metastability
nounEtymology From meta- + stability.
1
An unstable but potentially long-lived state of a system; for example, a supersaturated solution or an excited atom.
- Soloman's belief that love is necessarily paradoxical issues from his attempt to define it as what Sartre would call a dialectical metastability. Love must therefore be not a "state of the union but a never ending conflict of pushing away and pulling together."1989, Irving Singer, The Nature of Love:
- Derived terms
- metastable