In middle school we read one of the so-called love poems from the Book of Songs, “The Quiet Girl” (静女). It contains the lines: “From the pasture she brings me white grass, truly lovely and rare. It is not the grass that is beautiful — it is beautiful because a beauty gave it to me.” These lines have surely been explained countless times already: they depict someone deeply infatuated who, even without the “beauty” actually showing up, can still long for the person through the object she once gave. The German existentialist Martin Buber once said: “In love, we see things as people, tending to them with utmost care; out of love, we see people as things, merely using them.” This reveals not just an I-Thou relation, or some particular sentiment of the poet, but more broadly the emotional pattern of ordinary people.

People very easily develop feelings toward objects — what we often call “familiarity breeds affection” is a perfect example. A strong dependence on an object, to the point where it becomes a substitute for sexual gratification, becomes what’s known as a fetish; taken further, even necrophilia falls into this category. But affection and pathology are two clearly distinct things. In life, people often keep the belongings of departed friends and family as a way of mourning them. Many works of literature and film thread an entire plot through a single object to achieve a deeply moving effect. So “it is not the grass that is beautiful, but beautiful because a beauty gave it” is an evaluative framework we can understand quite well, and one we often use ourselves. There’s another saying for it too: “love me, love my dog.” Cupid — bow in hand, winged, blindfolded — is blind: first he blindly turns someone into a great beauty, then blindly makes us love everything connected to them, treasuring all of it. When will we wake from this drunken stupor? A Frenchman put it well: “A marriage truly begins the moment you stop loving your wife.”

Psychoanalysts have a term for this too — transference (a word we use often enough ourselves). Fromm called it one of the chief sources of error and impulsive behavior once people start weighing reality (from Fromm’s The Art of Loving). He gives the example of a couple who are “truly in love”: six months later, both discover that the person they married is not at all the person they fell for in the heat of passion — a completely different person. What they loved was an impression, the target of their own transference. So think about it: the “white grass” in “The Quiet Girl” may eventually turn out not to be so lovely; “love me, love my dog” may eventually run up against something that simply can’t be loved — and this whole shift can be perfectly described by Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” framework of emotional connection.

So let’s return again to Buber’s words: when affection fades, the person we once saw becomes nothing more than a thing. This too is a common phenomenon, evident in how curse words work across cultures — when cursing someone, we always transform the object of our hatred into whatever is taboo within our culture, like excrement or genitals. And this transformation, too, is centered entirely on “I-Thou.”

When someone pleases me, even their farts smell sweet; when someone displeases me, even if they’re stunning enough to topple kingdoms, they’re worth less than garbage. Amid humanity’s tangled web of emotions, what strange and improbable thing could possibly not happen?