"Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."

—Iris Murdoch, The Sublime and the Good

Self-will tends to center everything around the self—its needs, its story, its version of events. Other people exist within that framework, but often as supporting characters. We hear what they say through our own concerns, respond from our own fears, see them through the lens of what they mean to us. This is not cruelty. It may simply be the default.

What Murdoch calls love is the moment that default breaks—when something in another person lands as genuinely other, not just as a reflection of our own experience. That landing can feel surprising, even disorienting. It may arrive through a long conversation, or a moment of real listening, or an unexpected grief that suddenly makes someone else's grief visible. It may not be something we manufacture. But it can sometimes be something we make room for.