perhaps your deep familiarity with yourself is not a reason for harsher treatment."

I pondered that.

I had no immediate answer.

⸻

"There is something else I want to understand," I said quietly.

"What is it?"

"What happens to love when a person we love is no longer alive?"

The figure I imagined did not hurry to answer.

I looked at the dark sea.

"We go on loving them," I said. "But we no longer have the possibility to speak with them, to touch them, to share with them what is happening. So where is that love?"

"Where do you feel it?"

"In memories. In longing. Sometimes in something small I see or hear, that reminds me of them without my intending it."

"And does the fact that the person is gone change what you felt toward them?"

"Not necessarily. Sometimes it seems to me the love even becomes clearer, because the small everyday things that distract from it are no longer there."

"And sometimes?"

"Sometimes it becomes entangled with pain, with questions, with things we did not get to say."

"So perhaps love for a person who is gone also keeps changing within you."

"But they no longer have the possibility to change with me."

I said the sentence and felt how true it was.

That is one of the hard things about loss.

We keep living, growing older, learning new things.

And the person who is gone remains in our memory as we knew them, even if our understanding of them keeps changing.

"Can such a love come to an end?" I asked.

"For some people it stays very present for years. For others it changes form, moves away from daily life. There is no single way to experience it."

"I think I would not want it to disappear."

"So perhaps there is no need to decide now what will become of it in the future."

I was silent.

There were questions I did not want to hurry to finish.

⸻

"I want to go back to the couple sitting there," I said after a while.

The woman had already put the book in her bag, and the man stood up to bring something from the nearby table.

"What do you think of them?" Love asked.

"That I know almost nothing about them. And yet, something in their small gestures touched me."

"Why?"

"Perhaps because I love seeing people who treat each other gently. Especially after many years."

"And do you think gentleness is a sign of love?"

"Sometimes yes. But not only. A person can be gentle also out of politeness or habit."

"So what did you actually see in them?"

I looked toward them again.

"Perhaps the possibility," I said. "The possibility that two people would know each other for years, go through different periods together, and still want to sit beside each other in the evening facing the sea."

"That is a beautiful possibility."

"Yes. But I know it is not the only one."

I thought of all the forms of love I had met in my life.

Of relationships that lasted, of relationships that changed, of people who drifted apart and of those who stayed close despite the distance.

Not all of them fit the same story.

And perhaps that is why it is so hard to define love.

⸻

"I have one more question," I said.

"I am listening."

"Can love be measured?"

"In what way would you want to measure it?"

"I do not know. By the years? By what people are willing to do for each other? By the intensity of the feeling?"

"Do all these measures tell the same story?"

"No."

"So perhaps each of them describes only part of the relationship."

I thought of short loves that left a deep impression, and of long relationships in which there was not always closeness.

"Perhaps we try to measure love because we want to know that it is real," I said.

"And what would prove to you that it is real?"

I did not know how to answer.

After all, even when we love, we can be mistaken.

Even when we are loved, we do not always feel it in the same way.

And even within a close relationship, two people can understand their love differently.

"Perhaps there is no single measure," I said at last. "Perhaps one must look at the relationship itself, at what each one feels, gives, and receives."

"And what if the two people do not agree on what they see?"

"Then they probably have something to talk about."

She smiled.

And so did I.

⸻

The elderly couple stood up from their seats.

The man offered the woman his hand, and she leaned on it to rise. Then they walked together toward the lit hall.

I watched them until they disappeared from view.

I did not know how many years they had been together, whether they had had hard periods, or what each of them would tell about their life with the other.

But their small gestures had aroused many thoughts in me.

The conversation with Love had taken place only in my imagination, and yet I stayed sitting for a while longer.

I thought about the way love accompanies us through different periods of life.

Sometimes it arrives as a great excitement.

Sometimes it is built slowly, out of familiarity.

Sometimes it asks us to come closer, and sometimes precisely to know how to let go.

And there are loves that go on living within us even when the person we loved is no longer beside us.

I did not find one definition that would contain them all.

And perhaps I would not want to find one.

I rose from the chair and went to the railing.

The sea was dark, and only the ship's lights were reflected in the water.

I remembered the scarf the man had handed the woman at the beginning of the evening.

A small gesture, almost imperceptible.

I did not know what stood behind it.

But I loved the possibility that there was something of love in it.

I stayed another moment facing the sea, and then turned to go back inside.

Continue to Chapter Eight: The Entity of the Sea

© 2026 Nurit Rozenblat. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed without the author's prior written permission.