On Hidden Love
There has always been love that must remain unseen.
There has always been love that must remain unseen.
Even before we carved heart-shapes into the bark of trees, even before we spoke of Cupid and Eros, some kinds of love carried with them the imperative of secrecy. Lovers who could not name each other aloud. Hands that could not meet in daylight. Lives woven together only in the corridors of imagination, or in the softest hours before dawn.
I think of this often, not only because our own time (for all its clamor of freedom) still abounds with borders that love is forbidden to cross, but because there’s something perennial, even archetypal, about the way forbidden love shapes those who bear it. It transforms. It burns away the surface layers of life, revealing something more essential underneath.
I’m the product of two people who met while in other marriages. My mother was separated and wounded; my father was unhappy and ready for something more to his life. Each had children. They worked together in a hospital. What transpired between them remains private to them, although I can provide the epilogue to this story: they moved to the other side of the world and out popped me.
Perhaps these origins predispose me to be open to whatever flirtation comes my way, yet I don’t think that’s true for two reasons. One, I didn’t understand my parents' hidden affair until after I had experienced my first relationship that had to be kept a secret; and two, I think any human is predisposed to falling in love even when they don’t intend to. When I was at the tipping point of extreme stress while wrestling with the ethical nature of falling for someone I shouldn’t, I confided to my mother about the ordeal. There was no judgment, simply permission: “you can’t help who you fall in love with.”
History, if we read it closely, is littered with these stories of the torment of those who couldn’t help who they fell in love with.
There were the young men in ancient Greece who exchanged poems in the moonlight but could not speak their names in the market square. There were the women of medieval Japan, penning waka verses of longing to each other, their fans hiding their glances. There were the letters smuggled between soldiers in the trenches of the First World War; the hurried notes passed in the suffocating dark of 1950s America; the quiet, coded exchanges of lovers whose very breath was a form of defiance. And there are, still, the countless loves that move in whispers across countries where the law itself would turn against the mere fact of their being.
If we trace this secret river through the ages, we find that love forbidden is not simply about the fear of punishment or the weight of convention. More often, the secrecy becomes the crucible in which the love is forged.
For when love must remain unspoken, it becomes purer, in a way… stripped of ceremony, shorn of public performance. It exists not for the world’s approval but solely for itself. Every moment is heightened: the brush of fingertips, the exchange of glances, the letter that trembles in the hand. When you cannot hold your beloved’s hand in public, every shared breath becomes an act of resistance, of holiness even.
To live with such love is to learn the double vision of exile. You dwell both in the world of others, where you perform your appointed roles, and in the inner sanctum of the body, where another reality reigns true.
This is not an easy life. It breeds loneliness, longing, sometimes unbearable grief. But it also breeds an intimacy with silence, with nuance, with the unseen currents of meaning beneath words.
The lovers in exile (whether from law, from custom, from family, or from time) become, in a sense, mystics. They know something the rest of us often forget: that love is not, at its core, about possession, about display, about recognition. It is about presence. About seeing and being seen in the deepest way.
And because it is so rare, so costly, it leaves its mark. The hidden lovers of history, those who have lived their passion in shadows, often speak of the way this love, denied the ordinary expressions, seeps into the very fabric of their being. It shapes them not only in who they love but in how they see the world. Everything becomes a symbol, a message, a flicker of possible meaning. The world, so often draped in dullness, becomes alive with possibility and danger.
In this way, forbidden love does not simply endure oppression; it transforms it. The beloved is no longer just a person, but a beacon, a secret homeland, a talisman carried invisibly through the hours. This is not without cost, but it is also not without beauty.
Perhaps this is why such love recurs in our greatest literature – from Romeo and Juliet to Brokeback Mountain, from Sappho’s fragments to the letters of James Baldwin. It is a story older than language, and yet as fresh as each heartbeat. Because at its heart, it speaks to something we all know: that love, the truest love, is not always what the world can see or sanction. After all, you can’t help who you fall in love with. The body never lies.