People are irreplaceable. This is why all meaningful relationships require commitment as a baseline.
We are not fungible like numbers or ice cream flavors, despite the effect modern life and online abstractions and rapid pacing may have on our sense of reality.
Human beings are utterly unique.
Thus, you simply cannot have an authentic experience of love without a commitment to knowing someone deeply, and being known deeply in return, over a long period of time.
This struggle to engage truly and deeply shows up most obviously in a lot of our romantic relationships, and so many of the popular conversations around this topic prove out our shallow way of relating as a culture.
But it applies also to friendship and to those we align with for various parts of life and work.
Although there are varying degrees of seriousness with regard to different relationships in our lives (Aristotle’s three types of friendship have traditionally helped us to distinguish this, as well as vow-based commitments), the fundamental shift from a self-serving model where people have to fit our checklists needs to shift toward receiving people as whole, precious, unique beings.
In the former model, people easily become replaceable. If our goal is simply to maximize certain characteristics, then someone can always come along and be slightly better in some ways and become the apparently “logical” obvious replacement.
If we make ourselves our own little gods with hardened hearts, impenetrable to love, then of course this makes sense. We are simply trying to serve our ego and interests, and people become an extension of that—objects to be used rather than people to be loved, honored, and respected.
If we want anything resembling true meaning, authenticity, and love—necessary for longterm loyalty, joy, and relational and emotional safety—then we must reject such an approach.
In the latter model, however, where people are absolutely singular, a different kind of invitation arrives: one where love can only deepen, and a “replacement” becomes impossible, unthinkable—even laughable. In this case, no one can ever be the person we love, no matter how attractive they may be in some specific regard.
Here, it becomes negligible whether someone has a more refined nose, or cleans the kitchen just right, or makes more money, or drives a better car, or has all of these and more.
The sum of these differences do not equal the person we know. None of those things can possibly touch their essence. We can objectively recognize better gifts, capacities, or material access, but this doesn’t threaten real love.
When living from a real place that perceives reality accurately, we are attracted, whether romantically or otherwise, to a whole, complete person and their distinct presence. That person remains whether all kinds of things change through age, circumstance, or the natural course of life and its challenges.
In many cases, especially when someone is well-loved due to their virtue, character, and unique personality, the person actually becomes more of who they are and what attracted us in the first place, and our love therefore increases—despite the objective reduction of certain qualities that could otherwise tempt someone away.
Blood relationships and marriage carry this weight especially, where a choice to remove oneself from these relationships should only happen in severe circumstances.
These severe circumstances do exist.
But our whole culture has diluted the reality of those serious circumstances by turning many normal human struggles—also necessary for and unavoidable in real and deep relationships—into catastrophes. In many cases, it’s more likely not even truly seen as catastrophe but as a convenient off-ramp from a relationship that we perceive no longer serves us, if that was our impoverished starting point.
And it is impoverished.
Regardless of how impressive one can appear through the shifting sands of having rotating and “better” people around, there is no greater impoverishment than a lack of love.
Even when removal from a relationship is necessary, it should be accompanied by sorrow when we have maturely faced that people really aren’t replaceable, even when they’ve hurt us deeply. They leave a hole—one that grieves us.
So many people have been left lonely by both the rejection of people who function from an unhealthy and selfish conception of the value of others, but also by their own functioning from this place. In an increasingly disjointed and overwhelming culture where few people seem to prioritize real relationships rooted in self-sacrifice and love, people are falling apart.
It is a shared responsibility to restore commitment in our serious and meaningful relationships, which should also spill over into our friendships. No relationships are perfect, and people are precious and irreplaceable. In most cases, we do better to go deeper into our relationships rather than cut them off or drift away because we perceive some aspect of the person as insufficient or less attractive than something else “out there.”
We don’t need to be so shallow and suffer such a lonely fate we now see so often. Selfishness and capriciousness leads to a self-imposed prison where we reduce everyone to their changeable characteristics rather than their essence, and thus also condemn ourselves to a similar judgment, with all of us ending up fundamentally alone, unknown, and unimportant to anyone who could really love us.
We can train ourselves to truly love, to see and know and value a whole, complete person, and in so doing, allow ourselves to also be truly seen and loved. This is where we find the meaningful relationships we crave, and our sincere commitment will allow us to see how truly irreplaceable the people we love are.
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Sometimes only art can express where words fall short. The real love and intimacy of human relationships is like that.
I wrote a song a long time ago about how we most need the presence of a loved one when we are suffering:
In my private archive, there is more of this work—much of it not available elsewhere.
If you feel like continuing, you’re welcome there.
Access to the private archive is sent by email, and the archive includes my ongoing writing and occasional invitations to be more deeply involved in this very human work.
All of this is made possible by generous patrons.
KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE 