“I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence”

The expression “I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence” is Sugar’s compact statement of love as a deliberate, reasoned commitment rather than surrender to emotional turmoil. Recalling Adrienne Rich’s poem “Splittings,” Sugar turns its closing lines into a personal refrain and, in answering a correspondent caught in an unhealthy relationship, uses it to redirect the question from staying or leaving toward the kind of love a person chooses.

Origin in “Splittings”

Sugar first read Adrienne Rich’s poem “Splittings” when she was twenty-two. Its final lines joined love to intelligence, a connection that had seemed radical to her: love could arise from deep, reasoned intention instead of powerful, shadowy doubts. The expression therefore does not dismiss feeling; it challenges the assumption that intensity or uncertainty must govern intimate choices.

A Repeated Personal Refrain

Sugar describes the lines as having run through her mind countless times over the following twenty years, present both consciously and unconsciously. She is not religious and does not meditate, chant, or pray, but says beloved poems can feel holy to her. That description gives the expression the character of a secular devotion: a remembered poetic thought repeatedly brought to bear on life. Sugar also acknowledges that she has profoundly failed to live up to its aspirations, presenting it as an ongoing discipline rather than a standard she has effortlessly mastered.

Advice and Meaning

In her reply to Lusty Broad, Sugar distinguishes love from an attachment marked by intensity, scarcity, and emotional turmoil. She believes the correspondent already knows a change is needed, while recognizing the fear of what leaving might mean. Rather than simply instructing her to stay or go, Sugar asks how life might be transformed by choosing love with intelligence. The expression thus shifts the emphasis from a binary decision to the judgment and intention that shape a person’s way of loving. Sugar’s final insistence that she is addressing the correspondent’s eyes, not her crotch, makes that appeal pointedly direct: the choice is meant to involve the whole person, including clear-minded judgment.