Who hasn't hummed Céline Dion's song "My Heart Will Go On"?¹ Many have seen the scene in James Cameron's Titanic (1997) where Rose throws the Heart of the Ocean, a rare diamond, into the sea. What she is throwing into the sea, where she lost her lover, is the memory of a hidden love that she thus exposes, by making it a secret of the sea. As Rose says, "a woman's heart is an ocean of secrets."
Love and secrets often go hand in hand.
Let's read Voltaire:

Cunegonde and Candide found themselves behind a screen; Cunegonde let fall her handkerchief, Candide picked it up, she took him innocently by the hand, the youth as innocently kissed the young lady's hand with particular vivacity, sensibility, and grace; their lips met, their eyes sparkled, their knees trembled, their hands strayed. Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh passed near the screen and beholding this cause and effect chased Candide from the castle. ²

Do we find such love stories in this day and age, when anyone can find a sexual partner with just a few clicks of the mouse, or access pornography, which, according to Jacques-Alain Miller, only serves to "show […] the absence of the sexual relation in the real"?³
For Freud, love is based on divine details that make us believe in the relation.⁴ And J.-A. Miller states: "Love is a sign […] always correlated with a 'there is.'"⁵
The conditions of love are the secret causes of sexual desire. Desire for the other is correlated with the demand for love, which targets a singular person, to the exclusion of all others.
The precious object of the beloved, in its alterity, fills the hole of the absence of the relation. For Lacan, "the most shocking secret is unveiled before everyone; the ultimate mainspring of desire, […] its aim is the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a."⁶ Where love demands, the drive commands satisfaction and does not make relation.⁷ This is what Lacan describes as the secret of psychoanalysis, namely, the non-existence of the sexual relation.
We are reminded of Borges' The Sect of the Phoenix, in which humanity behaves like an obscene sect that, through the rite of coitus "makes of sex a secret."⁸ In this text, the secret of each person is only the secret of all, it is the shared secret.
Let's extend this question of secrecy to love, from the angle of the non-relation. The secret of love that psychoanalysis unveils, is that the fact of speech makes up for the relation that does not exist. However, a secret does not stop being one, just because one admits it.
Even today, love gives shelter to the drive.

^[1] Song written in 1997 by Will Jennings, composed by James Horner and performed by Céline Dion.
^[2] Voltaire, Candide, trans. John B., New York: Penguin Classics, 1947.
^[3] Miller J.-A., "The Unconscious and the Speaking Body," trans. A. R. Price. Presentation of the theme for the X th Congress of the WAP, 2016, available online: amp-nls.org.
^[4] Cf. Miller J.-A., "L'orientation lacanienne. Les divins détails", teaching delivered at the Department of Psychoanalysis of the University of Paris 8. Lesson of 1 st March 1989, unpublished.
^[5] Miller J.-A., "Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body", trans. B. P. Fulks, in The Symptom, Issue 18, Fall 2019. Available online: Lacan.com.
^[6] Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII, Transference, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, London/NY: Polity 2015, p. 176.
^[7] Cf. Seldes R., "From the Mystery to the Secret of the Sexual", argument for the WAP Congress 2026. Available online: congresamp.com.
^[8] Miller J.-A., "Enigmatised Coitus, A Reading of Borges," available online: Lacan.com.

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