I know as little about the nature of romantic love as I knew when I was eighteen, but I do know about the deep pleasure of continuing interest, the excitement of wanting to know what somebody else thinks, will do, will not do, the tricks played and unplayed, the short cord that the years make into rope, and in my case, is there, hanging loose, long after death.)
And so he lived with me for the last four years of his life. Not all of that time was easy, indeed some of it was very bad, but it was an unspoken pleasure that having come together so many years before, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured. Sometimes I would resent the understated or seldom stated side of us and, guessing death wasn’t too far away, I would try for something to have afterwards. One day I said, ‘We’ve done fine, haven’t we?’
He said, ‘Fine’s too big a word for me. Why don’t we just say we’ve done better than most people?’8
The hallmark of egotistical love, even when it masquerades as altruistic love, is the negative answer to the question ‘Do I want my love to be happy more than I want him to be with me?’ As soon as we find ourselves working at being indispensable, rigging up a pattern of vulnerability in our loved ones, we ought to know that our love has taken the socially sanctioned form of egotism. Every wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband’s favourite meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense of his sense of reality, to be his closest and effectively his only friend, to encourage him to reject the consensus of opinion and find reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops of steel that will strangle them both. Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband’s often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and says ‘What would I do without you?’ is already destroyed. His woman’s victory is complete, but it is Pyrrhic. Both of them have sacrificed so much of what initially made them lovable to promote the symbiosis of mutual dependence that they scarcely make up one human being between them.
Obsession
In Love, as in pain, in shock, in trouble.
Thus love is a state, presumably a temporary state, an aberration from the norm.
The outward symptoms of this state are sleeplessness, distraction, loss of appetite, alternations of euphoria and depression, as well as starry eyes (as in fever), and agitation.
The principal explanation of the distraction, which leads to the mislaying of possessions, confusion, forgetfulness and irresponsibility, is the overriding obsession with the love object, which may only have been seen from a distance on one occasion. The love object occupies the thoughts of the person diagnosed ‘in love’ all the time despite the probability that very little is actually known about it. To it are ascribed all qualities considered by the obsessed as good, regardless of whether the object in question possesses those qualities in any degree. Expectations are set up which no human being could fulfil. Thus the object chosen plays a special role in relation to the ego of the obsessed, who decided that he or she is the right or the only person for him. In the case of a male this notion may sanction a degree of directly aggressive behaviour either in pursuing the object or driving off competition. In the case of a female, no aggressive behaviour can be undertaken and the result is more likely to be brooding, inexplicable bad temper, a dependence upon the telephone and gossip with other women about the love object, or even acts of apparent rejection and scorn to bring herself to the object’s attention.
Formerly this condition was believed to afflict the individual acutely from the first contact with the object:
Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?1
However, the sudden and acute nature of the affliction seems to have been a characteristic of the illicit form, and since obsession has been made the basis of marriage, more gradual chronic states have also been recognized. The cause of the malady was supposed to have been the infective glance from the eyes of the love-object, which was commonly referred to metaphorically as Cupid’s arrow striking the beholder to the heart and leaving a wound which rankled and would not heal. In more extreme cases of destructive passion even more far-fetched pseudo-explanations were invented, like Phaedra’s belief that she was being specifically tormented by Venus:
Ce n’est plus qu’une ardeur dans mes veines cachée:
C’est Vénus toute entière a sa proie attachée.2
Such imagery makes great use of images of burning, implying both the heat of lust and the chafing of frustration. Ironically it was supposed that any attempt to control this condition, either by avoiding the object which caused it or seeking to exert the will over the passions, has the effect of banking a fire, which is to increase it so that eventually it leaps forth more violently than before. ‘Love will find a way. Love laughs at Locksmiths.’ Thus to ‘fall in love’ was a terrible misfortune, which inevitably involved the break-up of any stable ménage and self-immolation in irrational ardour. Racine used a French equivalent to describe love, both as an evil and an illness, by calling it un mal. The belief that love is a disease, or at least as haphazard and damaging as disease, survives in terms like lovesick, and in the imagery of popular corn.
Some of the longest lived popular song themes make direct use of the traditional imagery. The muzak which dulls the apprehensions of tea-drinkers in fashionable hotels and thrills through the pump-rooms in faded resorts is still based upon the staple of the great songs of the thirties and forties. The words may be less well-known than the tunes, especially as Irving Berlin and his ilk are understandably loth to allow them to be quoted, nevertheless it is a rare tea-drinker or spa visitor who cannot croon absently along about moon and June. These ‘classics’ are as overstuffed with references to hearts going thumpety-thump, eyes dazzled with star-light, blinded with the smoke and fumes from the furnace of passion which is the heart, as any of the extravagant poems of the quattrocento-secentisti. Lovers don’t slip, they aren’t pushed, they fall, hopefully if pathetically, right into the middle of a warm caress. They feel very strange but nice, afflicted it would seem by a pleasant ache, or even rubbed down with a velvet glove. They sigh, they sorrow and they get dizzy spells, or perhaps they do not, but then they just love to look in their beloved’s eyes.
The supreme irony must be when the bored housewife whiles away her duller tasks, half-consciously intoning the otherwise very forgettable words of some pulp lovesong. How many of them stop to assess the real consequences of the fact that ‘all who love are blind’ or just how much they have to blame that ‘something here inside’ for? What songs do you sing, one wonders, when your heart is no longer on fire and smoke no longer mercifully blinds you to the banal realities of your situation? (But of course there are no songs for that.)
Another song ironically denies that the singer is in love because he does not sigh or sorrow, or get dizzy spells. Are we so very far after all from Romeo’s description of his conventionalized passion for a woman he did not know, who was utterly indifferent to his advances?
Love is a smoke rais’d with the fume of sighs;
Bring purg’d a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;
Being vex’d, a sea nourish’d with lovers’ tears.
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.3
This attitude, which is an eminently consistent way of regarding adulterous passion, survives in the imagery of the state of ‘in love’ as the proper one for spouses. It is still ironically maintained for example that love is blind, just as Cupid was represented in the courtly love tradition as blindfolded. However, this blindness is usually taken to mean only the refusal of the lover to see his beloved in any way realistically, and especially to discern his faults.
The impotence of will and rationality to deal with this mania are recognized in the common terms ‘madly’, ‘wildly’, ‘deliriously’, ‘head-over-heels’ in love, while it would be oxymoronic to claim to be gently, reliably or sensibly in love. There is some disagreement about the self-immunizing propensit
ies of the disease, for some claim that one is only ever really in love once in a lifetime, others that it is better the second time around, others that the first time is the only genuine manifestation, still others that they fall in love every week or even every day.
Sex is a momentary itch,
Love never lets you go.4
It is an essential quality of the disease that it is incurable; this has meant that in cases where young people in love must be weaned off each other because they are too young or ill-assorted the only method is to deny that they are so afflicted. The ‘love’ must be proved to be false on the grounds, say, that it cannot happen to people so young…
I can remember Nat King Cole topping the charts (sometime during my unspeakably dreary teens) with a heart-rendingly bland number about a couple surrounded by enemies forever trying to tell them they were too young to reallee bee in luv, because love was only a word that they had heard (like all the other concepts that they knew). The argument of the kill-joys was manifestly invalid, for if they were to try the truth of the notion of love by experience, then presumably they would have to go ahead and love. However invalid the argument, the counter-conclusion of the song, that their love will last though years may go, hardly seems to constitute relevant refutation.
As love cannot actually be demonstrated to be present, so it cannot be demonstrated to be genuine. The advantage of denying its existence in a particular case, is that the denial cannot be refuted, although, as the song insinuates, it is likely to give rise to an enduring pose of young love persecuted by the world, an Aucassin and Nicolette fantasy which endures chiefly to refute the critics.
Methods of diagnosis of this condition vary. External observers will base a judgement upon observation of agitation, impairment of concentration and efficiency, or an undue preoccupation with the love-object expressed in curiosity or speculation. However, it must be noticed that such observers have a vested interest in the detection of love-affairs because of the particular voyeuristic pleasures they afford, and often precipitate such situations. ‘All the world loves a lover.’ The sufferer may diagnose himself as having contracted the disease because of the intensity of his reactions when the love-object is expected or in sight or fails to make an anticipated appearance. He will also suffer the omnipresence of a mental image of the beloved in dreams, at meals, during completely irrelevant discussions. If the love remains unrequited the symptoms either fade gradually or become transferred to a new object or intensify until they become agonizing. Which of these alternatives ensues is largely dependent upon the attitude of the sufferer to his affliction. The greater the degree of masochism and the inherent doubt of competence in actually prosecuting a love-affair, the more he will resign himself to isolation and barren suffering. The unconscious love-object then has to bear the brunt of responsibility for his self-induced condition and may be accused of cruelty or trifling with a good person’s heart. If the lover enacts some outrage upon the object to revenge himself for its cruelty, he will find that it is treated with special consideration by the lawmakers who allow a special status to those who are ‘in love’, especially if the object be considered unworthy. If his passion is denied this privilege, it will be justified by refusing it the status of ‘love’ and relegating it to mere vengeful lust or some such.
Generally it is considered proper for women not to arrive in this state of obsession unless induced thereto by a man. Unfortunately the presentation of the state of being in love as a desirable, and indeed consummate human experience is so powerful that adolescent girls seem to spend much more time in its throes than their male counterparts. However, the social fiction is kept up by the popular imagery of girls responding to male wooing and the contagion of love. The acid test of the experience is the astonishingly potent kiss. ‘It was my first kiss, and it filled me with such wild thundering rapture. I had been crazy about Mark so long, and now, with our kiss, I knew that he loved me too!’5
Love is being crazy about someone (Oh Ah’m jes’ wil’ about Harree!) and the extraordinary effects of the contact of the lip with lip and tongue with tongue bring on wild thundering rapture. However, in the case quoted the love was spurious although its symptoms were identical with the genuine ones: Betsy has just been kissed by Mark, ‘the best athlete in school and the wealthiest boy in town! Gosh, I am lucky,’ but she has a better friend in Hugh, the boy-next-door, who warns her about Mark and his fast, arrogant ways. In the second encounter Hugh plucks up courage to make a declaration and sweeps Betsy into his arms…‘His kiss set my heart to pounding and a feeling swept over me that I couldn’t name…a feeling that brought a carpet of clouds under my feet…’ This, it appears, is the real thing, or so the conclusion tells us: ‘I had made a mistake and had that for comparison! Love is not always what it seems, and kisses can be false!’6
The sensations caused by the two kisses are not genuinely distinguishable. Both are described in terms more appropriate to the abnormal experiences of the organism under drugs—pounding of the heart, roaring in the ears, and cottony legs; in fact love is also the drug which makes sexuality palatable in popular mythology. Sex without love is considered a crude animal evacuation: with love it becomes ecstatic and transcendental. Obviously it is meant to perform an autosuggestive function in affecting cortical sexual responses, and it probably does. The fact still remains that Betsy can only distinguish between the two kisses on some kind of political ground: it is in fact desirable for Betsy to marry into her own class, and one would not object if the policy were openly stated instead of cloaked in the mumbo-jumbo of the comparison between two identical kisses. In both cases the terms of reference are more apt to hallucination than to motivation for marriage; the emphasis is all on egotistic response, not at all on communication between the persons indulging in such osculation.
This confusion typifies all literature on the diagnosis of true love. Sentimental bias militates against the subjugating of love to any rational or wilful control, while anarchic passion is regarded with deep suspicion. Generally, as in the above sample, the most appropriate match must be transmogrified into the most gratifying. The real difference between true and false love, which are both compounds of lust and fantasy, is that true love leads to marriage. Provided it does that, a significant downgrade in the level of excitement is tolerated but not admitted. Adultery and fornication are still more exciting than marriage, but our culture is committed to maintaining the contrary. We are actually committed to the belief that this mania is an essential precondition to marriage…IS IT A SIN TO MARRY BEFORE FALLING IN LOVE? was the banner of an advertisement for Taylor Caldwell’s Let Love Come Last.7 Paradoxically love sanctifies both marriage and illicit encounters. ‘Love conquers all.’
The irrationality of love is fondly celebrated in those pulp stories of women who gave up cold career and ambition for the warmth of a husband’s pressing love. Efficient career woman X holds out against junior buyer Y’s love for her for months until he acts cold and she gets jealous, or until he has an accident and she rides in the ambulance with him. After all ‘When love calls—who can really deny it?’8
Love is here either compared to a necessary human function (cf. Nature calls!) or to a person summoning to a pleasant duty, another survival of older forms of analogue. Nevertheless the crises in such a story were aimed to reveal to the unconscious sufferer that she was in fact in love, just as the leper finds out by pouring boiling water over his numb feet. Some such testing is allowable, and even prescribed for those who doubt that they are really truly in love. ‘Love is never really love until it is reality-tested.’ Trial separations can be useful in proving the durability of an obsession. Some experts in this kind of homeopathy have devised questionnaires which the patient must apply for himself, a fairly unreliable procedure at best. The questions may range from ‘If he left you, could you bear to go on living?’ to ‘Do you find his breath unpleasant?’ A more common procedure is to advise the love-lorn, a term which has sinister connotations if only an
yone ever understood it, what love is not, which is no guide to what it is.
Love is not mere thrill or passing pleasure. It is not escape from loneliness or boredom, nor is it a comfortable adjustment for practical convenience or mutual benefit. It is not a one-way feeling, and it can’t be made two-way by wishing or willing it so.
The adolescent lover following this rule of thumb may be excused for feeling a little confusion. Certainly, many poets and others have burnt with one-way love; the establishment of parity in love is quite impossible. It is impossible to know if pleasure is passing before it is past, and if it is not an escape from loneliness and boredom, or a comfortable mutual arrangement, there would seem to be little point in setting it up as a desideratum at all. The positive description supplied by the same author is not less daunting:
Love is many things, It’s a little child’s satisfied response to attention and tenderness and it’s also the older child’s affectionate curiosity. It’s the playfulness of adolescents and their romantic flight of imagination. Then again it is the earnest, mature devotion of mature marriage…
Love is delicate, elusive and above all spontaneous. It thrives on honesty and sincerity and naturalness combined with mutual responsibleness and concern. At the beginning it just ‘happens’ but to flourish and endure it requires the full capacity of the open heart and soul.9