The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets out in classic triangulation:

—Love as Union

—Love as Valuing

—Love as Robust Concern

I recognize, from my Western philosophical formation, the triad of eros, agape, philia. I absorbed it as lust, altruism, friendship, often wondering in the intervening years how much damage that taxonomy, trivialized by time and lack of attention, has done.

The first philosopher and I never recovered from a betrayal. I succeeded, with the second, in transforming eros into philia, or finding the philia in eros—prying it out, over time. I sent him the syllabus to Love and he sent it back from his university post, annotated and marked. Love, stained already by Authority, History, Trust.

I messaged the list:

“Loves, I still haven’t met all of you in person, and I regret the demise of the IRL sessions. I did share the syllabus with my love philosopher, as requested. Annotations forthcoming. Yours, E.” This missive earned a single black heart from S, one of the members of Love I’d never met. I jolted when I saw their heart, then I liked it back.

We are not post-gender, but when it comes to names and pronouns—this decision predated my invitation to the group—Love tends toward the least binding. (This was explained to me as an experiment, a gesture.) On the list we are capital letters; we are all they/them.

Picture this against a backdrop of shift, a ground of categorical pause. Picture the clients: a husband and a wife, for instance. Their marriage has ended, something new has taken its place, within (provisionally, at least) the same walls. He walks around the house smiling for the first time in years. She retreats to her corner, begins the process of cleaning up and clearing out. They sleep separately, better than well. They put their arms around each other several times a day. Sometimes, for no reason but because they want to, they fuck.

(Is the story of the husband and the wife mine to tell? Does it preserve confidentiality to replace names with roles, details with abstractions? Does reducing it to gestures honor the contract, or break it?)

I jolted at S’s heart “for no reason.” Does it follow that I jolted because I wanted to?

The style of mediation I’m learning, have been learning, depends on the ability of the mediator to draw out unspoken needs from each party, to go beyond the surface narrative (“the conflict”) to find out what the right brain knows. The phrase used in the Manual is the story beneath the story.

You could say the mediator shares some traits with the therapist. According to the Argentine analyst, therapeutic treatment depends on love being present—if not mutual then at least unidirectional, from therapist to client. This love, the analyst admits, can take effort. And isn’t always possible to achieve.