By Theresa Rézeau 

Their faces have disappeared.

In Edvard Munch’s The Kiss (1897), a man and woman stand together in a darkened room. Their bodies remain distinct, but where their faces meet, individuality begins to dissolve. There are no two profiles, no clearly separated mouths, no eyes with which either person can look back at us.

Munch (1863–1944), the Norwegian artist who returned repeatedly to love, anxiety, jealousy, separation and death, gives us intimacy without reassurance. The couple has achieved what lovers are supposed to desire: closeness. Yet the closer they become, the harder it is to tell where one person ends and the other begins.

It is an unsettling image for a culture that likes to describe love as completion.

Every February, Valentine’s Day surrounds love with a familiar vocabulary: flowers, cards, dinners, declarations, proposals. Love becomes something recognisable and reassuring, something that confirms rather than destabilises us.

Even the history behind the day has been made romantic.

The historical identity of Saint Valentine is uncertain. Early traditions refer to more than one Christian martyr named Valentine, while the familiar story of a priest secretly marrying couples in defiance of Emperor Claudius II belongs to later legend rather than secure historical record. The association between Valentine’s Day and romantic love developed centuries afterwards.

There is something revealing in that transformation. A shadowy history of martyrdom has gradually become a celebration of romantic certainty.

Munch offers almost the opposite.

To love another person requires some surrender of separateness. We allow someone access to territories normally protected from view: fear, desire, memory, shame, hope. We permit another person’s happiness to matter to us. Their absence can alter the atmosphere of a room. Their words can acquire an authority that those of strangers never possess.

Love changes the proportions of the self. That is part of its beauty, but also part of its danger.

Look again at Munch’s couple. Their embrace can be read as tenderness, but the disappearance of their faces introduces another possibility. What happens when closeness asks for so much that individuality begins to vanish?

We speak readily about finding someone, less often about losing ourselves inside someone. Sacrifice is praised as evidence of devotion. Compromise is considered necessary. Vulnerability is encouraged. All can belong to healthy love, but none is limitless.

There is a difference between allowing love to change us and requiring ourselves to disappear so that love can continue.

Munch places that distinction inside a kiss.

The image becomes more complicated after love ends.

Valentine’s Day is built around beginnings and continuations. We celebrate the person who has been found, the relationship that has survived, the declaration finally made. There is less ceremony for the people carrying what remains after love has gone.

Where do broken hearts go?

The language surrounding heartbreak often suggests that they should go somewhere quickly. Move on. Start again. Open your heart. Meet someone else.

But a heart is not renewed by forgetting. Nor is it replaced by willpower. A heart is not an object we discard. It is a history.

Relationships do not disappear simply because they end. They remain in habits, reflexes, places, songs, fears and forms of knowledge about ourselves that did not exist beforehand. Some people love again easily. Others become cautious. Some establish boundaries that did not exist before.

Fear after heartbreak can also be memory.

Once the heart has learned that intimacy can wound it, caution is understandable. But healing cannot simply mean returning to the person who existed before the relationship, because profound love alters the person who experiences it.

There may be no former self waiting to be recovered.

This is where the spiritual language of a “new heart” becomes more interesting.

Within the biblical tradition, the image is one of transformation rather than simple replacement. A new heart need not mean an untouched one. It can be a heart that knows what happened and remains capable of love anyway.

That does not make suffering sacred. Heartbreak is not automatically ennobling. Some losses deepen compassion; others leave damage requiring years of care. Pain guarantees nothing.

Nor does love justify the destruction of the self. A relationship that requires the continual surrender of dignity, safety or identity should not be mistaken for devotion. Sacrifice ceases to be beautiful when one person must repeatedly disappear for another to remain.

The difficulty is that love inevitably changes us.

Another person enters the architecture of memory. Experiences become shared. Places acquire meaning because of what happened there together. The story of the self begins to contain someone else.

When that relationship ends, separation therefore involves more than losing another person. Part of one’s own history has become inseparable from them.

This may be why heartbreak can feel strangely physical. The body continues through routines that suddenly contain absences: a message that no longer arrives, a voice no longer heard, a side of the bed no longer occupied.

Valentine’s Day has little language for this aftermath.

Art does not need to solve it.

Munch does not tell us whether his couple will remain together, whether their surrender is mutual, or whether this kiss will one day become a memory one of them struggles to carry. He leaves the central contradiction unresolved: intimacy requires us to loosen the boundaries of the self, while love worthy of the name cannot demand that the self cease to exist.

Maybe this is the harder measure of love.

Not whether it leaves us unchanged. Love that matters rarely does.

Not whether we surrender everything. Erasure is not intimacy.

The greater task is to allow another person to alter the shape of our lives without surrendering the dignity of remaining a person within our own.

Munch painted the moment before that distinction can be known.

A kiss can be surrender without disappearance.
Love must learn the difference.