The mycelium in love

— The love that fuses without dissolving, that distinguishes without separating — the grammar the fungi have practised for 400 million years. —

§0 · A fracture to begin with

There are two dominant stories about love, and you have probably been handed both. The first says: love is fusion. Becoming one, losing the borders, being no more than a single being with the other. This is the romantic love of the 19th century, reworked by Hollywood and by pop. The second says: love is autonomy. Keeping your borders, preserving your individuality, living side by side without merging. This is the contemporary wisdom of personal development — secure attachment, «me first, you next». Both stories fall short. And there is a third grammar, truer, several hundred million years older, that the fungi have practised since they came into being. This article is called The mycelium in love because that title is, literally, what is happening.

Sheldrake — the fusion of hyphae, observed

Here is what happens when two strands of mycelium meet in the soil. Each strand (a hypha) is a microscopic thread of fungal cells. When the tip of one hypha touches the tip of another, several scenarios are possible, and the fungus — brainless, let us recall — chooses which. First scenario: the two hyphae recognise each other as foreign (a different species or an incompatible strain) and one of the two retracts. Second scenario: they recognise each other as close enough but distinct (same species, compatible strain), and they anastomose — that is, they fuse their cytoplasm while keeping their nuclei separate within a single tube. This fusion-but-not-confusion is a structure of rare elegance. Third scenario: they fuse entirely, nuclei included, forming a new genetically hybrid organism.

The second scenario — anastomosis — is the one that interests me here. Merlin Sheldrake describes it at length in Entangled Life. In an anastomosis, the two hyphae remain distinguishable — each nucleus keeps its genetic identity, each hypha keeps its information. But they now share the same cytoplasm. Nutrients circulate freely between them. So do the chemical signals. They act as a single organism while remaining two. And the beauty of the arrangement is that they can at any moment de-anastomose — the hyphae close back up, the fusion stops, each becomes independent again. The structure is plastic, alive, negotiated.

Strand — the grammar we were looking for

Sophie Strand is an American poet and essayist, young, who lives with a chronic autoimmune condition. In The Flowering Wand (2022) and then The Body is a Doorway (2024), she offers a mycorrhizal rewriting of the sacred masculine, of chronic illness, and of human love. Her own contribution is to have explicitly made the bridge that Sheldrake had only sketched: what the fungi do in anastomosis is, perhaps, what humans do when they truly love.

Her thesis, in a formulation I condense from several passages: to love, in the strong sense, is neither to dissolve nor to stay side by side. It is to anastomose. To keep your own nuclei while sharing your cytoplasm. To preserve your genetic signals while letting the nutrients circulate. To remain two while acting as one. And — the decisive point — to be able, at certain moments, to de-anastomose: to withdraw and become whole again, without that meaning the end of the relationship. The mycorrhizal structure gives those who lacked the vocabulary the exact grammar of what a love that lasts without devouring would be.

Kimmerer — the grammar of animacy as scaffolding

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, is the third summit. She does not write specifically about love between humans. But she forged, in Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) and Gathering Moss (2003), a concept that makes the mycorrhizal grammar possible within human relationships: the grammar of animacy. In the Potawatomi language, nouns fall into two genders: animate and inanimate. Water is animate. The stone, in certain contexts, is animate. The forest is animate. And the human is not the only one to be held as a «who» rather than an «it».

This grammar changes the lover's posture. If the other is an irreducible «who» — who exceeds me, who escapes me, who will never let themselves be entirely known — then love cannot be fusion. The other is not an object to be integrated. And it cannot be pure separation either, because in the grammar of animacy the «whos» are in relation by default — they address one another, they alter one another, they nourish one another. This is exactly the structure of mycorrhizal anastomosis, transposed into interpersonal grammar.

Carson — Eros the bittersweet

The fourth summit is the oldest and the most academic. Anne Carson, a Canadian Hellenist, published in 1986 with Princeton Eros the Bittersweet — her reworked doctoral thesis. She takes up a phrase from Sappho — glukupikron, «bittersweet», literally «sweet-sharp» — to describe Eros as the ancient Greeks thought it. And she demonstrates, quotation after quotation, that Greek Eros is neither fusion nor separation. It is the tension between the two — the distance that separates and that desires at the same time, the lack that is never filled and that keeps the relationship alive.

Carson's thesis: if Eros were satisfied, it would dissolve. Satisfied desire ceases to be desire. But if the distance were total, Eros could not even form. It needs the almost-touchable, the almost-graspable, the «you who are so near that I can touch you, and so other that I will never know you entirely». This precise tension — Carson names it the edge — is the fundamental operator of love. And one notices, laying her pages beside Sheldrake's: Carson's tension is precisely what mycorrhizal anastomosis holds. The nearness of the shared cytoplasm and the distance of the preserved nuclei. The fusion that does not dissolve. The distinction that does not separate.

The theorem of love

Let us set the four side by side. Sheldrake: the fungi fuse their cytoplasm while preserving their nuclei. Strand: this is the grammar of love that humans were looking for without naming it. Kimmerer: the grammar of animacy makes this structure thinkable between irreducible «whos». Carson: Eros itself obeys the tension between nearness and distance, of which anastomosis is the biological embodiment.

A single logical structure, articulated at four different scales. Donna Haraway, as a biologist-philosopher, offers a word for this structure: sympoiesis — making-with, becoming-with, as opposed to autopoiesis (self-making). Sympoiesis names precisely this structure where identity emerges in and through relation, without thereby merging with it. It is the grammar of holobionts (Margulis), of mycorrhizal forests (Simard), and — Strand adds — perhaps of any human love that lasts without devouring.

Three gestures for practising anastomosis in a relationship

Not couples therapy. Three simple gestures, which seem obvious and which, precisely because they are obvious, are rarely practised with the discipline they ask for.

Gesture one — keep a shared cytoplasmic space. This means: a daily ritual where you circulate within each other. Not a great weekly conversation. A daily circulation. Making the coffee together in silence for five minutes. Walking to the bakery as two. Telling each other a night's dreams in under a hundred seconds in the morning. These are the nutrients passing through the fused hyphae. Without that daily flow, the anastomosis stops — and the relationship becomes two separate nuclei with no shared cytoplasm.

Gesture two — keep a preserved nucleus. This means: a space each week, or each day, where each one stays entirely alone with themselves. Not waiting for the other to come home. Not in retaliation. Not as emotional distance. As a nucleus that holds its difference so that the anastomosis has meaning. An hour's walk alone. An evening reading without speaking. A separate friendship you do not share. Without that preserved nucleus, anastomosis becomes fusion — and the two nuclei end up dissolving into a magma that no longer has an identity.

Gesture three — being able to de-anastomose temporarily without drama. This means: knowing how to take a week's distance, sometimes, without it meaning a crisis. Travelling alone. Having a weekend out of contact. The fungus does this when the environment changes — it retracts its hyphae, it folds back onto its core, it waits. When the environment turns favourable again, it re-fuses. This plasticity — this breathing of the anastomosis — is what sets sympoietic relationships apart from fusional ones. The first kind last forty years. The second explode after five.