All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (31 page)

In
Mating in Captivity
, her fine book on the travails of sex in ongoing unions, the therapist Esther Perel punctures the myth of spontaneity. She cites the case of a gay couple who came to see her because their sex life, now that they were living together, had lost its lustre. She points out to them that when they lived in separate cities, they anticipated their reunions, imagined what they would get up to, planned their dates. There was a lot of imaginative foreplay, ‘longing, waiting, and yearning’, an intentionality to the seeming spontaneity and artlessness of their coming together. The art now goes into epicurean meals rather than loving. ‘Is the titillation of seduction only the privilege of those who date?’ she asks one partner in the couple. ‘Just because you live with someone doesn’t necessarily mean he’s readily available. If anything, he requires more attention, not less.’

Too often in our target culture where the sex industry is rampant, Balzac’s poem of erotic marital love gets infused with a work ethic. We install performance ratings in the bedroom, count the how many and how much, note outcomes. But sex as hard work loses its allure and becomes as dreary as composing an annual report for the ever vigilant appraisal team. How much better to engage in imaginative elaboration, to dream ourselves afresh, to abandon oneself in the company of our other, and play. Cupid, after all, is a plump child.

When Ian McEwan’s hero Perowne thinks of the excitements of familiarity that life with his wife provides, he evokes a sexual site of freedom and abandon. In the inherited ethos, both Freudian and religious, of double sexual standards, which place the sacred in domesticity and emotional satisfactions and the profane outside of it in the passionate excitements of ‘debased’ sexual objects, this can sound counter-intuitive. Indeed, many grow shy and inhibited as soon as the bed moves into the marital chamber, and find themselves unable to enact an abandon available elsewhere–as if parental forbiddings now hovered over maritally sanctioned acts and we stood to lose our mates if we showed them our wild side. To bring the illicit home, both within ourselves and to our loved one, may be the ultimate challenge in domesticating Eros.

Reinventions

Pondering the mysteries of marriage and sexuality, Freud noted in ‘The Taboo of Virginity’ that ‘it must strike the observer in how uncommonly large a number of cases the woman remains frigid and feels unhappy in a first marriage, whereas after it has been dissolved she becomes a tender wife, able to make her second husband happy. The archaic reaction [the discharge of immature sexuality on to the man who first has coitus with her] has, so to speak, exhausted itself on the first object.’

Though physical virginity is rarely these days the condition of women on entering a first marriage or cohabitation, it still remains the case that first unions may bring with them an ‘immature sexuality’, one that trails ‘archaic reactions’, fears of dependency or ‘bondage’. These bear the whiff of Mummy and Daddy, a submersion or loss of oneself in and to the other from which second unions can be relatively free. In the classic formations, young women tie themselves to older men, finding in them the father (or mother, since gender here is less the issue than unresolved ties to the past which the self in flux carries within) they aren’t quite ready to leave. At times, when this kind of union was less taboo, young men would regularly engage in passions with older women, a rite of passage that had the added benefit of putting the overpowering sexualized mother within them to rest.

In our era of independent working women, sometimes more successful than their husbands, certain difficulties can be exacerbated for both. Men can too easily find themselves infantilized by their partners (who may indeed ‘baby’ them). An attractive wife then takes on the aura of a critical, suffocating mother. When children arrive, this maternal aspect of the feminine comes quickly into the picture, and the attractions of the woman whom the man once desired prove difficult to reawaken. What then? The problem is a recalcitrant one, emphatically so in an age where we put arguably far too high a value on sexual passion–ever short-lived in its intoxicating form. A rebalancing here towards the value of other kinds of loving would not come amiss: tenderness, care, conversation, a shared history, mutual projects, and a mutual investment in the good life a couple has constructed may serve individuals far better than serial relationships in which the tail wags the dog and sets him running.

In his analysis of what he calls the Hollywood ‘comedy of remarriage’ of the 1930s and 40s, Stanley Cavell probes the ways in which marriage, second time round, can be turned into an adventure, a romance, rather than a tragedy or farce. Remarriage for him entails a reconstituting of the self or a growth in self-knowledge, as well as a seeing of the other afresh and an understanding of human frailty. The rupture–divorce or split–helps: it marks an important point on the journey from illusion to disillusion to re-illusionment. In
The Philadelphia Story
Katharine Hepburn (Tracy) and Cary Grant (Dexter), having divorced over a number of incompatibilities–her pride, rectitude, sexual fears, over-attachment to (regulating) Mum and Dad, his drinking–find ‘home’ in each other again on the very point of her marrying another.

Howard Hawks’s
His Girl Friday
begins with the journalist heroine, Rosalind Russell, telling her ex (and editor) Cary Grant that she is poised to marry another: in other words, she has constituted her freedom from him, she is once more a separate, independent being. But after a series of adventures, one of which entails her giving up the film’s mother-figure, the original couple are once more ‘at home’ together, poised to re-enter a familiar union on revivified terms. Crucially, the new union preserves something of an adventure, of the illicit–a ‘moral equivalent of the immoral’. It also holds out the promise of joint projects, a working life together.

What is it that makes these remarriages possible? Cavell underlines the reawakened capacity in these couples to notice one another, to remember that if familiar, they are nonetheless strangers. They may be the same, but they are also different, together as a we, but also two distinct ‘I’s.

The philosopher of ethics Emmanuel Levinas, in a somewhat different register, deepens this understanding of love. He posits love as a uniquely ambiguous relation, at once possessive and deferential, between the self and the beloved. Though motivated by desire and need, love comes into authentic being only when a reciprocity is set up in the other: there is a simultaneous sense of needing without being able to bring the other into possession, the sense of being needed, but without surrendering to exploitation of one’s self. One could say that freedom and bondage here coexist. ‘Love remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, [a] need [that] still presupposes the total, transcendent exteriority of the Other, of the Beloved.’

In Cavell’s understanding, an erotic remarriage is underpinned by the ability to experience dailiness as a comedy–a festive sense that human beings are complicated, neither angels nor beasts, neither heroes nor villains, but creatures prone to weakness and fragility. Playfulness is a plus, an antidote to the earnestness and idealizations of romantic passion. The constant conversation, the tender or rebarbative exchange between couples, flirtation, keeps the flow of desire and togetherness alive, keeps them connected and devoted one to the other. Jane Austen would have concurred, as would Charlotte Brontë, whose Jane in her last words emphasizes the constant talk that fills her and Rochester’s days.

The romance of domesticity, with all its upheavals and occasional ruptures, its mingling of dream and dailiness, can triumph outside those luminous Hollywood comedies as well. Children, those intruding strangers, can sometimes help, at least at first. Sometimes, though it feels criminal to say it, so can affairs–the advent of a third party who makes us confront what we value most in love. At other times, in these days of wished-for fidelity, a therapist often enough provides that third party–the other with whom we can fall into ‘transferential’ love, emotionally re-enact our ways of loving and hating, and through whose triangulating presence we can realign our separateness and our togetherness.

In
Netherland
, his fine post-9/11 novel, Joseph O’Neill offers amongst much else a subtle portrait of a modern (re)marriage–one lived out in the generalized anxiety of the modern world and in the din of an advice culture which makes the trajectory of love banal, as chewed over as a second-hand sock.

Hans van den Broek, Dutch by origin, deeply introspective, is a high-flying New York-based oil analyst married to Rachel, a successful English lawyer. With their small son Jake they live in a loft in Tribeca until the destruction of the Twin Towers forces them to take up temporary residence at the Chelsea Hotel. Here they remain in a kind of paralysis until Rachel announces that she can’t face the insecurity of New York any longer. She wants to take their son home to London. She has realized, too, that she no longer enjoys a pace of work that takes her away from her child. Other things become clear as well, to both of them. A tiredness has taken over their coupled life, a malign weariness which is both part of and more than the apocalyptic moment. The narrative of their union to the exclusion of all others just isn’t right any more. It is Hans, not terror, that Rachel is fleeing: they have grown alone together. Love has turned into loss.

A separation ensues. Every two weeks or so, Hans flies to London to see his son. But without his family, he feels his life to be meaningless. He has no friends, no pastimes. A dullness which had already set in has become general. Only in one area does he find a rekindling of liveliness: cricket. The game allows him to revisit his childhood, and in a metaphoric way to come to terms with his mother’s death, part of the background of his inner paralysis. Cricket also sparks the important and unlikely friendship with Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian Gatsby who dreams the big dream while engaging in small-time racketeering. Chuck is both friend and in some respects a replacement father figure for the one Hans never had. Larger than life, traditional in his views of women, Chuck has both a good wife and a mistress. His gambling reminds Hans of his mother’s sometime lover. Through the friendship and the inner journey it allows Hans to undertake, he gradually comes back to life, though the coming back is to a new place, a subtly altered self.

The ongoing relationship with Rachel plays into the change. She has not been standing still either. On one of his visits to London, Hans realizes, through something his son says, that she has now engaged in a serious affair. He is angry, jealous. He sleeps with other women and eventually, after he has moved to London to be closer to his son, even enjoys it. Time, that proverbial healer, passes, and just when it seems that Hans has really at last left Rachel, that he can take his marriage or leave it, she announces that she has broken up with her lover.

They do–with the ‘minimum of variety and history: our old bag of tricks belonged to those other lovers and those other bodies’. They are new to each other, separated out from their old melded skins. They only kiss after two months–and in mid-kiss Rachel suggests, ‘We should see a marriage counsellor.’ They move into a house together as well.

When the marriage counsellor asks Rachel why she had stayed married to Hans, she doesn’t answer as Hans fears she will–that she had tragically decided to settle for a reliable man, or as he hopes, that he bowled her over–but rather because ‘she felt a responsibility to see me through life and the responsibility felt like a happy one’. Hans is overwhelmed by her response. It puts into words and into reality exactly how he feels, though with a subtle difference. ‘Rachel saw our reunion as a continuation. I felt differently: that she and I had gone our separate ways and subsequently had fallen for third parties to whom fortunately we were already married.’

In O’Neill’s version of the contemporary comedy of remarriage, love is a kind of omnibus. You can get on, then off. Fortunately, you can also get on again, though you’ll have to have walked for a while along that road of life which is always full of blunderings and detours.

As for happiness, though we carry on seeking it in marriage and elsewhere, it is not what people do best. Yet if we didn’t have its opposite, we wouldn’t know how to gauge or recognize it. And marriage or long-term cohabitation–once we have learned to live generously with our own and the other’s limitations, once we have acceded to the frustrations life and age inevitably bring–may be our best shot at it.

In his fine poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’, Philip Larkin examines an effigy of a noble couple and sees with ‘a sharp tender shock’ that the recumbent figures have their hands entwined. With the dispassionate gaze of a modern, he expresses our unwilling, sceptical, yet ‘almost true’ hopes of love.