Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
Escaping Flatland
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Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion<br>Looking for Alice, part 5
Henrik Karlsson<br>May 20, 2026
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This is the fifth part of a series on relationships begun with “Looking for Alice” (which is about how I met my wife Johanna), “Dostoevsky as lover” (about our early years together), “Relationships are coevolutionary loops,” and “When I accept myself as I am, I change.”<br>Housekeeping: for those of you who live in Copenhagen/Malmö, some readers are organizing a meetup on June 6. You can read more about that and sign up (for free) here. It sounds fun.<br>And now, the essay.<br>Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
Kiss on a Swing at a Street Fair, Brassaï (Gyula Halász), c. 1936
When we moved to the farm on the island, Johanna and I had been together for eight years, had a 3-year-old in tow and a second one on the way, but were despite this still kids, basically. For example, we had, for no reason at all, assumed that there’d be firewood at the house. It was February. The wind coming in from the sea at 60 feet per second was blowing long tongues of snow across the roads. When we realized our mistake—the former owner had only left ten logs to help us through the first hours—we were already snowed over.<br>We pulled a sofa right up to the fireplace, where we burned a single log, and slept with beanies on our heads and every piece of cloth we could find wrapped around us—a little cave of blankets, where we lay with the three-year-old tucked in between us, laughing darkly at the fact that our breath rose white above us.<br>Johanna and I had met in our early twenties in Uppsala, outside a bookstore. The impression she had made on me was endearing but perplexing: the precision of her attention and the intensity of her curiosity were unlike anything I had seen, and yet, despite this, as I discovered later, she was surprisingly ignorant. If I mentioned the First World War, back then, she would say, “When was that, again?” But if I talked about an area I was researching, it would take her five minutes of insistent questions to cut through to the deep, underlying insight that had eluded me for months. In clinical terms, she was a nerd who didn’t know she was a nerd. And when she discovered this about herself, through us meeting, it felt, she says, like coming home.<br>Being young and lost, we made our relationship into a cocoon, a place where we felt safe enough to… well, what is it that caterpillars do in cocoons really? Dissolve themselves into a nutritious soup and assemble a new self. Yeah. It was like that.<br>Johanna says I made her realize that she didn’t need anyone’s permission to pursue her curiosity. I say she took that and just ran with it—lugging home shopping carts’ worth of books from the university library, self-teaching everything she felt she lacked, doing her own research. The first half-decade, as we moved in together and had our first child, was an explosion of Becoming. Johanna grew and changed beyond recognition, leaving the girl I had fallen in love with behind to transform into deeper versions of herself. The idea that led to the island was, in many ways, something I had nurtured out of her.<br>This is one of the joys and challenges of love: the more skillfully you love someone, the more held, encouraged, and accepted they feel, the more they change. If you love someone well, you have to run to keep up, growing your heart to hold what they are growing into. And this can be challenging. The direction of their change and the speed of their change can be the wrong direction and the wrong speed for you. There is no guarantee that another person’s growth aligns with what you want; sometimes you just grow apart.<br>But lying on the sofa watching our breath rise and mix that first night in the house, I could confidently say that that was not a problem for us. The challenge of aligning Johanna’s transformations and mine had been invigorating. Each time she’d grown and changed, I had felt something open up in myself. Her changes had become prompts that pushed me toward a higher, truer version of myself, just as my changes had been for her. Change answering change, it was a virtuous loop.<br>But then, the first spring on the farm, the loop fell apart.<br>Spring
The change was so small that it seems silly to even mention it. It was the plants.<br>As the land woke in spring, first anemones, then bluebells shooting up everywhere, Johanna had a deep, bodily reaction to the landscape we’d moved into. The land had spirit. It had good bones. She became increasingly occupied by the idea of making a great garden. She felt an urge to study flora and horticulture and color perception and design theory. This was a completely new direction for her.<br>I was happy to see her excited, and I tried to be supportive. But my happiness was of the abstract kind; I couldn’t actually relate to what she was feeling. I found the...