Radical Uncollapse: Love as Ontological Intervention

If to love is to construe the Other as sacred, then love must also be an act of radical uncollapse.

In a cosmos where nothing is actual until it is construed, the meanings we make of each other are not neutral. They are ontological commitments. When we collapse a person into a role—partner, parent, colleague, problem—we are not just mislabelling them. We are reducing the field of becoming they can instantiate. We are limiting the futures they can inhabit. We are, in effect, narrowing reality itself.

Love reverses this.

To love is to hold open the field of potential in the Other. Not by projecting fantasies onto them, but by refusing to settle the question of who they are. It is a disciplined openness—a refusal to foreclose. This is what makes love an ontological intervention: it alters the construal dynamics of the world.

Love as Co-Creation of a Field

In radical uncollapse, the meaner does not merely recognise the Other’s potential—they participate in co-creating the field in which that potential can be actualised.

Love is not passive admiration. It is an interpersonal grammar of recognition, invitation, and permission:

• Recognition: You are not reducible to how I have known you.

• Invitation: You may become something new in relation to me.

• Permission: I will not defend myself against your becoming.

In this frame, love is not a contract, but an evolving ontological agreement: we will remain unfinished, and meet each other again and again in that unfolding.

The Ethics of Radical Uncollapse

This way of loving is also a way of resisting violence. Violence constrains: it says, “you are only this.” Whether through physical force or social expectation, it collapses potential into function.

Radical uncollapse does the opposite. It grants ontological room. It allows error, doubt, reinvention. It does not say “I love who you are,” but “I love the possibility of who you may become—and the mystery of who you already are.”

This is not boundless tolerance. It is not indulgence. It is a fierce and ethical stance: to hold the sacredness of the Other as irreducible, even when their becoming destabilises your own.

The Sacred Space of Love

To love in this way is to make a clearing in the forest of roles. A place where meaning does not have to be efficient. Where identity is not predetermined. Where becoming is not just allowed—it is honoured.

This is the sacred space of love: not a sanctuary from reality, but a sanctuary for reality. A place where reality itself—through us—can be more than it was.

To love is to uncollapse. To uncollapse is to let the cosmos continue.