The Dizziness of Freedom

What Kierkegaard Knew About Falling in Love

There’s a moment, if you’ve ever really fallen for someone, where you feel it before you can name it. It’s not quite excitement and it’s not quite dread. It sits somewhere between the two, vibrating. You’re texting back too fast and then deleting the draft. You’re rehearsing conversations in the shower. You’re doing the thing where you’re happy and miserable at the same time and somehow that feels completely rational.

Søren Kierkegaard had a word for this. Several, actually, but the one that keeps coming back to me is Angest which is typically translated as anxiety, though he meant something more specific than our contemporary clinical application.

The Dizziness of Freedom

In The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Kierkegaard describes anxiety not as fear of something external, but as the vertigo that comes from confronting your own freedom. Fear, he says, has an object: a dog, a diagnosis, an overdue bill. Anxiety is different. Anxiety is what you feel when you look down and realize there’s nothing holding you back from the edge. His exact phrase: anxiety is “the dizziness of freedom.”

Apply that to falling in love and it becomes almost uncomfortably accurate. Nobody is forcing you to send that message. Nobody is making you show up vulnerable to someone who could, in theory, use that vulnerability against you. You could simply not and the fact that you could simply not – that the choice is entirely yours – is exactly what makes it so nauseating.

This is different from the way we usually talk about romantic anxiety. We tend to frame it as a fear of the other person: will they reject me, will they leave, are they who they say they are. Kierkegaard would say you’re looking in the wrong direction. The anxiety isn’t really about them. It’s about you and the terrifying fact of your own freedom to choose.

The Stages, and Where We Get Stuck

Kierkegaard proposed that human existence moves through three stages, or spheres, as he sometimes called them: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. He laid this out across several works, including Either/Or (1843) and Stages on Life’s Way (1845).

The aesthetic stage is governed by sensation, novelty, and the avoidance of boredom. The aesthete lives for experience: the pursuit, the spark, the feeling of being alive in a new situation. This isn’t necessarily shallow; it can be intensely passionate. But it’s structurally incapable of sustaining intimacy, because intimacy requires repetition, and repetition is the aesthete’s enemy.

This maps onto a recognizable type: the person who is wonderful in the early stages of falling in love – present, generous, electric – and then seems to evaporate once the relationship becomes ordinary. It’s not malice. It’s an orientation to life. The ordinary is where they lose interest, because the ordinary isn’t producing the feeling anymore.

The ethical stage involves commitment. The choice to bind yourself to something or someone, over time, with full awareness that it will be difficult. Kierkegaard’s primary example is marriage, not as romance, but as the daily decision to show up. The ethical person doesn’t love because it feels good. They love as an act of will. Moving between these stages isn’t automatic, and Kierkegaard is clear that it requires a kind of rupture; a crisis that makes the old way of being unlivable. Which might explain why some people only manage to really commit to someone after a significant loss or failure. The aesthetic mode stops being an option not because they outgrew it rationally, but because something broke and forced the question.

Kierkegaard’s Own Wreckage

It would be dishonest to write about Kierkegaard and love without mentioning Regine Olsen. He was engaged to her in 1840. He broke the engagement the following year and, by most accounts, in a way calculated to make her despise him, so she would grieve less. He spent years writing about it, thinly veiled in pseudonyms, across multiple books. He never married anyone else. Whether his reasoning was noble self-sacrifice or elaborate self-justification is still genuinely debated by scholars. What’s striking is that the man who wrote most clearly about the anxiety of freedom and the necessity of commitment apparently couldn’t navigate it in his own life. He theorized the leap and couldn’t take it.

That’s not a contradiction worth mocking. It’s actually the most human thing about him, and it’s worth sitting with if you’re writing about self-sabotage: sometimes the person who understands a pattern most clearly is the least able to escape it.

The Leap

The concept Kierkegaard is most famous for is the “leap of faith,” which he developed primarily in relation to religious belief, specifically in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) and Fear and Trembling (1843). Yet the structure of the leap applies here too.

The leap is necessary precisely because it can’t be reasoned into. You can gather information, you can assess compatibility, you can make spreadsheets about shared values if that’s your thing, and none of it closes the gap. At some point, you either jump or you don’t. The jump is not supported by certainty. That’s the whole point.

This is part of why intellectualizing a relationship, analyzing it constantly, seeking reassurance through logic, doesn’t actually resolve the anxiety. It can’t. The anxiety is structural. It exists because you are free and the outcome is genuinely uncertain and you are choosing anyway. No amount of evidence eliminates that.

What This Actually Means

I don’t think Kierkegaard is offering comfort here, exactly. What he’s offering is something slightly more useful: a reframe. If the anxiety you feel when falling for someone is the dizziness of freedom – if it’s not a malfunction but a signal that something genuinely matters and the stakes are genuinely real – then it becomes a little less something to fix and a little more something to acknowledge. You’re not broken for feeling it. You’re not more anxious than other people, or fundamentally unsuited to love. You’re experiencing what it actually feels like to stand at the edge of a choice that cannot be made safely.

The self-sabotage usually starts when we try to resolve that feeling prematurely; retreating before we’ve jumped, or manufacturing a reason to leave that lets us feel like we chose rather than fled. The anxiety doesn’t go away if you pull back from the edge. It just gets quieter for a while, and then it finds you again in the next situation, or the next.

Kierkegaard didn’t have a clean answer to this. He circled it for most of his adult life but he was at least honest about what the question was.

That’s probably where we should start too.