Wrestling with Big Questions: No Easy Answers, Just Honest Wonder

In 1833, a 22-year-old poet named Arthur Hallam died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage while on vacation in Vienna. His closest friend, Alfred Tennyson, spent the next seventeen years writing a poem about him. Seventeen years. Wow. I mean, that’s not just grief, that’s… that’s a life’s work built on a loss. Exactly. And somewhere in the middle of that long, long poem, Tennyson writes the line we all know: "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all." And I’ve been sitting with that. Really sitting with it. Is it true? It’s one of those things we just accept, right? Like a piece of foundational wisdom. Of course it’s better.

A life without love is gray, it’s empty. But when you really press on it… I’m not so sure. Right. Because the "lost" part isn't a footnote. It’s the main event for a lot of people. The grief Tennyson was writing about wasn't some noble, poetic sadness. It was a shattering. It broke him for years. And we’re not just talking about death. We’re talking about the breakup that hollows you out for a year. The friendship that ends in a betrayal you never saw coming. The love for a parent that was… complicated and painful. The "loss" can be the thing that defines the rest of your life. So the argument for "no, it's not better" is basically a risk-management strategy for the soul.

You’re avoiding a catastrophic downside. You might miss the highest highs, but you also miss the kind of pain that can permanently damage you. Mm-hm. It's the stoic argument, in a way. The path to a tranquil life is to minimize attachments to things you can’t control. And you absolutely cannot control other people, or the fact that you will, eventually, lose them. So to love is to knowingly plant a time bomb in your own life. Oof. A time bomb. Yeah. But then… what’s the alternative? A life of perfect, placid, un-bombed tranquility? Is that a life? That’s the question, isn't it? I mean, all of our great stories, our art, our music—it’s fueled by this stuff.

It's fueled by the love and the loss. Without it, what are we writing about? What are we feeling? It’s the texture of being human. A life without that risk feels… thin. Like a meal with no salt. So the value is in the intensity itself. The experience. Even if the net result is pain, the act of having felt something so deeply is what gives a life weight and meaning. I think so. But here’s a turn that I’ve been thinking about. The phrase is "'Tis better to have loved and lost." That’s a judgment made in hindsight. Wait, say more about that. It’s a story the survivor tells. Tennyson, seventeen years later, is the one who gets to frame the narrative.

He’s the one who gets to say, "This devastating pain was worth it because my love for Arthur was so profound." Arthur doesn't get a vote. The person who is completely destroyed by the loss, who never recovers… they don't get to write the poem. Ohhh. So it’s a kind of survivor’s bias. We only hear from the people who managed to find meaning in the wreckage. The people who just found wreckage… are silent. Exactly. It’s a beautiful coping mechanism that we’ve mistaken for a universal truth. We have to believe it was worth it. Otherwise, the pain is just… pointless suffering. And that’s unbearable. So maybe the question isn't really a choice we get to make.

We don't stand at a crossroads and say, "Okay, I am now formally opening myself up to the possibility of catastrophic emotional pain." You know? You just… fall in love. You just… come to care deeply for a friend. It happens to you. Yeah, it’s not a prospectus you read before you invest. And I think that’s where I land with it. The question is a bit of a misdirection. The real work isn’t deciding whether to risk it. The risk is a given. It’s the price of admission for being alive and connected. So the real question is… once the inevitable loss happens, what do you do? How do you become the person who can, seventeen years later, say it was better?

And not the person who is just… lost. Right. How do you learn to carry it? The love and the loss. Not as two separate things, but as one single, heavy, and profound reality. There’s no clean answer for that. No. There really isn’t.