All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (3 page)

Penises were familiar enough to me from my utterly non-puritanical home where doors were often open and the occasional nudity hardly remarkable. I don’t think the sight of my father’s or brother’s penis stimulated a sense of envy or of my own lack, though such matters or their symbolic afterlife rarely produced a conscious rumble. But when penises erupted in strange places, they could be frightening. The perennial flasher might be giggled at when we girls were in a group, but took on fearful moment if one was alone.

On one confusing occasion when I was made aware of a man’s erect penis, I made a scene, which is probably why the event can still be recalled. I must have been about ten or eleven, that prepubescent Lolita moment that so fascinated Vladimir Nabokov. It could only have been a Sunday, since we were off into the Laurentian Mountains for a family outing, this time accompanied by some friends of my parents. The car was crowded and my place was on a pair of bony male knees. Let’s call him Bill kept hugging me to him, purportedly for safety’s sake, and occasionally rocking me as if I were a tiny tot who needed calming. This did little to put me in a sunny mood. At some point during the long drive, the rocking took on too regular a rhythm and something that felt like a third bony knee wedged against my bottom. I don’t know what came over me, but I hollered that I was going to puke and demanded that the car be stopped. I ran out and away alongside the highway until my angry father caught up with me and forced me back. But I just wouldn’t take my place on those knees again. I think I must have felt a sense of disgust–why else say I was on the point of being sick? Nor was I to be consoled. I was finally persuaded back into the car only when I was allowed to squeeze into the front seat next to my mother.

I couldn’t tell my parents what had happened. I couldn’t tell myself either, since I didn’t know. This was secret matter. Only much later and with fuller knowledge did it take on a kind of sense. I didn’t speak to Bill for ages and was severely reprimanded for my lack of politeness. Bill wasn’t a bad man and I now imagine he must have been rather shamefaced. Such things happen to most children in a more emphatic or a lesser way, sometimes forgotten, sometimes recalled. They’re just part of growing up into love and its regular enough stalking partner, sex. To the child, they’re part of a puzzle in which the pieces only slowly, if ever, fall into place.

My older brother presented a riddle, too. Having arrived at young manhood while I was still an innocent, he would often be entertaining young women I wasn’t allowed to meet in the basement of the family home. This was also the place where I listened to my Elvis Presley records. Going all gooey when Elvis crooned ‘Love me Tender’ certainly had something to do with love, as far as I was concerned. I loved Elvis with all the passion that collectively shared idols awaken in the pubescent young, at that moment when the body puts cravings for one doesn’t know quite what into motion and rampant fantasies focus on actor or pop star to provide a ready object.

It didn’t need a great leap of the imagination to link that vague gooey Elvis-shaped longing with whatever it was my brother was up to on those occasions when the basement door was kept securely locked. Our dog, who served as his guardian, barked effusively if anyone tried to enter, or even knocked. The dog certainly knew more than I did. He might even have understood why it was that Elvis’s voice could make me go soppy with love, while any approach from an embodied male of the local species made me gag with disgust. When at some point during his young virile manhood–he must have been about nineteen–my mother declared that my brother was in love, I knew it was obscurely linked to the locked basement door and its secrets. The word ‘love’ on this occasion was uttered in a dirge-like tone that evoked doom rather than promise.

My brother’s chosen love was a slender brunette I had only glimpsed in passing. I knew, however, from the family rows that she was a French-speaking Québécoise, and therefore Catholic. My brother’s refrain that she came from a Communist family, which meant she had no religion at all, just like us more or less, cut little ice. The arguments went on and on until the two sets of parents met. They were polite enough as far as I could tell from the eavesdropping position I took up in the kitchen until I was caught out. But after that meeting, the girlfriend disappeared and my desolate brother was whisked away on some summer jaunt.

I hadn’t read
Romeo and Juliet
yet, though their names came up. Nor had I seen
West Side Story
with its evocation of star-crossed lovers trying to bridge a social divide. But the lyrics were everywhere and I had the LP. Ever after, this moment in my brother’s life was caught up with the realization that love, far from being ‘a many-splendored thing’, was also an occasion for stiff-lipped parents from ill-matched or warring social groups to come together in judgement: love was a disturbing force which had to be battened down, so that its ill, certainly tumultuous, winds didn’t wreck the good ship Family. I later realized that love was also that first trembling step we take into the wider world of the
polis
, the world of others who bear no relationship to us except that created by the bond of ‘I’ and ‘you’. Without that bond, we would be poor creatures, forever mired in our limits.

By that time I had started to read books other than
Nancy Drew
and
Anne of Green Gables
. In fact, through these teenage years I was becoming a rather bookish sort and would read anything that came to hand from the school or small home library, from friends, or the local drug store’s swivelling racks. So many of these books found a primary theme in love. Like those Australian children who know from books a great deal about English seasons, fauna and flora, though none of them exist in Australia, I learned a great deal about passion without ever having experienced it.

When I look back at that reading, it seems to fall largely into two basic templates, at least in so far as love is concerned. The first kind of love came out of English literature. Jane Austen was key, as were all her progeny in countless tales of girl meets boy (or nurse meets doctor), overcomes pitfalls, vaults hurdles of both inner blindness and outer difficulty to arrive at that glorious end-point, which is also a promise, where love and marriage meet.

The other strand came out of continental literature. Here love had little to do with marriage, which was always a backdrop of convenience or misery. Instead, it had everything to do with secret desire and the grand illicit passion of adultery. Enter Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina with their transgressive desires and suicidal fate. Meanwhile, heroes like Balzac’s Rastignac and Stendhal’s Julien Sorel climbed the social ladder through the scaling of each step by seductive acts of love, often with older women.

I never paused then to reflect on the contradictions embedded in these two models: the happily ever after of one and the miserably ever after of the other. After all, each in its own way played out the patterns that had already been laid down by the family stories and fairy-tales I’d been told or read earlier. Nor did it seem strange to me that at one and the same time I could be pining away for Darcy or his rather uncouth equivalent spied at school, and singing, with great clanging brio, ‘I never will marry, I’ll be no man’s wife. I intend to live single, all the days of my life.’

In that flux of emotions and hormones which is adolescence, contradictions live side by side. It’s only later that we think we have to settle for an either/or, and all the while wish wistfully that an ‘and’ were still possible. Meanwhile, all these stories, tragic or comic, had a common point. Love conferred meaning, filled life with significance. If it entailed suffering, had a dark side, it was also a school in sensibility: without it we would never know the sublime heights and perfidious lows of others–or ourselves.

If I anatomize all this as preamble, it is because love always carries an individual story, whatever its universal weight as an emotion or condition and whatever discourses of love our culture has conferred on us. The childhood instances I post here were unique to me and inflected the way in which I grew into an understanding of love. What is common to all children, however, is that the little four-letter word accrues so many contradictory meanings that it emerges as a consummate mystery, one trailing importance, yet hardly easy to decipher or live.

Well before I’d actually been to bed with a man or used the word about my emotions, well before I’d experienced that obsessive madness of passion that links the lover to the lunatic and the poet, I already carried within myself a host of oft-conflicting templates of love, habits of mind and body, wishes, expectations, fears, let alone those fluttering ghosts of those of my sibling and parents–all born out of a brew of family life, cultural and bodily forces. These were rekindled, tugged at and pulled into varying shapes, whenever I later ‘fell in love’ or simply loved. And each new accretion came into play the next time round.

Love shows little heed of physical age, much as we may try to constrain it into age-appropriate form. Which is why grown women may find themselves on occasion as needily dependent as a crying toddler, or a grandfather may be as obsessed as he was as a young man by a pretty young thing. In the film
Moonstruck
an ageing, philandering lecturer, rebuked by a mature woman with the words, ‘You’re too old for her’, aptly replies: ‘I’m too old for me.’

Now, as I grow older, I rarely think of love as divine or carnal rapture. Rather, I think of those ties that bind me to my children, somehow the most important people in the world, as idealizable and as irritating, each in turn, as the long-term partner with whom I share my days, my ups and downs and that necessary tedium in between. Or I think of my mother’s distorted face staring at my father’s dead body, a man she was prone to criticize, but whose life she had shared through thick and thin for over forty years. I think of the numerous couples I know, estranged by the turmoil of life, coming back together in times of extreme need or illness, to share pain and difficulties, the old enmities laid aside. All that, too, is love.

Why write about love? It’s just a four-letter word, after all, one often casually used. It can feel empty and platitudinous or bring with it a queasy embarrassment or a contemptuous sneer of dismissal. Its yuck factor is high. Over the last decades, love has been scoffed at as sentimental goo, derided as a myth to keep the masses enslaved, exposed as a mental malady and inveighed against as a power-monger in romantic garb bent on oppressing women in particular.

Yet love bears within it a world of promise, a blissful state removed from the disciplines of work, the struggle for survival and even the rule of law and custom. The promise coexists with the knowledge that love can bring with it agonizing pain, turmoil, hate and madness–and in its married state, confinement, boredom, repetition.

Indeed, love carries a freight of experience that takes us from cradle to grave. It frolics amongst the daffodils, dances to the secret tunes of perversity and transgression, drives some mad and others insanely happy. Its object can be long dead and exist only as a picture in a frame enlarged by imagination, or an all but naked man hanging on a wall, or a pop idol. It can be the subject of laughter or insufferable longing and often both at the same time. It can exist as an unbreachable attachment between couples of whatever sex, who seem on the surface to despise each other or engage in tortuous power games. It can play itself out intensely between fathers and daughters or mothers and sons–sometimes with deadly outcomes, at others happily enough. It often comes accompanied with the intense pain of jealousy or rejection.

The Ancients split love apart into Eros and Agape, desire and affection, or benevolence. They tellingly gave Eros or Cupid, a sometime god, a physical embodiment: that playful, rambunctious, charming winged toddler who grows into a fetching nubile youth. In some versions Eros is passionate about other youths, but in his longest narrative he falls in love with the imaginative Psyche, or soul, she who can love in the dark, sparked by stories whispered into her ear. Son of the beautiful Aphrodite (Venus) and warring Mars, Cupid creates both havoc and pleasure. His arrows land in unexpected places, urban alleyways and romantic vales, and show little respect for gender or the status of their object.

Following Aristotle’s lead, the great essayist Montaigne as well as the creator of Narnia, C.S. Lewis, designated four kinds of love: the natural, that is, affection, that ordinary bond of everyday life between familiars; the social, or those bonds, like friendship, formed through mutual projects and commonality; the hospitable, which in Christian terms becomes charity, the brotherly love offered to neighbours and outsiders; and finally and perhaps most problematically, the erotic, that sexually fuelled, driving or transforming power, both creative and destructive, that passion is. The last, some have thought, may also play a part in the others, acting as an energetic force that is then diffused or sublimated into other bonds.

In the following pages, I have compacted this voluminous subject into something of an arc of love through individual time–a life history of love, one might say. I begin with a phenomenology of our first forays into love and attempt to anatomize passion’s constituent parts. I move on to marriage and more durable coupledom, its triangulation in adultery, love in the family and finally love and friendship. Throughout the book, smatterings of condensed history provide illuminating ways of seeing other than our own. Underlying it all is an attempt to understand the dynamics of the way we live desire and love today. Since our social moment impacts on the way we experience love and helps to shape our desires, some of the imbalances that our times have produced are also my subject.

Given the nature of the oft ungovernable emotion under consideration, the voyage this book takes us on inevitably bears the traces of my own experience and observation. If I have structured it in part along the trajectory of a life, it is because we live love differently–though never altogether differently–as we grow up and older. I am as interested in the Himalayas of voluptuous passion as in the plateaux of what might be called ordinary, quotidian love. Appreciating the latter, I have learned in the course of my days, is as much of an art and perhaps, also, an ethics, as succumbing to the sublimities of the first.