February, and that saccharine holiday halfway through, always gets me thinking about the nature of love and what it means to be paired up and what that feeling of longing is during those times when we aren’t. And when I have more questions than answers, it is always a good time to read Plato, who will inevitably leave you with more questions than you came to him with. And his greatest work on Love, the Symposium, seems to be a good thing to discuss tonight.

Plato’s Symposium is a text on philosophy, albeit one set amid a backdrop of a night of drinking and storytelling. Privileged lads take turns giving speeches on love and its corresponding god, Eros, whilst reclining on shared couches, eating, drinking wine, and generally having a grand night.

When they get to the great comic poet Aristophanes, the group receives a tale of love that has a ton of meaning to unpack, more than we can get to here. While the comedian doesn’t disappoint our expectations in giving us something absurd, something that makes us crack a smile now and then, he takes the ridiculous and turns it into a sentiment that is heart-achingly familiar. The one we all understand. Loneliness.

Aristophanes crafts an origin myth in which humans were a combination of two beings in one shared body. Some were of the earth and were two women in one, some of the sun and both male, and some of the moon, sharing in androgyny as male and female. These beings had four arms and legs, were round, and shared a head with faces on each side. He crafts these beings to seem humorous at first glance, saying that even though they typically walked upright, they rolled around on their cylindrical bodies whenever they desired to go fast. Imagine a rolling ball of arms and legs, and you’ll get the picture. Not so sexy.

But he turns this ridiculous image on its head. These beings were powerful and strong because of their wholeness, and the gods became wary and fearful of them. Something had to be done. Still, the gods didn’t want to eliminate them, because then they would have nobody to worship them. Zeus came up with an ingenious plan. He would separate them in half so that they would double in number, thereby increasing the number of the gods’ worshipers, but it also weaken them. He would reduce them and make them powerless. He would make them incomplete.

So he cut them in two.

Zeus separated each being from their other half with the horrifying result that these pitiful beings now did nothing but search for their other half. And when each one, “desiring its own half, came together…throwing their arms around one another and entangling themselves with one another in their desire to grow together, they began to die off due to hunger and the rest of their inactivity, because they were unwilling to do anything apart from one another” (191a-b). Their loneliness abated, they wanted nothing but to embrace each other always.

Heartless Zeus took pity on them and plotted another disruption- he would arrange their genitals on the front so that they could find those suited to them (someone of the sex that was once their other half), embrace for a time, and then depart with satisfaction.

Aristophanes casts this coming together as pleasurable, necessary, ridiculous, and ultimately inadequate. Even though Zeus creates sex as a remedy for wasting away over our incompleteness, Aristophanes notes that humanity still has not gotten over this initial separation. He says that whenever anyone finds their own half, “they are wondrously struck with friendship, attachment, and love, and are just about unwilling to be apart from one another even for a short time” (192b-c). They don’t stay together merely for sex, but they don’t exactly understand what it is they need from the other person.

Aristophanes asks them if Hephaestus, the great craftsman god, were there to ask them what they truly want, would they know? If he pressed them with the question, “‘Is it this you desire, to be with one another in the very same place, as much as possible, and not to leave one another night and day? For if you desire that, I am willing to fuse you and make you grow together into the same thing, so that–though two–you would be one; and as long as you lived, you would both live together just as though you were one; and when you died, there again in Hades you would be dead together as one instead of as two” (192d-e). Aristophanes said that there would not be a single person that, having found their true other half, would refuse.

We would want to be fused once again with the person who makes us complete. Thus, he defines love as “the desire and pursuit of the whole” (193a).

It is Eros that unites our separated beings, “Eros, the bringer-together of their ancient nature, who tries to make one out of two and to heal their human nature” (191d). Eros is a philanthropist that heals us.

And if being whole and united with our favorite is the best thing we could wish for, then in the real world, the present, with its circumstance and imperfection, the closest we can get to this is to seek out “a favorite whose nature is to one’s taste” (193c). Match yourself to the person who makes you both want to say, “Never let me go.”

While this may seem like constant seeking with little chance of reward, there is something that speaks to us, at our core, about this type of longing for someone who makes us feel whole, our soulmate. That anything lesser is lacking something, incomplete. And, when united with someone who brings out our fullness of spirit, we can be so strong and powerful as to make the gods quake in fear.

It is important to remember that, for Aristophanes, this kind of human connectedness is something more than romantic love. It is affection for someone like yourself, someone transcendent, someone that speaks to your soul. And perhaps this desire to be accepted, to be seen, to be understood utterly and without reservation or condition, is why we feel so lonely on holidays such as today.

It is no surprise that the entire work ends with Socrates, the last person standing after the night of revelry, emphatically trying to convince two others that “the same man should know how to make comedy and tragedy; and that he who is by art a tragic poet is also a comic poet” (223d). He knew what Aristophanes so clearly showed us, that human existence is both laughable and grave, full of longing and struggle that must be laughed at to be fully understood, and that to be able to tell our individual tale, as well as that of our species, we must know how to combine the absurdity of existence with the realness and importance of being truly seen.

If you haven’t seen it before, this scene from Hedwig and the Angry Inch

*Excerpts taken from Plato’s Symposium, translated by Seth Benardete, 1986, Chicago University Press. If you want to read the entire thing, including Socrates’ speech casting Eros as a pitiful wretch, or the moving speech by Alcibiades, where he proves Socrates right on this point as Alcibiades laments his own unworthiness in pursuing Socrates’ bright and beautiful soul, you can get a copy of this stellar translation here.