Conservation Law

On wedding anniversaries and not treating love as a scarce commodity

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CONSERVATION LAW*

“Man being loved is crazy lol”

“Because it’s like paired with this grief ya know”

“Like grief of not getting this before”

It’s the day after a particularly successful weekend of karaoke and picnicking, the kind where you feel the music so deeply that things break around you and where you will the rain away simply by refusing to leave the park. This particularly successful weekend was precipitated by the birthday of someone who I love an awful lot. As it was starting to wind down, they were finding a place for all the laughter, affection and love to settle into within their body. 

“It’s like the body almost tenses up when receiving that kind of love sometimes. And then you have to give it time to relax,” they texted. 

Staring at three different screens at my desk at work, the strain of the bluish light on my eyes competing with a semi-permanent knot in my shoulders, I think I understood what they were trying to tell me.

***

I got married in September so September is a time when the more serious and more senior people in my life comment on my being loved. 

My marriage can in many ways be separated from love, especially as I have always felt like being recognized as a unit in the eyes of the law changed very little between me and my spouse and a lot between me and various power structures, some more abstract than others. The two of us have been through a lot together, dating across state lines, pushing through a few weeks of nearly deadly illness, a sudden move across the country during a particularly apocalyptic time, giving up dreams and pursuing new ones, embracing the truths about our own selves and constantly working to define and redefine and redefine and redefine who are to each other. 

Our marriage was an investment in having more time, all the time possible really, to keep doing this, in no small part because it afforded me the privilege of legally staying in the same location as the person I love. We had invested in each other emotionally already and the paperwork added a layer of necessary security to our being able to follow through with that. Our wedding day was a truly immensely happy one, but I never expected it to bring about some seismic shift in who we will be to each other for the rest of our lives.

Yet, to many people, the titles of husband and wife flattened most of our story into something like formalized respectability. They also made it simpler for people to interact with us, giving them a short and easy playbook of jokes, questions, and gendered event invites. I think by now most everyone knows that I am bitter about this: when people make jokes about me cooking for my husband because I am his wife (and how dare I not feed him red meat like a real man), or ask whether four years of marriage mean that a baby is on the horizon, or simply express shock at how much we still like each other, my face cannot help but betray that bitterness. 

The anniversary of our very small September wedding is a bit of a magnet for commentary from others, and at times that has made me feel skittish about it. Most years, we’ve gone on a nice museum date followed by a nice dinner, an only slightly more upscale version of what we’d usually do on a day off or a particularly well planned Friday. The idea of throwing a party or even having to field congratulatory phone calls has never sat right with me. Still loving each other being considered as a celebration-worthy success only feels like it draws attention to how much people traditionally expect relationships to get worse.

This year, as the date is creeping up on me yet again, I am wondering whether my bitterness is in part coming from the same place as my friend’s grief. Why else should I even worry about how people perceive us if I know it to be untrue? Ultimately, this perception afforded me the safety and privilege that come with being able to pass as a straight woman in addition to guaranteeing me legal status, so why would I want to rock the boat?

Of course, there is no one answer, but as the years go by and I am only feeling more loved, I am starting to realize that not only did I never imagine that I will be loved, but that the love I did allow myself to imagine at my least low moments was still so much smaller and restrained and manicured than what I now know that I can actually have.

***

Conservation laws are extremely important in physics. Most dramatically, they are what tells us that energy and matter cannot be created out of nothing. This is why perpetual motion machines do not exist and we cannot just make whatever stuff we need appear from thin air. 

A conservation law tells you that if you start with a certain amount of whatever the conserved substance is, then that is how much of that substance you ought to have at any other point in the future. 

In physics and chemistry, conservation of mass tells you that you cannot have a bigger mass of products of an isolated chemical reaction than the combined mass of chemicals that you started with. And if the balance of before-the-reaction and after-the-reaction masses does not work, more sophisticated versions of the law will tell you how to account for mass discrepancy by recalling that mass and energy can be interchangeable.

The law of conservation of energy similarly implies a balance between how much energy you put into a system and how much work it can do or how much it heats up. Even the most efficient machine in the universe would have to energetically break even. And most machines don’t really get there so you have to account for every unwanted process that may be making the energy account imbalanced.

Similarly, if you think you are tricking the law of conservation of energy, like with your refrigerator which seems to be removing energy from its inside to make it cold, you have to zoom out to include the back of the fridge where your hand will find the extra heat. Zooming out as much as possible reveals that the amount of all energy in the universe ought to be constant, just one absolute unit of stuff that we can transform and partition but never really destroy and create. I used to ask ninth grade students to memorize that last part about creation and destruction of energy being impossible, that is how fundamental it is.

***

I’m not sure when I learned that the amount of love you can imagine for yourself should be finite. Maybe it was growing up in the late 90s and early 00s with all those rom coms and sitcoms where a protagonist has to make a choice between competing suitors. You have to choose one person because the true mark of love is letting one person have a monopoly over you. Or, you have to choose one person because it is not true love unless you put boundaries on it and include some hard no’s from the jump. In some ways, we often rank how real love is by how many rules and mandates for denials and deprivations it comes with.

Maybe it was, and still is, existing in a capitalistic world where scarcity is always the name of the game, where all resources have to be treated as finite because otherwise there would be no winners and losers. And, as a culture, we love to talk about relationship winners and losers, about 5s dating 8s or conquering someone that is out of your league. Competition is ideologically part of it, but the capitalist tendency show up in material ways too. As adrienne maree brown writes in Pleasure Activism, an imperfect book that I still always return to,

“From religious spaces to school to television shows to courts of law, we are socialized to seek and perpetuate private, even corporate, love. Your love is for one person, forever. You celebrate it with dying flowers and diamonds. The largest celebration of your life is committing to that person. Your family and friends celebrate you with dishes and a juicer. You need an income to love. If something doesn’t work out with your love, you pay a lot of money to divide your lives, generally not telling people much unless it’s a soap opera dramatic ending. This way of approaching love strangles all the good out of it.”

Moreover, as Rebecca Traister recently outlined in the Cut, though conservatives and other self-fashioned traditionalists often prescribe marriage as a panacea to all sorts of economic and other insecurity, it as an institution that serves to perpetuate the privileges and wealth of those who already have them. 

Maybe it was really personal, like watching my parents, who at times had big words about their love, but in reality over the years found it impossible to keep giving each other all that much. They had stuck by the cliches, telling me that opposites attract and that if you love someone enough then nothing else really matters, but then the uglier, darker cliches got to them too - all the ones where husbands call their wives overly dramatic and sensitive, where friends are left behind and each person’s world gets ruled by the other one, where every fight is about offending or emotionally hurting someone to the point of tears, and where you never not keep score that you can deploying in the next fight.

And it is easy to conceive of love as conserved when it is transactional. In the same way you can trade 216,600 Joules, the standard unit of energy, for an hour of keeping a 60 Watt light bulb on, you can also trade something like love for favors, affection and small words of care. The first really serious relationship I found myself in in college was like this. A relationship with a man who said he loved me early on, but later started to qualify why exactly, or how exactly I earned the finite amount of love he had to give. The clear implication was that there was no more left for times when I was not fully living up to that why and how. 

Towards the end he would tell our friends that it was easy to love me because I cooked a lot, and we’d all laugh as if there was nothing more to love than that simple act of quiet domesticity. Incidentally, to this day he is the only person that ever refused to eat something that I had made. I played along with this way of being together because I was young and because my self-confidence was low. And the pattern of trying to maintain love through a tit-for-tat power struggle was familiar to me from my family and my culture at large. When this man ungraciously dumped me for, in his view, choosing to listen to a family member instead of him, I could barely find it in me to be angry instead of just feeling like a failure. I had incurred enough penalties in the game of love for him to simply run out of it.

It has been more than a decade since then, and I only ever think about it when that tense feeling my friend was texting about settles over me. Often, I realize that I made myself forget the many arguments that marked this relationship, but also the early days when it was all supposedly still very good. It is painful and embarrassing to think that my idea of good times was composed of such crumbs. 

Though I have buried those details somewhere way, way below the foundations of the memory palace where all the past versions of me live, something like muscle memory still kicks in on occasion. At times, spontaneous proclamations of love put me in a state of alertness rather than ease because I am waiting for the subsequent ask or to find out that something has gone wrong and this is my remuneration for it. It feels a little bit like getting a slight taste of a cocktail that once made you sick to your stomach, or taking a bite of an indulgent dish at a fancy restaurant and fearing that it’ll be just like a cheaper, knock-off version of it that once tasted really vile. 

***

I recently went on a weekend trip with someone I love dearly and because I do not drive I got to engage in all of the worst passenger behaviors, like commandeering the music selection for most of our drive through New England. By day three I found myself giving a small monologue on why I was full of tears, some in my throat, some in the corners of my eyes, when I saw boygenius play a stadium show in Queens earlier in the summer. 

Stumbling over my words on how much my relationship with music had always been strongly tied to who I think I am, I managed at least some points about how the band’s music has a strong undercurrent of friendship, of an expansive sort of love and care, something like hope, and a sort of generosity that is much harder to find in music than it is to find bitterness or pain. One of my favorites from their sophomore record is True Blue, partly because I did a lot of coming of age while I lived in Chicago, but certainly because of the following lines

“You've never done me wrong

Except for that one time that we don't talk about

Because it doesn't matter anymore

Who won the fight?

I don't know, we're not keeping score”

A gracious acknowledgement that nothing is ever only one way, that one person cannot always do everything right. And that it is possible to move on from moments of pain, that there can be enough love between people to render moments of strife unimportant.

This portion of the song has made such a strong impression on me because I have historically had a tendency to burn bridges. I attended high school in two separate countries and still have very few friends to show for it. I made friends in college, but quietly lost touch with even those that were often a singular source of joy during a difficult time. A few weeks ago when an ex-roommate from graduate school texted about planning a visit with friends we had both lived with, I was not at all shocked to be the one hearing about it after it had all been planned, fixed and probably set to a date too late for me to jump in. Often, I have chosen to not even pick fights with people who knowingly or unknowingly hurt me, but just quietly grew bitter and drifted away, never making it to a place where unsettled scores don’t matter.

This too is part of that muscle memory, of thinking that all relationships are more like paying an electricity bill so your light bulbs can stay on than an infinity of feeling that can be reached if you just set your mind to it. Certainly, this may include some hard conversations, maybe even rekindling conflicts that you’d previously avoided, but sometimes the care and love does lie in the hard, contentious things too.

The chorus of True Blue says so too:

“And it feels good to be known so well

I can't hide from you like I hide from myself

I remember who I am when I'm with you

Your love is tough, your love is tried and true blue”

***

While scientists have never found any signs of the law of conservation of energy being broken or contradicted by the actual world around us, statements about energy, and especially thermal energy, can sometimes get wonky. Last year I wrote a feature for New Scientist on the idea of the absolute zero and how the subgenre of physics called thermodynamics, which deals with quantities like energy, work and temperature and how they’re all interrelated, starts to show its seams in the quantum realm. 

For instance, some limits on how efficient an engine that converts energy to work can be have been broken by building machines made of a few tiny quantum particles instead of gears, thermal reservoirs or electromagnets. Tiny quantum fridges, often a single circuit made of a special material or a few diamonds with one weird atom in their middle, also seem to work differently than conventional fridges, often pushing the limits of temperatures and energies that researchers previously thought possible to achieve. 

The most stunning thing that happens with quantum objects is that here and there information and energy start to intertwine in a way loosely reminiscent of how mass and energy sometimes also do. Sometimes when mass seems to be missing after a collision of two particles, it is because it was released as energy. Sometimes when a quantum engine gains energy seemingly out of nowhere, it is because you obtained new information about it through some measurement or some sort of inquiry about its state.

I am not saying that quantum mechanics gets you past the hard limit of how much energy there is in the universe, but it does seem like you can make interventions, ask good questions of a system so to speak, that will help you put a little more of that energy to work than you might have thought possible.

***

Next year will be our fifth wedding anniversary and our tenth year together and I am already somewhat weary of what sorts of requests and comments that will invite. Will we have to spend money on a big party that will be for everyone but the two of us? Will the assumptions of how we divide labor and how we treat each other only get amplified? Coincidentally, I will be another year into the very long process of working towards a more permanent legal status in the United States and whatever we chose or not chose to do, someone behind the scenes will factor that into their assessment of whether our marriage is still as valid as when I was granted my first adjustment of status. I still think of how preparing for our last interview with an immigration official required thinking about questions like “who pays the bills” and “who cooks and cleans” as if a world where our being together means that we actually do things together does not exist in the eyes of the state.

But both this year and next, I want to sit with some of my bitterness around this and understand that it matters so much to me that people see my relationships the way I do in part because it took me myself a long time to get there. On bad days I am still quite unsure that I deserve love, but I have asked myself enough questions, and conducted enough inquires of the world around me to know that there can actually always be a lot more love than you think.

I say “I love you” to a lot of people these days and when they say it back I aim to believe them. Certainly, the years-long relationship that I have had with my spouse has always been, and always will be, a wellspring of a kind of care and affection that has nothing short of changed my life. And my life will never not consist of investing in that over and over again. But being able to find love in other forms, in friends, in community, in whatever packaging does not look like just the two of us hoarding everything that feels intimate and caring and then strategically employing to gain something over the other, has also been transformative. 

Ultimately, if there is more than one person that can love me in whatever capacity fits who we are, if “I love you” can be something that can be said to a friend as much as a lover as much as my mom, if when I say that I love my community I can really meant that without having to downgrade and dilute what the word love means there, then there are more and more reasons to keep going and imagining a better future, something necessary for actually bringing it about, becomes easier. 

I think I may have never felt so loved as I have this year, and I probably never had to have as many complicated conversations and lean into as many arguments that I would have otherwise avoided. It has been a time of learning to stop myself from saying “you always say that”, of learning ask clarifying questions instead of jumping to conclusions, of understanding that sometimes people, myself included, just act out and that does not have to be a referendum on the whole relationship, of saying “I appreciate that you did that” without need a reason and even for small things, of not letting myself paint myself as a martyr everytime someone else shows a minor imperfection, of standing up for myself even when it is uncomfortable because I know that people who love me don’t love in ways that mandate that I give something back in return. 

Pretty much every year, one the day of our anniversary I tell my spouse that this may have been our best year yet. This year is no exception and I credit at least part of that to our shared world continuously expanding, to our loving each other being anything but an isolated experience. 

And that is the feeling that I want settling into my body, being memorized by my muscles, leaving behind only the most literal of knots, the kind that can be dissolved by a loved one’s firm touch. 

Best,

Karmela 

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ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING

In the past month, a lot of my reporting has been focused on finishing up stories that I picked up while I was in San Francisco mid-August, but another follow-up story made me even more excited. Building on a forecast from last year, I finally got to report that the brightest X-ray machine ever turned on in a giant tunnel underneath Menlo Park. It will catch molecules in action, basically as “on film” as possible, in many situations we really want to see and understand more of what particles inside of them are doing, like electrons in solar panels or during catalysis reactions relevant for industry and agriculture.

I also quite liked this story about computing with DNA. Ever since I learned about molecular electronics a few years ago while reporting this story, I have been dazzled by the idea of using molecules to do what we usually make electrons do inside of machines. It is really wild to see that technology be constantly pushed forward.

Finally, I have been working on some longer pieces that I hope will be published over the next few months. One will be about driving under the influence of cannabis and it will run as part of the new series on the science of cannabis that the US contingent of New Scientist has been working on all summer. The articles we already ran on where marijuana came from, shifting attitudes towards it and the fuzziness of substances of CBD have all been really great so I am excited to be contributing to this project. The other longer story that I have been working on will be a holiday piece about the physics of fluids found under festive circumstances - this will be a fun, somewhat silly one.

READING

This interview with the mathematician Andrew Granville in Quanta Magazine where he discusses the view of mathematics as  “a pure quest, where we just arrive at great truths by pure thought alone.” misses a lot about how the idea of truth is actually constructed, even in a field seemingly as abstract and untouched by human biases as his own. The piece is titled “Why Mathematical Proof Is a Social Compact” which sort of summarizes his arguments, but the interview goes further and Granville’s insights are both accessible and thought provoking beyond this one question.

This column in the Vittles newsletter on “Cooking on Crip Time” which says a lot about chronic illness, labor in relationships and what it means to be committed to enjoying food without ever getting too didactic or, on the other hand, pulling too many punches. 

I’ve also been both fascinated and horrified by the Google antitrust trial and this piece on how much of it is being hidden from the public, from Mat Stoller’s BIG, outlines just how much power Google still has here, despite having to defend itself from the law.

LISTENING

A friend turned me onto Strange Trails by Lord Huron, a conceptual country album about coming back from the dead. This is the kind of alt-country record that is not for people who actually dislike country, but it is also quite atmospheric and enchanting in a way that does manage to transcend genre here and there. The lyrical narrative is for sure what pulls it all together and makes it an album in the traditional sense of the word rather than just a collection of would-be singles. Put this on on a gray day when you really want to go outside but cannot, or if you fall in love during Halloween season.

On a similar yet much sharper note, I found myself listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence record a surprising amount times in recent weeks. The song that shares the name with the record is certainly a classic, but having been unfamiliar with the band’s catalog past it, I was pretty blown away by tracks like “Blessed” or “Richard Cory” which not only sound more edgy and more rock’n’roll adjacent, but also seem to have a lot more to say politically.

And because I am still reading that book about drone music that I am now constantly talking about, I got pretty into Amon Duul II’s Yeti and Faust so Far by Faust, both of which are featured in the krautrock chapter. In many ways, what these bands do to the classic rock sounds that I grew up with is almost disturbing, but the distortion and the fairly chaotic approach, sometimes bordering on nonsense noise, is oddly captivating. I didn’t think I would like either of these, but then I kept finding myself listening to them at work. 

For some really hypnotic, stripped down, truly droning drone, Faust’s collaboration with Tony Conrad called Outside of the Dream Syndicate is also really something else.

WATCHING

We finished watching Star Wars: Rebels and I am still processing both my feelings about it and the larger Dave Filoni project of filling in all the lore and history that George Lucas left out when conceiving the Star Wars movies. Whereas I felt like the Clone Wars animated series actually did a lot to warm me up to what Episodes One through Three were trying to do, Rebels felt more burdened by the existence of all the other live action properties from recent years. 

For sure, Mandalorian lore and appearances and reappearances of Ashoka Tano were exciting, but as many have pointed out there is also always that consistent feeling that many of the characters and storylines will have to be extinguished if the parts of the story that we have already are going to continue to hold. I am a sucker for world building and I still think that more context can completely reframe a familiar story or event. At the same time, a part of me is also a touch hungry for some surprise, not just continuity.  

However, even viewed as as much of a standalone story as possible, unlike the last season of Clone Wars which really delivered so many masterful punches, season 4 of Rebels felt rushed. Committing its last third to the franchise’s more mystical tendencies and giving us one deus-ex-machinae-adjacent death and one such resurrection came off as a quick fix to a more complex plotline running out of time. And while the final few setpieces did offer both animation bravado and nostalgia-heavy cues, especially with the soundtrack, the stakes of it all never quite solidified, leaving it all in a place of dissatisfying uncertainty. Unless Filoni is trying to say that this is what leading a rebellion feels like, which might as well be true, it is an odd choice for a show that certainly had some very strong points, including some earlier sections of this, its ultimate season.

EATING 

A peach and thyme cake dotted with strawberry frosting, very loosely based on this recipe, that I made for a coworkers birthday and my go-to chocolate cake, topped with a pistachio frosting and refashioned into a rough football field shape for celebrating my husband’s 33rd with his family. 

Onigiri and braised tofu puff stuffed with sushi rice and proper sushi rolls with various fillings ranging from sweet and savory eggplant to smoky roasted peppers, all made to be shared with loved ones.

Incredible squash blossom apizza, lasagna, tiramisu and marinated mozzarella pearls from Three Girls Vegan in Guilford, Connecticut during our New England trip.

A one-of-a-kind patio dinner hosted by two vegan chefs I have been following on social media, but who still really blew me away, especially with their homemade tempeh and wildly successful friends risotto.