 This is the most personal article I've ever written. It's about love, and it's not meant to make you feel fuzzy inside. My goal isn't to inspire or impress you, it's to be completely honest. Four years ago, I experienced true love, and it changed my life. Anybody who has experienced it will tell you the same. It's the most profound experience that a human can have. But it isn't easy to describe. It's not simply a feeling. It's something like a state of mind. It changes how you think and how you see the world. And for me, the depth of love that I experienced was so intense, it forced me to accept the existence of God. Obviously, I'm not talking about your run-of-the-mill kind of love, the kind we have towards our favorite foods. I mean, I do love bacon, and I also love my wife. Now, why we use the same word in both circumstances I don't quite understand. While my affection for bacon runs deep, it's in an entirely different category than the love that I feel for my wife. So my wife Julia and I agreed we needed a different term to reference the profound feeling we shared for each other. When we're extremely close, we don't say I love you, we say I verb you, and it means something completely different. To verb somebody doesn't mean to like them a lot. It doesn't mean to really enjoy their company. I'm talking about a feeling so strong that it is necessarily met with a desire for commitment. It is literally impossible to verb somebody and not want to be partnered for the rest of eternity. Now, I realize this will upset people, but if you think you really, really love somebody, but don't immediately want to be committed to them for life, without even a shred of doubt, then you've not experienced true love. True love does not include even a split second of reservation, about 100% commitment to your spouse. In fact, nothing could be desired more. Now surely what I've said sounds fanciful and dramatic, incomprehensible even, and neither me nor my wife could have understood what I've just said before experiencing it directly. Neither of us thought that we would ever get married, but it happened. Don't be mistaken, all is not roses. True love is not just a fluffy feel good thing, it's utterly terrifying and painful. The life-changing beauty is coupled with extreme distress. Getting to that mental state with your partner is difficult, and maintaining it might be impossible. My wife and I undoubtedly experienced true love, but the state of mind doesn't appear to be permanent. I wouldn't say we've fallen out of love, but it does occasionally get covered up, as if we forget that we're madly in love with one another. Sometimes it gets covered for too long, and it can be hard to get back. So the purpose of this article is manyfold. I want to explain a necessary condition for experiencing true love, and how to get it back if it's lost. I also want to caution, love changes you as a person. All of your personal values immediately get upended and reordered. It's a conversion experience to such a degree that you might not even feel in control of the situation. And it's not a guaranteed thing, your love might be unrequited. Opening yourself up to true love means opening yourself up to absolute devastation, as I will explain shortly. Here is the absolutely necessary condition. Honesty. Now it's not a sufficient condition, but it is necessary. And I'm not talking about your conventional honesty. I mean, you need to be 100% honest. Not 99.9% whole a little back honest. And that might sound easy, but it's probably one of the most difficult things a human being can do. Every single one of your secrets must be exposed to your partner, all of them. The darkest thoughts, feelings, stories, hatreds, jealousies, insecurities, lies, pettiness, desires, every last one. It's a degree of honesty that most people don't have with themselves. The experience is of complete naked vulnerability. The purpose is to answer this question. Who are you? Really. Humans have this incredible ability to wear masks. At best, we present a sort of true version of ourselves to the world, but behind all the walls and artificial rubato, there's a real person. There's an extremely sensitive human being. For most of our lives, I think everybody, and myself included, forgets this. We suppress it and start to believe our masks. In my case, before falling in love, I was extremely detached for the reality of my emotions. Not in a dramatic way, not because I was in a bunch of pain or anything. I simply overlooked them in the midst of my philosophic journey and I doubt I would have ever rediscovered them without Julia. If you can't be completely honest with yourself, much less with your partner, then you cannot experience true love. If you aren't real, then your partner won't be able to love you because they won't know who you actually are. Any affection that they have towards your masks will never reach you because their feelings are based on an illusion. Rather than expose yourself, the desire is to shield parts of you, to wear at least a fig leaf or some kind of makeup. But to the extent that you do hide parts of yourself, if you have one single wall, you have necessarily shielded yourself from true love. So if you do manage to get to this degree of honesty, you'll discover that humans have some shitty qualities and some really shameful stories. This is true about all of us. If you've lived long enough, you've done or at least thought some very terrible things. And chances are you've buried truths about yourself. I've done some awful things in my life and they were coupled with lies and manipulation and extreme selfishness. My wife knows the truth that parts of me are ugly and I know the same is true about her. We were fortunate enough to share these truths before we got married, but the opportunity still exists for any couple, regardless of their marital status. So what can you expect upon revealing yourself? Pain, a lot of it, assuming that you're a regular human being who's kept something from your partner. You feel pain for several reasons. First, the simple facts of the situation. Maybe you've done something behind their back or vice versa, which can feel devastating. Maybe you realize that you've been lying to yourself, perhaps for years, which might cause pain, shame, confusion, maybe embarrassment. You also feel pain because you've hurt your partner, perhaps deeply. You feel more pain because you've been keeping secrets from them. Your internal life has known the truth, but you've lied about it and for whatever reason. It causes even more pain because if you're in this fragile state, you don't have any walls to protect you. If you're being real, then you see the reality of the circumstance. You've lied and hurt somebody and you've probably been lied too. When you are in such a vulnerable state, your partner can completely crush you. You've given them a direct route to your heart. And I don't mean crush you a little. I mean they can take your heart and smash you into smithereens. They can reject you, mock you, hate you, hurt you, or perhaps even most painful, lie to you. When you're deeply honest about somebody and they lie to you in return, either about themselves, about you, about what they've done, thought, felt, etc. It's devastating. You feel stupid. You must really trust somebody to share yourself with them. And when it's not reciprocated, it's like throwing yourself in front of an oncoming train. And there's no way to tell how your partner will react. Perhaps they've never felt so much pain before. Perhaps they feel crushed by the truth. They might be angry at you. They may ball up in the corner and cry for a week. They could want to spend time away from you or vice versa. I don't know and neither do you. That's part of the difficulty. Will you be able to trust each other in the future, given the truth about who you are and what you've done? You can't know until you have the conversation. If it works out, if you both can share the truth with each other, then you have an opportunity to build a relationship based on real trust and serious vulnerability. I trust my wife and it's possible that I could be horribly taken advantage of. I'm always running the risk of looking like and feeling like a complete fool. I am aware of this and so is my wife. She bears a huge responsibility for not taking advantage of my trust. And knowing that somebody else trusts you is terrifying. If you screw up, then you're stuck in a catch 22. Either you immediately confessed to that person and it hurt them in the process, or you suppress the truth which will end up hurting them more in the future. The longer you go without getting back to a clean slate, the longer you've essentially lied to each other. This is why the mental state of true love seems temporary. It's extremely fragile, like an egg which breaks at the first scratch. To maintain it, it takes a lot of conversation and honesty and you must be prepared for pain. You must think about and share all the dark thoughts you've had, the selfish, manipulative lies and half lies you've told. You must get real with yourself. Have you wondered if you made a mistake getting together? Do you honestly enjoy your partner, your kids? Have you been unfaithful either explicitly or in your thoughts? Are you insecure with your own self? Have you lied to yourself so much that you don't even know who's under the mask? Remember, to feel love you must expose whoever you really are, ugly as it might be. There is not one inch of wiggle room to say, well I'll hold just a little back just in case. You can't even allow .0001% of yourself to be walled off or guarded. Now I should imagine the prospect of true love sounds a bit scarier, especially if you have a tendency to be dishonest. What happens when you're completely naked in front of somebody and they reject you? I don't know, I imagine it would be a shattering experience on a very deep level. It is a massive risk, but the reward in my mind is nothing short of discovering the meaning of life and experiencing literal perfection on earth. Mutually shared love is the highest state of human existence. There is no deeper feeling, there's no deeper meaning. It is 100% complete, satisfying, and consuming. It leaves absolutely nothing additional to be desired. It is so perfect if you can get there that it will terrify you to think about losing it. Even if you don't reach that state, by being truthful you'll be left with a clearer picture of reality and the people in your life. If you are partnered with somebody because of illusion, then in the long run it's better to go your own ways. Living a dishonest life might be easy, but it will eat at your soul. As far as we can tell, you get one shot at life, so you might as well be truthful with yourself about it. Don't wake up when you're 80 and realize that your entire life was an act. Now I'm not making the case for love. I'm trying to show what's required to get there. Lots of honesty and lots of pain. This entire idea can be summarized in a sentence. Truth and love are inseparable. You literally cannot experience true love without completely exposing yourself. And by doing so you could end up devastated. Or you might join the small group of people who fully understand the final line of Les Miserables. When they sing, to love is to see the face of God.