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The Difficult Art of Giving Space in

Love: Rilke on Freedom, Togetherness,
and the Secret to a Good Marriage

“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond

between two people: that each should stand guard
over the solitude of the other.”

BY M A RI A P O P OVA

“Love one another but

make not a bond of love:
let it rather be a moving
sea between the shores of
your souls,” the great
Lebanese-American
poet, philosopher, and
painter Kahlil Gibran
counseled in what remains the finest advice on
the secret to a loving and lasting relationship.

Our paradoxical longing for intimacy and

independence is a diamagnetic force — it pulls
us toward togetherness and simultaneously
repels us from it with a mighty magnet that, if
unskillfully handled, can rupture a relationship
and break a heart. Under this unforgiving
magnetism, it becomes an act of superhuman
strength and self-transcendence to give space to
the other when all one wants is closeness. And
yet this difficult act may be the very thing —
perhaps the only thing — that saves the
relationship over and over.

Two decades before Gibran, at the dawn of the

twentieth century, another great poet of abiding
insight into the turbulences of the human heart
contemplated this predicament. In a letter to the
19-year-old cadet and budding poet Franz Xaver
Kappus, Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–
December 29, 1926) offered some spectacular
advice on managing the bipolar pull of
autonomy and togetherness in a way that
assures the longevity of any close bond and
protects love from self-destruction. The
passages, originally published in Rilke’s classic
Letters to a Young Poet — the record of his six-
year correspondence with Kappus, which also
gave us Rilke’s timeless wisdom on the lonely
patience of creative work, what it takes to be an
artist, why we read, and how hardship enlarges
us — appear in the wonderful poetry and prose
anthology Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties:
Translations and Considerations (public library),
selected and translated by the scholar and
philosopher John Mood.

1902 portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke by Helmuth

Westhoff, Rilke’s brother-in-law

Rilke writes to his young correspondent:

I hold this to be the highest task of a

bond between two people: that each
should stand guard over the solitude of
the other. For, if it lies in the nature of
indifference and of the crowd to
recognize no solitude, then love and
friendship are there for the purpose of
continually providing the opportunity
for solitude. And only those are the
true sharings which rhythmically
interrupt periods of deep isolation.

A century before psychologist Esther Perel

asserted in her landmark book on the central
paradox of relationships that “love rests on two
pillars: surrender and autonomy” because “our
need for togetherness exists alongside our need
for separateness,” Rilke considers how our
cultural constructs around what it means to be
coupled obstruct happiness in union:

It is a question in marriage, to my
feeling, not of creating a quick
community of spirit by tearing down
and destroying all boundaries, but
rather a good marriage is that in which
each appoints the other guardian of his
solitude, and shows him this
confidence, the greatest in his power to
bestow. A togetherness between two
people is an impossibility, and where it
seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a
narrowing, a reciprocal agreement
which robs either one party or both of
his fullest freedom and development.
But, once the realization is accepted
that even between the closest human
beings infinite distances continue to
exist, a wonderful living side by side
can grow up, if they succeed in loving
the distance between them which
makes it possible for each to see the
other whole and against a wide sky!

Therefore this too must be the

standard for rejection or choice:
whether one is willing to stand guard
over the solitude of a person and
whether one is inclined to set this
same person at the gate of one’s own
solitude, of which he learns only
through that which steps, festively
clothed, out of the great darkness.

Illustration from An ABZ of Love, Kurt Vonnegut’s

favorite vintage Danish guide to sexuality

This principle, Rilke points out, holds true not

only in marriage but in any close relationship
and any bond desired to last a lifetime:

All companionship can consist only in

the strengthening of two neighboring
solitudes, whereas everything that one
is wont to call giving oneself is by
nature harmful to companionship: for
when a person abandons himself, he is
no longer anything, and when two
people both give themselves up in
order to come close to each other,
there is no longer any ground beneath
them and their being together is a
continual falling… Once there is
disunity between them, the confusion
grows with every day; neither of the two
has anything unbroken, pure, and
unspoiled about him any longer… They
who wanted to do each other good are
now handling one another in an
imperious and intolerant manner, and
in the struggle somehow to get out of
their untenable and unbearable state
of confusion, they commit the greatest
fault that can happen to human
relationships: they become impatient.
They hurry to a conclusion; to come, as
they believe, to a final decision, they try
once and for all to establish their
relationship, whose surprising changes
have frightened them, in order to
remain the same now and forever (as
they say).

Two millennia after Epictetus offered the Stoic

cure for heartbreak in the recognition of the
temporality and flux of all things, Rilke adds:

Self-transformation is precisely what

life is, and human relationships, which
are an extract of life, are the most
changeable of all, rising and falling
from minute to minute, and lovers are
those in whose relationship and
contact no one moment resembles
another.

The outliers impervious to this supreme

challenge of love are rare, Rilke notes; for the
rest of us, there is only the hard, necessary work
of love:

There are such relationships which

must be a very great, almost
unbearable happiness, but they can
occur only between very rich natures
and between those who, each for
himself, are richly ordered and
composed; they can unite only two
wide, deep, individual worlds.

[…]

For one human being to love another:

that is perhaps the most difficult of all
our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and
proof, the work for which all other work
is but preparation.

Complement this particular portion of the

altogether beautiful and healing Rilke on Love
and Other Difficulties with Anna Dostoyevskaya
on the secret to a happy marriage, Virginia
Woolf on what makes love last, and Kahlil
Gibran on the courage to weather the
uncertainties of love, then revisit Rilke on
inspiration and the combinatorial nature of
creativity.

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