Liminal Love

Standing in the Doorway, Love Calls You By Your Name

Mar 17, 2025

Read this essay in print in The Void - Spring 2025.

Arnold Böcklin’s *The Isle of the Dead* (1883)

Slavoj Žižek often has this to say of love: that we do not know precisely what it is that makes us fall in love with someone, but once we are in love we are able to list what it was that made us fall in love (her eyes, her lips, her humor, etc.). There is this I think accurate idea that we do not fall in love with someone because of their specific traits, but we back-fill once we are in the state of love. The consequence comes before the catalyst in a way that we cannot quite explain, and thus, we try to explain it away afterwards. Perhaps the most honest answer to the question of why you fell in love with someone is this: “I don't know, it just sort of happened.” But that isn’t the romantic answer, and so we shy away from it.

That’s the strange thing about love: it lives in this liminal space between the already-there and the not-there-yet. And it lives in this liminal space not only at the beginning of a relationship, but throughout and after it. Love is constantly on the threshold between states. This is what makes it exciting, this is why we are always searching for it in new and exciting ways. You think love is waiting for you in the other room, so you go in there, but you realize that it was standing in the doorway. Now that you're in the room, you already need to leave and move if you want that same love that you’re seeking.

Standing in the Existential Threshold

Bob Dylan has explored love a multitude of ways throughout his career, but here I will focus on “Standing in the Doorway”. This rhythmic ballad has more insights into liminal love that most other art, so I figured it would be a good place to start. We’ll also take a look at Leonard Cohen’s “Love Calls You By Your Name” later in the essay. Both Dylan and Cohen see love as an experience in liminality, a tension between hope and despair, finality and temporality, pleasure and pain, union and loneliness. This is the brilliance of love—there’s almost a thrill to knowing that the very thing that provides us so much joy in our lives contains a shadow that could wreck us. Or vice versa, the very knowledge that the deep pain we feel now can be overthrown by the very same emotion in a different light gives us the slither of hope we need to keep going.

One needn’t even fully agree that love itself is a liminal experience, but our ability to reflect on our love experiences surely depends on our topographically liminal perspective. It is only as I walk out the door that I realize what a huge mistake I’ve made, and that I can fully reflect on what the love truly means. I am, in a sense, blinded by love when I experience it fully and first-hand, “in the room” with the beloved. Maybe I didn’t know how good I had it, or maybe I thought it was much better than it really was. We’ve probably been in both positions. But it’s only with a little perspective, standing in the doorway, looking back, that we can truly see the love experience for what it is. The trick, the paradox, the cruelty of it all is that you cannot move back inside and have that same love experience. The love has already been tainted by your decision to leave, even if you only made it so far as the threshold. When you return, it is a different love, perhaps a love injured and torn by your decision to leave, and your impending decision to come back. It is in the threshold that we can reflect and self-realize what sort of love we want and whether the love we’re looking at is the love we want or something else.1

Of course, the inescapable fact about love is that, like all things we experience, it is bound by time. You have memories of love, good and bad, and you either chase those same feelings or run away from them for the rest of your life. But the future is uncertain. You don’t know if you will ever experience those things again. You only have the now, and the now is where you have the chance to take that uncertain future and turn it into a memory you will hold onto rather than try to forget.

In “Standing in the Doorway,” we join the protagonist (who we’ll refer to as Dylan for ease, but this is not necessarily Dylan singing in the first person) at the end of a relationship, dealing with what it means for a love to be over, or at least no longer two-sided. It appears that Dylan still loves this woman.

The song opens with “I’m walking through the summer nights, the jukebox playing low.” Already, we’re moving through something short-lived, a summer night. It may not even be fully dark, and Dylan is hearing tunes he knows too well: tunes of heartbreak, despair, and loneliness when the promise of the opposite felt so close. But we know that this has happened too often, too many times. And we know that the beloved is nowhere near. This is not a world he’s going to remain in forever, but again, this world is just a liminal state for him, a passing-through before he moves on.

When Dylan is “standing in the doorway crying,” we know all too well that moment: where you must collect yourself, on your way from your deep heartbreak back to the “normal” world where you can’t be crying all the time, you have to get on with things.2 To echo Kierkegaard (can you believe it!), life doesn’t stop moving while you figure things out. You have to figure things out right in the middle of life, while the train keeps on chugging along. And so, standing in the doorway, a place one does not usually stand, a place not designed for stopping, the lover has an opportunity to let out his raw emotion, his inner turmoil, before entering the outside world where such things should be kept inside. But of course, if this was a serious relationship, quite literally the inside may no longer be his and he may not be able to go there just to grieve. The inside represents a form of action, an act of returning to the beloved.

And the doorway is such an interesting place to be: the doorway has no place of its own, but it neither belongs to the outside nor the inside. It is a pure place of liminality. It exists only by marking what it is not. It signifies the distinction between outside and inside, but it is neither itself. When Dylan is standing in the doorway, he is not just stuck between two places, but he is in a place that has no place of its own. The love is absent, but not yet. There is still a trace of that love that Dylan had with the beloved, and that trace is precisely what makes love so liminal. As he sings later, “the ghost of our old love has not gone away,” signifying this trace that lingers, and it’s a trace that will linger for a long time. Perhaps forever.

He follows this line up with “I got nothing to go back to now,” which adds an interesting level of finality to the doorway, as if this liminal space is the last time Dylan will experience what lies on the inside. Once he fully crosses that threshold, there is no going back. He has to keep moving forwards. That feeling that the beloved’s decision to break up the relationship always feels so final, and one is simply left to stand in the doorway, and then move on with finality. This is a common arc in rom-coms, particularly of the mid-2000s Hugh Grant variety where, right before the emotional climax of the movie, the protagonist finds himself alone and he has to keep moving, he has to believe that the beloved is truly gone forever, and it’s only when he learns to get back to his life with the absence that fate brings the beloved back and they are able to love each other fully gain. The finality is vital. The doorway defines the very impossibility of returning to the relationship as it was. The moment Dylan steps into the doorway, onto the threshold, the relationship is transformed not only by the beloved’s decision, but by Dylan’s own decision to accept that and make his way out the door. The act of stepping into the doorway reveals something in and of itself: his movement away from the beloved is imbued with meaning by the existence of this doorway, by the fact that he now could remain inside or leave forever. This is the either/or decision that plagues humanity and its ethical decisions. The doorway here helps Dylan define the love that he has lost, but also reveals the very instability of that love that was not visible when he was “in the room”, so to speak. But of course, unlike the tidy endings of rom-coms, often we are simply forced to contend with that instability, with the trace of our old loves, for the rest of time. We are unable to return (even if we are able to physically return to the same beloved, something has changed…) but that trace still lingers and cannot be erased. Haunted by the ghost of our old love, forever seeking ways, perhaps, to escape it. But the doorway is precisely where the old loves turns into a trace and that moment of reduction to a trace is the singular moment where a decision can be made. Whether to turn back, or whether to move on. Neither option returns the lover to the beloved in the way they existed before, and both present radical choices for the lover.

There is a sort of hangover in the post-break-up world: Dylan sings “the light in this place is so bad, Making me sick in the head,” and one can easily imagine coarse fluorescent lighting painfully pulsating into the eyes. Only in heartbreak, in the absence of love, can we experience something typically so good and symbolic of the good—light—as this sickening experience. Losing love is like bad lighting: you don’t want to stick around, and so you keep moving, you keep on in that liminal state.

The laughter too is making him sick in the head and it’s making him sad. When you’re heartbroken you don’t understand how others can laugh. We get the impression in this verse that Dylan himself is stuck in a sort of existential liminality: the light is bad, the laughter is sad, everything is sort of not what it should be. This echoes Sartre’s nausea in a rather poetic way. When you realize, in a shock, that your love is not what it seems, then everything else becomes questionable. You experience a form of alienation from the world that feels as if you’ll never come back to things being the way they were, the way it feels like they should be. You lack trustfulness on an existential level. This is reinforced by the light not just making him sick, but sick in the head, disoriented. The stars turning cherry red also indcates that his own perception is losing its grip on reality: red with love, or with anger? This is the experience of “standing in the doorway”, one way leads back to love and the other to resentment.

This is reinforced with the very next line, in the next verse, “Don’t know if I saw you if I would kiss you or kill you, It probably wouldn't matter to you anyhow.” This further highlights the volatility of love, of this liminal space, this existential decision. There can be no two things further apart than a kiss or a kill (well... I can think of something... but I shouldn’t mention it here. I shouldn’t mention sex here.) But the lover is faced with this unbelieveable decision, still feeling intense passion but also wanting to kill the beloved for the pain and hurt that’s been caused, she she’s given him. This is a strange place to be, and only love can put you there.

Fascinatingly, this is a purely internal struggle, highlighted by the lover noting that this dichotomy probably wouldn’t matter to the beloved. And it’s not that the beloved wouldn’t care if the lover killed her, but the beloved doesn’t care how the lover feels about her, she doesn’t care that he doesn’t know whether he’d kiss her or kill her. His internal feelings are no longer her concern, and that adds to the emotional strandedness of the lover here, stranded in the doorway.3

We see the lover attempt to move beyond this liminal space and fail: “Last night I danced with a stranger, but she just reminded me you were the one.” In an attempt to rekindle some sort of love-feeling, the lover dances, but it’s with a strnager, not someone he already has a connection with. But of course, even there, the lover is engaging in that liminal space with the stranger of becoming more intimate, there are few things more intimate than dancing (though I can think of one... although I probably shouldn’t mention it. I shouldn’t mention it. I shouldn’t mention sex here.) The lover is trying to forge a new path forwards, out of the doorway of liminal love, to put those feelings to rest and know what he’d do if he saw the lover, what we all want to do when we see past lovers: shrug and say his and move one quickly and non-chalantly. Even now, after the night was over, the lover still refers to the stranger as a stranger. He never got to know her, not even afterwards. Never got her name. And all she did was remind him that his beloved was the one. Was the one. But no more. This recognition that the beloved is no longer the one, but is still playing that role in his mind, is a powerful reminder of the liminal love, the tension between past and present, and the lover’s attempt to escape the room of the beloved has failed. He is still tethered to the past, to the one was was the one even if he could be dancing with someone who is, right now, the one.

The lover is paralyzed, but even this is a paradox. He’ll go through life paralyzed, constantly moving forwards but still paralyzed, not moving. Still right in the doorway. Here we see, in the lack of agency one has in paralysis, that love lingers liminally long after we want it too. It still paralyzes us when we think we’re moving on forwards. Liminal love is a cycle, a cycle where one always returns to standing in the doorway, crying.

A rather bleak picture indeed. Ironically, it is in Leonard Cohen’s “Love Calls You By Your Name” that, though traditionally seen as even bleaker than Dylan, Cohen provides the picture of hope that only liminal love can afford.

“Love Calls You By Your Name” (The Ethical)

Love is something that we can escape, we think. If only I become this person, or that person, then I can escape love’s enticing call. I can become someone who can resist the siren’s call. No.

“You thought that it could never happen to all the people that you became.” Clearly, the beloved in Cohen’s song (we’ll assume the same posture of singer as lover and other as beloved, even though that’s not quite as explicitly stated here. For the same of the essay, we’ll run with it. Happy to discuss at great length why that’s not really true some other time... or here in this footnote.)4 There’s a strong sense throughout the song that the beloved is trying to create a self, is trying to be someone she is not. And yet the tragic irony, the disturbing paradox, of this situation is that it is not who we can force ourselves to become, and it is not who we are now, but somewhere in between the two that love calls us. We see this with the “body lost in legend,” something so physical, especially when it comes to love, lost in the not-real, the ephemeral, clearly in the liminal space between the physical space that it occupies and the story we tell ourselves about what we are doing—stories that are decidedly not taking up space in the physical realm.

Ah, but we are “here, right here, between” so many things, things that are impossible to combine yet create something exciting in their between, something emotional, passionate, and even despairing: “between the birthmark and the stain, between the ocean and your open vein, between the snowman and the rain,” placing us in an explicitly liminal space, in transition, creating an emotional and psychological tension that drives us forward. This is not a place we want to be, but this is where love calls you by your name. This is where love knows you, when you are in this liminal space, this doorway between two opposing forces, between the massive expanse of the ocean and the tiny slit of your open vein.

What is this call? What is this call that love calls us? It is a call into the void, into the liminality itself and, like the siren, encourages you to stay, encourages the lover to stay. It says “I know you. I know your name. Stay with me.” It deepens the sense of the lover being trapped in an unresolved state. This is the position of the lover: trapped in an unresolved state between ecstasy and despair. The call comes both from out there and within. As you stand in the doorway, you cannot tell from where the call comes, inside or outside. Does the call come from the outside, from a lover, from a divine presence, from the external objecivity of love itself? Or does it come from within? From the sense of self? From the fragments and pieces of ourselves that we are forced to contend with, to pick up, and put back together—and all the king’s horses couldn't do it.5 This ambiguity reinforces the liminality of love itself. Where does the call come from? Paradoxically, it could clearly be both. To call upon Kierkegaard for assistance once again, the solution to the sickness unto death, despair, is precisely this grounding the psychological internal self in the external power that established it. It is this mixing of internal and external that finally resolves the tension and wrestles the self free from despair. And is love not the exact same way? When we place all of our love on the beloved then we misplace it, and we should prepare to be disappointed, let down, heart broken, and in despair. However, when we love the beloved because of something internal to us, be it validation or self-fulfillment of status or something, then we also should be prepared for disappointment, heartbreak, and despair,. It is only when the two—the external and the internal—properly mix, when there is a synthesis of the internal and external, that we can truly love and love can truly call us by our name, know who we are, and expect that us, who we are, and not some expectation of who we are going to be or some memory of who we once were, but who we are right now, that is who love calls, when the internal and the external have been properly synthesized.

Again, to return to the doorway, this is the site of true anxiety and despair. This has always been the paradox so difficult to grasp from Kierkegaard’s most compelling works: that in order to escape despair, you must first deepen your despair. This is the defining feature of “anchoring your self in the power that established you.” To accept the fact that you, by yourself, cannot escape despair, that it is your self’s very inability to do so that permits you to anchor your self in the external power that established you. In both “Standing in the Doorway” and Cohen’s song, the lover is no longer the lover they once were, but they have yet to become the lover they would like to be. They are stuck in the inbetween, and only by accepting this state of liminality can one truly become the lover they want to be. The paralysis that both lovers thus experience is one that prevents them from staying precisely where they are, and thus becoming precisely who it is they most would like to be! And so, both are “between”. Between past love and future love, between the old lover and the new lover, and between the despairing self and the self that deepens despair in order to escape it.

You are standing in the doorway, and love calls your name. This is the ethical responsibility that you must shoulder. You must recall that there is a sense in which the liminality of love itself forces the lover into a position of ethical responsibility, into a posture of ethical action. Cohen’s song places the lover between opposing forces, between these unresolvable opposites that cannot be easily resolved, that cannot be easily synthesized. We could easily say, (admittedly unpoetically,) “between the aesthetic life, and the ethical life, once again, once again, love calls you by your name.” This “in-between” state is precisely where we want our lover to live! Anyone who has read Kierkegaard’s Either/Or knows that while Kierkegaard is truly advocating for the ethical life of Judge Wilhelm, it is the life of the aesthete that captures everybody’s attention. It’s the interesting life! Within the huge tome that is Either/Or, it is the short chapter titled The Seducer’s Diary that became an independent sensation and set the mid-19th-century Copenhagen literature scene on fire. Yes, we want a lover that is responsible, ethical, committed, and self-assured. But we don’t want our lover to lose the pleasure-seeking, passive elements that were probably more pronounced when we first fell in love. The lover in Cohen’s song doesn’t appear to directly select the aesthetic or the ethical life, but insists that it is between the aesthetic and the ethical that love calls your name again and again. The true ethical stance for a lover is to stand in the doorway, capable of self-reflection, capable of killing or kissing. Love lives in that immeasurably thin line between the two extremes. Quite contrary to the idea that sitting “between” these two stances always, never making a choice, is the avoidance of the ethical call of love, rather Cohen’s lover is saying “No! It is here, right here! Here, love calls me by my name! Here, love knows me! Here, love understands that I am myself unresolved!” The lover understands that love requires an authentic, fully responsible self, and that to truly be one’s authentic self, one truly must standing in the doorway, crying. This is the ultimate paradox of existence: that to be the self that can fully respond to love’s call, one must rest easy in one’s unresolvedness. It is an ongoing process, never finished. One truly must be between the birthmark and the stain, between the ocean and their open vein. If the lover were to step outside, they begin to falsely construct their self independently, detached from the external grounding power that established them. This idea that the process goes on, never finished, is precisely what makes life-long loving possible and interesting: a lifetime with a person never “finishes off” the love, the love is never complete. This is why, even after sixty or seventy years of marriage, when a spouse passes away, it feels too soon. The love was still not finished.

“Here, Right Here, Between…” (The Leap of Faith to Love)

Love is calling to the lover in this between! And this is the precise “leap of faith” that Kierkegaard made so famous. It is only when the lover stands in the doorway that he can hear love’s call, specifically, of him, by his name. It is from this position, in the doorway, that the lover can make the leap of faith to love, through the anxiety that standing in the doorway brings, and by accepting this anxiety, overcoming it in authentic love.

The lover must relinquish any hope of returning to the love as it once was, embracing the absence of any closure if there is to be any hope of a real love experience again, with the same beloved or another. This is what distinguishes the leap of faith from a mere nostalgic attempt to return to what has already been and cannot be returned to. When Dylan is standing in the doorway, he perhaps cannot yet take the leap of faith since he knows it will ultimately be that nostalgic leap back to what he hopes is still there. He needs to take that time, in the doorway, to collect himself, before he is ready for love with this beloved or another, before he can take that leap. The lover needs to take the risk that the love will never be what it once was, but the leap must still be taken nevertheless.

He must leap through the anxiety about love in order to arrive at love itself. And as Cohen sings, it is “here, right here” in the doorway “between” the hour and the age, between the aesthetic and the ethical, between the beloved and the unknown future, that the lover must leap from.

But this “here, right here” is not a stable location, nor does it provide stable footing. In fact, just like the guitar accompaniment in the song itself, it feels as if it is a “here” that is constantly slipping away. This “here” is not merely the present here-and-now (spatial and temporal specificity) but a “here” defined by its distinctions, always split between the love that has passed and the love that is yet to come. This “between” that is the “here” provokes the very anxiety that the lover must deepen in order to escape it. The lover is always in a position of uncertainty:

I have feelings for my beloved, but she does not yet know of them. Does she have feelings for me? I am with my beloved—does she love me to the same extent that I love her? I don’t feel this relationship is working out. Does she feel the same way, or does she see us moving forwards? She has called us quits—does she want me to reinvigorate the relationship with a grand gesture, with a leap of faith back into the relationship (recognizing the repetition cannot be re-experienced as the same love, but already something new) or does she genuinely want me gone completely?

These are the questions of the doorway, the questions we face “here, right here” where the real love, from the first feelings of fancy all the way through to the end are deferred as a not-yet or an already-gone. And thus paradoxically, through this deferment, it is precisely “here, right here” that the true love exists! It is not in the anxiety of the “will she/won’t she,” “does she/doesn’t she,” that we experience throughout the relationship, but in the accepting that the here and now, those anxieties recognized but not given control, that we finally can say “yes, I am in love! I am experiencing the impossible task of figuring out if I am in love and if my beloved loves me back! I am completely unsure, so I am certain that I am in love!” In many ways, this is a leap to your current position, a leap to remain in a world that requires you to keep moving. Keeping moving requires uncertainty, and both require an impossible decision. In the “here, right here,” Dylan’s lover doesn’t know whether he should 1) kiss the beloved or 2) kill the beloved, he doesn’t know whether to go on dancing with strangers or to take solace that the beloved will always care, even when the “flesh falls off [his] face.”

Importantly, when Dylan’s lover dances with the stranger, but is only reminded that his beloved was the one, Dylan is reminded of the beloved not in her current state, but the memory of the previous relationship that will not exist in its same form if he is to return to her. He is only reminded of the trace within him. So the leap of faith “here, right here” is to leap into the arms of the stranger, despite those feelings, and trust that the trace of the old love will disappear before long. Love must take place “here, right here.” It is not something that waits for the right moment, or for the right set of values, or the right factors, but it happens “here, right here” in the messiness of our lives, in the ambiguous moments that cannot be described, in the unplanned spontaneity of human existence.

“Once again, once again!” (The Repetition of Love’s Call)

But of course, the lover in Cohen’s song does not heed loves call. And so love calls again, and again, and again. This tension between responding to love’s call and resisting it reflects a state of emotional liminality. (This is why The Odyssey is so enduring, and perhaps why it endures more than The Iliad, at least in pop culture. It is that liminal journey. Specifically, the story of the sirens has always fascinated me. Like so many, I would just absolutely love to hear that siren song. I would, like Odysseus, do everything I could to hear it without succumbing to it. Perhaps there is no greater story in the world than that one.) And only in this repetitive state of always being called, never answering, do we find what love truly is. Often, we love our liminality. As much as love is liminal, we love our liminality. When we are called by something true and good, we don't necessarily want to leave and go to that truth and goodness. We want to stay in our liminality. But the trouble with these liminal spaces, just like a doorway, is you cannot stay there forever. That is the beauty of these spaces: “between the dancer and his cane, between the sailboat and the drain,” these are places that, with time, cease to exist.

This call is ongoing, it is always “once again,”6 suggesting that liminality itself is a defining feature of human relationship. You’re always more than friends, less than family. Between a stranger and a lover, that’s where most of our relationships sit, in that liminal space. And we operate with that tension subconsciously guiding our every move: do I want to move closer or turn away? Do I want to step inside and seek shelter or move on to the next town?

Love itself is a repetition either way. Either you return to the same room, the same doorway, night after night, and yet each time it is also a different doorway marked by your absence, by your decision to leave. Or you decide to go to a new town, a new lover, a new doorway, and yet you bring with you traces of the old lover and with each new doorway, with each new love, you attempt to recapture what you loved about the old lover and attempt to “love out” the love you hated in the old love, the love you resent and are constantly trying to escape. But this love still lingers, it lingers in liminality, and it lingers precisely most because you do not want it anymore. The love you hate lingers precisely because you do not want it anymore. The love you chase after lingers precisely because you will never be able to repeat it. Not really.

What we long to recover can only be grasped in fragments, it does not exist anymore. It is not what it was. Cohen’s “once again, once again” is not merely an invitation to return to the same room, to the same love, but to recover, if only fleetingly, a glimpse, a trace, of the love that we long for. Once again, love is calling your name. Are you standing in the doorway, crying? There’s nothing for you to return to, anyhow.

Not that you necessarily have a choice here—the love you want is often not the love that you really want, nor is it the love you will end up with, and you’ll realize that once you have the love that you didn’t know you were seeking, that you didn’t know you needed.

This requirement to collect yourself speaks to the subjective nature of your heartbreak: when you are grieving a death in the family, you are more permitted to grieve publicly. However, with a heartbreak, you can perhaps grieve with one or two of your closest friends but, even then, they will only put up with the sadness for so long. You are expected to “get over it” and not be a drag. But internally, the pain can feel incredibly large. Hence Dylan’s standing in the doorway: the pain is large, and so he needs to stand there and cry for quite some time before he can return to that “normal world” and appear as normal.

One can easily imagine Dylan singing this version live and going “you left me stranded in the doorway crying, blues wrapped around my head.”

While in “Standing in the Doorway,” Dylan as the lover is providing some sort of general thoughts and then addresses the beloved directly (“you [the beloved] left me [Dylan, the lover] standing in the doorway crying”), Cohen’s song appears to speak to the lover from a third perspective that is outside of the lover/beloved relationship. However, this is ambiguous. The speaker (Cohen) may be a former beloved of the lover he is speaking to. Or the speaker may be a more neutral third party.

Take a listen to Nick Cave’s “Song of the Lake” from his 2024 album Wild God, where he sings: