Till Death

Love in the slow, horizontal fall of time

Featuring Sherry Ning in the Fiery Philosophies series.

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SPRING, 2026.

The jewelry designer spun her laptop around to show Ben and me a mock-up of what our wedding bands will look like. “See, this is a size 4.25, three-millimeter band—you don’t have a ton of space.” I studied the narrow strip of gold on my finger and brainstormed what to inscribe on the inside of our rings, searching for a phrase brief enough to fit and large enough to contain my feelings.

At first, I really liked “Till Death” because of what it means: death is yoked to love. Italian literature likes to play with the words amore, love, and morte, death, because they can’t be talked about separately. The wedding vows we've grown so used to hearing, 'Till death do us part', ache all the same. This is what Kafka meant by, “the meaning of life is that it ends.”

But death doesn’t just give meaning to life; it tells us the very material of it: love. It’s why Titanic and Romeo and Juliet have become archetypes of I’d-die-for-you romance. It’s why Greek myths about love affairs among the immortal gods of Mount Olympus are totally boring until a mortal is involved—love can only change the course of history when one party is capable of dying and leaving the other absolutely broken (Castor and Pollux, Adonis and Aphrodite, etc.), or why Eros (Cupid), the god of love, has wings, so he could travel between the worlds of the gods and mortals—it’s no wonder being in love feels like levitating, like being divinely favored.

And this is also why the story printed on the bottom of In-N-Out’s soda cups, John 3:16, is about an immortal God who loves mortals so much that He enters their world and suffers the very death that defines them, all to be resurrected and make love the one thing stronger than the inevitability of the grave.

THE TENSION in Homer’s The Odyssey spans across time and distance: many years and the vast sea between Calypso’s island and Ithaca—home. Calypso offers Odysseus everything our handbook of compatibility tells us we should want: beauty, pleasure, comfort, exemption from the discomforts of mortality. She promises to make him immortal if he stays on the island; she represents the endless “now” that’s free from duty, politics, and decay. Yet, Odysseus sits by the sea and weeps for Penelope.

Back home, Penelope is aging. She belongs to a vulnerable kingdom overrun by suitors. Returning home and recovering a marriage pockmarked by twenty years of absence brings with it a slew of pain: shipwreck, war, trickery, wrath, bloodshed, and sorrow. Which will this Bronze Age man choose? Immortality? Or the slow, horizontal fall of time?

Odysseus chooses time. Maybe what that says about love is that it seeks a person within it. He prefers one finite woman, one challenging marriage, and one earthly home over Calypso’s wishes. After all, what is eternity without communion? Who wants to evade death if it costs us our only chance of getting what we desire the most? Do we really wish to trade our love for something vague, albeit infinite? What is abundance good for if it can’t give us the one thing that truly matters to us?

DESIRE WANTS INCARNATION. You see it in children scanning the audience for their parents’ faces during a school play, rejoicing when they see that mom and dad are present. Hearts beat with excitement when we exit the one-way doors at the airport arrival and hear a familiar voice yell out our name from somewhere in the crowd. It’s being able to tell our beloved is in the room next door, laundering, working, or doing whatever, just by their scent or the sound of their shuffling about.

We can desire bottomlessly, because love really is the most abundantly occurring natural resource, but in order to prove itself abundant, it must become tangible; it must be made mortal. Love’s inexhaustibility becomes clear only when it is threatened by death itself. Mortality is the lover’s ache: the more completely someone becomes irreplaceable to us, the more unbearable is the knowledge that a lifetime with them is still only a lifetime.

When singledom critiques the state of emergency dating culture is in, personal disappointments tend to become myths, then myths become universal laws: All men are like that. Women only want this. If he wanted to, he would. I fear that many individual cases are lost not because they’re truly beyond repair but because they’ve slipped too easily into the slimy mouth of sexual politics.

As a result, dating discourse can become bloated with discouraging statistics, monoliths, and radical views that, upon touching grass, you might notice are a narrative, not universal truth. Climbing out of this churn can be easy because much of the noise around the dating crisis remains that: noise.

I SAY THIS because no amount of information about populations can have any real connection to the desire that occurs in the singular. A statistic can describe the fate of ten thousand couples and still tell you nothing about the person sitting across from you. We love the meet-cute because of this: a phenomenon naive about the calculus of compatibility, a glimmer of life somehow existing inside a broken system that relies on filters, attachment styles, and long-term goals arranged in advance.

The entire charm of meet-cutes lies in the obvious fact that desire exists before explanation, that there is an X factor in the mysterious force of attraction that transcends what works on paper. It is, perhaps, the only time we allow another person to exist like a rare, thought-to-be-extinct individual outside the so-called dating market.

Most importantly, it tells us the reason we return to what we desire, even when it tortures us. It’s because it enchants us with the possibility that love begins in an unpredictable fall, with a weird sense that among all the people one could have met, one has met this one.

G. K. CHESTERTON famously wrote, “The shortest way of putting the problem is to ask whether being free includes being free to bind oneself. For the vow is a tryst with oneself.” The greatest use of optionality is at the moment of making a decision—it’s to be able to decide when and to whom we want to give it all up.

In a way, Calypso is a foil to Penelope: it takes the temptation of eternal youth to truly showcase what loyalty is, and when Odysseus chooses Ithaca, he’s simultaneously keeping a vow with who he was twenty years ago—the man who swore to be king, father, and husband. Calypso’s island, though idyllic, is the erasure of everything he once was: you can live forever as nobody, or die someday but be somebody.

Paradoxically, the narrowing of possibilities is the narrow door to a real life—real as in not mere imagination of what something could be but actually experiencing it for what it is. Love’s limit is the source of its seriousness. In Chesterton’s words, “Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation.” Do you want what’s imaginary and perfect, or what’s real with the chance of being good?

At the end of the day, nobody wishes to be a calculatedly chosen candidate—nobody’s knees have buckled at the question, “Will you marry me, because I find you better than all the other ones I’ve tried dating?” The meet-cute shows us that the kind of love we’re after is the kind that makes us forget that there were candidates or checkboxes at all, that the person we’re facing just does not have a replacement. We want a romantic “someone” to be singular, nonfungible, and unrepeatable, wanted for reasons that remain obscure.

IN MY “Diary of a Bachelorette,” I wrote:

What matters now isn’t perfection, but the choice to stick together—after all, isn’t that what love is? … An opportunity to fall so deeply into each other that a glimmer of paradise lost can be found by looking to your side instead of above?

Reading that now, I think that that glimmer is what mortal love is: a palimpsest of an archetypically older desire, the marriage between mortal people bearing faint traces of our appetite for the infinite. Nodding to Chesterton, C. S. Lewis wrote, “those who are in love have a natural inclination to bind themselves by promises. Love songs all over the world are full of vows of eternal constancy,” because what is art for if not to leave a record of how much they love someone long after they’re gone? Earthly love is like a kind of first draft of eternity, scribbled in perishable bodies, in which our desire for another person echoes the deeper desire for a love that even death can’t defeat.

And so, the most urgent question may also be the simplest: do you want to fall in love or not? When we stand on the brink of desire, about to fall into love with someone, we find ourselves with Odysseus on the beach of Calypso’s island, with the longing for home replaying in our hearts: we can stay forever young, plump with ideals of beauty and love, or we can build a raft and brave the sea and faithfully journey toward what our heart knows it wants, all at the risk of death.

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💌 INKWELL POETRY COLLECTION: What better way to linger on romance than through poetry? Sarah Jane Souther has curated a collection for this series from our submissions inbox. Enjoy more fiery philosophies here!

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Sherry Ning
Writer

Sherry Ning is taking a deeper look at things. She writes about experiences you’ve had but don’t know how to describe—from falling in love to the feeling of self-sabotage to the joy of boredom. Her blog lives on www.sherryning.com, and her book, The Pluri Society, is for sale on Amazon.

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📸 Photography by Elizabeth Sanders

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For more on love and incarnate living…

Every Young Man’s (Real) Battle

In a world of opinion writers be an artist

It’s a Privilege to be this Lonely