My soon-to-be husband is not in love with me. A Spanish speaker, he tells me que está enamorado de mí —he is in love of me. By its own grammatical logic, love in Spanish is not an act that you do with someone; rather, it seems to come from the other, as though drawn from an internal fountainhead.

In his book Estudios Sobre El Amor, originally published in 1939, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset seems to explain this misalignment of prepositions in almost scientific terms: “ Amor es gravitación hacia lo amado .” Love is gravitation toward the beloved. Ortega describes loving as a centrifugal act, the movement of one person infinitely toward the other.

It seems natural, then, that upon falling in love with Atza, I felt a sense of vertigo. We’d met in a writing workshop

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