I’m private when it comes to love.
Luckily, I can say a lot through the piano and still keep some mystery. The piano allows that. It reveals without exposing. It touches without forcing its way in.
Love is everywhere, and it explains everything. A lack of love in childhood that we go searching for as adults. A hunger for recognition. The desire to avenge a broken heart. The will to build, to grow, to keep improving no matter what within a relationship we’ve committed to. Love is something each of us claims in our own way, something we interpret through our lives and our most intimate experiences. That’s what makes communication in a relationship so important, and so difficult at the same time.
Two people can love each other sincerely and still fail to understand one another. One gives, the other doesn’t know how to receive. One waits, the other doesn’t know how to come closer. One asks for words, the other offers silence. And silence, in love, is the most dangerous ground for interpretation. We project our fears onto it, along with our old wounds. We turn the absence of an answer into an answer. We build entire conclusions out of nothing.
Some people love by giving everything, as if pouring an entire ocean into someone else’s hands. And when those hands can’t hold it, when the other steps back under the weight of what they’re being given, the one who gives is left alone with their generosity. Exhausted from offering what was never asked for. Hurt by having revealed too much. No one teaches us this. No one teaches us the right measure in love. No one tells us when to give, when to hold back, when to leave.
And then there are those who want to love but don’t know how. It isn’t coldness or indifference. It’s an inability to find the right gesture. The feeling is there, but somewhere between the heart and its expression, something locks. Fear of doing it wrong. Fear of opening a door you won’t be able to close again. Fear that once the other has seen what’s inside, they will decide to leave.
Maybe that is the true drama of love: the struggle to translate your feelings into the other person’s language. We talk about love as if there were a manual, as if loving were a skill you master with practice. In reality, we enter a relationship each carrying our own grammar, our own logic, our own definitions. What one person calls love, the other calls dependence. What one person calls freedom, the other calls abandonment.
Do we have the patience to learn the other person’s language? Do we keep giving what the other is unable to receive, or do we finally give ourselves what we had been waiting for from them? We can point the way, offer landmarks, find the words. But in the end, the other person is the one who has to walk the path. And at the same time, they do what they can with what they know. And sometimes, it still isn’t enough.
Next month, you’ll hear a piece on my album that carries these questions. It’s called How To Love. It captures that tension between two people who sincerely want to love each other, and the difficulty of actually getting there. It’s a piece about the effort love requires. About that conversation almost everyone has had at least once, when you realize that wanting to love is not enough, you still have to learn how.
Sincerely,
Sofiane Pamart
✨ Lire cette publication en français ici → Piano Scenes (FR)
Quite an analysis! How articulate is that!
Beautiful message thank you