Relationships are the great creative work of our lives. They are, like every creative endeavor, a process demanding both systematic intentionality and surrender. If we show up for that process with courage and consistency, it will surprise us, shatter our complacency, take us places we never thought we could go if we followed the vector of our preconceived plans.

The most rewarding relationships come the way creative breakthroughs do — not as a reasoned conclusion but as a revelation, breaking the momentum of our assumptions about what is possible and what we deserve, rising like a mountain from the fault line of our expectations to change the landscape of our lives.

Just as the most compelling creative work tends to blur the boundaries between disciplines, between materials, between genres, the most revelatory relationships tend to blur the boundaries between the common categories of connection, with all the disorientation and overwhelm that entails — nowhere more disorienting than when a friend becomes a lover.

H.G. Wells (September 21, 1866–August 13, 1946) explores the price and the reward of this blessing discomposure in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli (public domain) — a story largely autobiographical, for which Wells paid a high price, but which he must have felt would offer a compass through the confusions of a complex yet mutely common human experience. (All writers write about their own experience, however many degrees of abstraction it may be refracted through. The great writers make of the personal a handle for the door of the universal so that others may enter the secret rooms of their own experience, those regions of our lives we are too afraid or confused or alienated from ourselves to visit, those places where ultimately we discover who we are and what we want.)

Along the way of his well-planned life, the protagonist meets a young Oxford graduate named Isabel. The two are immediately magnetized into a rare intellectual connection. But as they magnify each other’s minds in sweeping, soaring conversations, beneath the surface of their conscious awareness the body is silently begging for participation:

At that time I think we neither of us suspected the possibility of passion that lay like a coiled snake in the path before us. It seemed to us that we had the quaintest, most delightful friendship in the world… Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays — among easy-going, liberal-minded people. For the most part, there’s no sort of harm, as people say, in them. The two persons concerned are never supposed to think of the passionate love that hovers so close to the friendship, or if they do, then they banish the thought. I think we kept the thought as permanently in exile as any one could do. If it did in odd moments come into our heads we pretended elaborately it wasn’t there.

One day, in one of those small, unpredictable moments that change everything, something shifts in the middle of one of their intoxicating conversations:

I turned to Isabel’s voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear cheeks and nose and forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight and the shadows of the twigs of the trees behind me. And something — an infinite tenderness, stabbed me. It was a keen physical feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before. It had a quality of tears in it. For the first time in my narrow and concentrated life another human being had really thrust into my being and gripped my very heart… Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment… From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure. Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that this was likely to be a matter of passion between us.

Suddenly, the “long and frank an intimacy” between the two friends turns into “an extraordinary accession of friendship and tenderness” that comes to include passion as naturally as it had included poetry and philosophy:

The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find it impossible now to tell the order of its phases. What disturbed pebble started the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply that the barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been wearing down unperceived… It was as if we had taken off something that had hindered our view of each other, like people who unvizored to talk more easily at a masked ball.

This exquisite mutual recognition is why Tom Stoppard would come to define love as “the mask slipped from the face,” but there is a reason we move through the world masked — there is nothing more vulnerable than the naked face of the soul. Emerson knew this: “There is no terror like that of being known,” he wrote as he was falling in love with his friend Margaret Fuller and resisting it.

And so, as Wells’s characters both feel the energy between them, they resist it, wielding the combined power of their formidable minds at bridling it from involving the body:

The quick leap of her mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the response of an induction wire; her way of thinking was like watching sunlight reflected from little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so bright, so mobile, so variously and easily true to its law. In the back of our minds we both had a very definite belief that making love is full of joyous, splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, and we had to discuss why we shouldn’t be to the last degree lovers.

In that way we have of feeling safer in negative certainty than in uncertainty, forestalling the vulnerable possibility of losing what we desire by turning away from it by our own will or convincing ourselves we don’t desire it in the first place, they reason through their list of reservations:

There is a phase in every love affair, a sort of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions to the prospect. It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity. Timid people may hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, but neither Isabel nor I are timid people.

Jolted awake from their Cartesian stupor, they discover that what hadn’t seemed possible, that what neither their culture nor their past experience modeled, could actually exist: a love not subtractive of the rest of life but infinitely additive, one not predicated on a tradeoff of devotions between the relationship and their individual work, a fully integrated love in which the passions of the mind and the passions of the body are entwined, annealed, magnified:

It wasn’t as if we could throw everything aside for our love, and have that as we wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn’t altogether, or even chiefly, a thing in itself — it is for the most part a value set upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other interests; to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best as activities.

As they become lovers, they enter the magical world all new lovers enter — an island all their own lightyears away from the mainland of their familiar lives:

For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell, magically cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and then we began to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that the world was all about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us, threatening us, resuming possession of us.

Every uncommon love requires constant vigilance and protection from the pressures of the commonplace, a trust that its reality is deeper and larger and more powerful than the so-called real world. Eventually, the protagonist discovers that despite the profound reconfiguration of life his relationship with Isabel demands of both of them, it is worth the toil — because it is worth everything. Wells writes:

There is no describing the reality of love. The shapes of things are nothing, the actual happenings are nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon them and a wonder… No one can tell love — we can only tell the gross facts of love and its consequences.

With every relationship that reorients life, that remaps the landscape of permission and possibility for both people, the question is always the same: Which is the higher price — the price of the consequences or the price of a life without such love? And the answer is always arrived at by the same path: the courage of living.