The Course of Love
We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we’ve all but consciously forgotten. We behave according to an archaic logic which now escapes us, following a meaning we can’t properly lay bare to those we depend on most. We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in, with whom we are truly dealing, and what sort of behavior the person before us is rightfully owed. We can be a little tricky to be around.
When our minds are involved in transference, we lose the ability to give people and things the benefit of the doubt; we swiftly and anxiously move towards the worst conclusions that the past once mandated.
The business of repatriating emotions emerges as one of the most delicate and necessary tasks of love. To accept the risks of transference is to prioritize sympathy and understanding over irritation and judgment. Two people can come to see that sudden bursts of anxiety or hostility may not always be directly caused by them, and so should not always be met with fury or wounded pride. Bristling and condemnation can give way to compassion.
We don’t need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.
We place such demands on our partners, and become so unreasonable around them, because we have faith that someone who understands obscure parts of us, whose presence solves so many of our woes, must somehow also be able to fix everything about our lives. We exaggerate the other’s powers in a curious sort of homage—heard in adult life decades down the line—to a small child’s awe at their own parents’ apparently miraculous capacities.
Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might only constitute a narrow and perhaps rather mean-minded aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it, to be loved rather than to love.
Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service. The word has grown freighted with negative connotations. An individualistic, self-gratifying culture cannot easily equate contentment with being at someone else’s call. We are used to loving others in return for what they can do for us, for their capacity to entertain, charm, or soothe us.
The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behavior.
The parent has to second-guess what the cry, the kick, the grief, or the anger is really about. And what marks out this project of interpretation—and makes it so different from what occurs in the average adult relationship—is its charity.
The world thereby assumes, during Esther’s early years, a kind of stability that she will later feel it must subsequently have lost—but which in fact it only ever had thanks to her parents’ determined and judicious editing.
A well-loved child is set a challenging precedent. By its very nature, parental love works to conceal the effort which went into generating it. It shields the recipient from the donor’s complexity and sadness—and from an awareness of how many other interests, friends, and concerns the parent has sacrificed in the name of love.
He began by hoping, naively and selfishly, that he and Kirsten were raising better versions of themselves. It’s taken him a while to realize that he has instead helped to put on earth two people with an in-built mission to challenge him, individuals who will inflict upon him repeated frustrations, frequent bewilderment, and a forced, unsettling, and occasionally beautiful expansion of his interests
At times the protective veil of paternal sentimentality slips, and Rabih sees that he has given over a very substantial share of the best days of his life to a pair of human beings who, if they weren’t his own children, would almost surely strike him as being fundamentally unremarkable—so much so, in fact, that were he to meet them in a pub in thirty years’ time, he might prefer not even to talk to them. The insight is unendurable.
Whatever modest denials parents may offer—however much they may downplay their ambitions in front of strangers—to have a child is, at the outset, at least, to make an assault on perfection, to attempt to create not just another average human being but an exemplar of distinctive perfection. Mediocrity, albeit the statistical norm, can never be the initial goal; the sacrifices required to get a child to adulthood are simply too great.
In order to let the separation take its course, Rabih and Kirsten know not to become too strict, distant, or intimidating. They understand how easy it is for children to get hung up on a mum or dad who is hard to read, scary-seeming, or just not around all that much. Such parents can hook in their offspring more tightly than the responsive and stable ones will ever do. Rabih and Kirsten have no wish to be the sort of self-centered, volatile figures with whom a child can become obsessed for life, and so take care to be natural, approachable, and even, sometimes, theatrically daft. They want to be unintimidating enough that Esther and William will be able, when the time comes, to park them cleanly to one side and get on with their lives. Being taken a bit for granted is, they implicitly feel, the best possible indication of the quality of their love.
Even after years together, there remains a hurdle of fear around asking for a proof of desire. But with a horrible, added complication: we now assume that any such anxiety couldn’t legitimately exist. Hence the temptation to pretend that reassurance would be the last thing on our minds.
We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn’t a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a peculiar sign of well-being. It means we haven’t allowed ourselves to take other people for granted, that we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn out badly—and that we are invested enough to care.
The motif of a beloved taking second place to a random stranger in a masturbatory fantasy has no logical part in Romantic ideology. But in practice it is precisely the dispassionate separation of love and sex that may be needed to correct and relieve the burdens of intimacy.
From one perspective, it can seem pathetic to have to concoct fantasies rather than to try to build a life in which daydreams can reliably become realities. But fantasies are often the best thing we can make of our multiple and contradictory wishes: they allow us to inhabit one reality without destroying the other.
The modern expectation is that there will be equality in all things in the couple—which means, at heart, an equality of suffering. But calibrating grief to ensure an equal dosage is no easy task: misery is experienced subjectively, and there is always a temptation for each party to form a sincere yet competitive conviction that, in truth, his or her life really is more cursed—in ways that the partner seems uninclined to acknowledge or atone for. It takes a superhuman wisdom to avoid the consoling conclusion that one has the harder life.
Couples are not only besieged by practical demands at every hour, they are also inclined to think of these demands as humiliating, banal, and meaningless, and are therefore likely to be averse to offering pity or praise to one another, or themselves, just for enduring them.
Rabih and Kirsten are suffering partly because they have so seldom seen their struggles sympathetically reflected in the art they know, which instead tends to belittle, and to poke puerile fun at the sorts of troubles they face.
They will never be outwardly distinguished or earn large sums of money; they will die in obscurity and without the laurels of their community, and yet the good order and continuity of civilization nevertheless depend to some tiny but vital degree on their quiet, unnoticed labors.
Were Rabih and Kirsten able to read about themselves as characters in a novel, they might—if the author had even a little talent—experience a brief but helpful burst of pity at their not at all unworthy plight, and thereby perhaps learn to dissolve some of the tension that arises on those evenings when, once the children are in bed, the apparently demoralizing and yet in truth deeply grand and significant topic of the ironing comes up.
However unedifying and plain silly attacks of jealousy may be, they cannot be skirted: we should accept that we simply cannot stay sane on hearing that the person we love and rely on has touched the lips, or even so much as the hand, of another party. This makes no sense, of course—and runs directly counter to the often quite sober and loyal thoughts we may have had when we happened to betray someone in the past. But we are not amenable to reason here. To be wise is to recognize when wisdom will simply not be an option.
He is starting to learn about “being good” but not in the normal, secondhand kind of way, by listening to a sermon or dutifully following social mores from a lack of choice or out of a passive, cowed respect for tradition. He is becoming a slightly nicer person by the most authentic and effective means possible: through having a chance to explore the long-term consequences of bad behavior from within.
Our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions. Yet what is worse is our utopian refusal to countenance the divergence, our naive hope that a cost-free synchronization might somehow be found: that the libertine might live for adventure while avoiding loneliness and chaos. Or that the married Romantic might unite sex with tenderness, and passion with routine.
The error of the infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind the central truth of human nature: that everyone—not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts—but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings. The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better.
Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.
Melancholy isn’t always a disorder that needs to be cured. It can be a species of intelligent grief which arises when we come face-to-face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start.
We have not been singled out. Marrying anyone, even the most suitable of beings, comes down to a case of identifying which variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.
It might seem silly to spend fifty minutes (and £75) on how Rabih responded when Kirsten called upstairs to him for the second time to make his way down to lay the table, or Kirsten’s way of reacting to Esther’s disappointing geography results. But these are the breeding grounds for issues that, if left unchecked, could develop into the sort of catastrophes that society is more prepared to focus its attention on: domestic violence, family breakups, the interventions of social services, court orders . . . Everything begins with small humiliations and letdowns.
An avoidant attachment style is marked by a strong desire to avoid conflict and to reduce exposure to the other when emotional needs have not been met. The avoidant person quickly presumes that others are keen to attack them and that they cannot be reasoned with. One just has to escape, pull up the drawbridge, and go cold.
Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.
Rabih recognizes that it’s a mere sleight of language that allows him to maintain that he has been married only once. What has conveniently looked like a single relationship in fact sits across so many evolutions, disconnections, renegotiations, intervals of distance, and emotional homecomings that he has in truth gone through at least a dozen divorces and remarriages—just to the same person.
Pronouncing a lover “perfect” can only be a sign that we have failed to understand them. We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.
Choosing a person to marry is hence just a matter of deciding exactly what kind of suffering we want to endure rather than of assuming we have found a way to skirt the rules of emotional existence.
Enlightened romantic pessimism simply assumes that one person can’t be everything to another. We should look for ways to accommodate ourselves as gently and as kindly as we can to the awkward realities of living alongside another fallen creature. There can only ever be a “good enough” marriage.
For this realization to sink in, it helps to have had a few lovers before settling down, not in order to have had a chance to locate “the right person,” but in order to have had an ample opportunity to discover at first hand, and in many different contexts, the truth that there isn’t any such a person; that everyone really is a bit wrong when considered from close up.
Rabih feels ready for marriage because he has despaired of being fully understood.
It’s profoundly counterintuitive for us to think of ourselves as mad. We seem so normal and mostly so good—to ourselves. It’s everyone else who is out of step . . . and yet, maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness.
They seem “difficult,” of course, within the cage of marriage when they lose their tempers over such petty things: logistics, in-laws, cleaning duties, parties, the groceries . . . But it’s not the other person’s fault, it’s what we’re trying to do with them. It’s the institution of marriage that is principally impossible, not the individuals involved.
We speak of “love” as if it were a single, undifferentiated thing, but it comprises two very different modes: being loved and loving. We should marry when we are ready to do the latter and have become aware of our unnatural—and dangerous—fixation on the former.
We are ready for marriage when we accept that, in a number of significant areas, our partner will be wiser, more reasonable, and more mature than we are. We should want to learn from them. We should bear having things pointed out to us. And at other moments we should be ready to model ourselves on the best pedagogues and deliver our suggestions without shouting or expecting the other simply to know. Only if we were already perfect could the idea of mutual education be dismissed as unloving.
The Romantic vision of marriage stresses the importance of finding the “right” person, which is taken to mean someone in sympathy with the raft of our interests and values. There is no such person over the long term. We are too varied and peculiar. There cannot be lasting congruence. The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace.