All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (9 page)

After the advent of the pill in the sixties, when sex even for young women became generally permissible and a cohort of parents arrived who prohibited less systematically, it didn’t take long for new self-generated prohibitions and rules to slot into place, particularly in the US. Fleetingly ‘liberated’ by the women’s movement of the 1970s and the pill, momentarily free from the later plague of STDs, female desire was quickly enough again shackled by fear: men were not only exposed as power-mongers and oppressors, but increasingly subsumed under the category ‘rapists’. Sexuality, briefly and freely ‘fun’, a site of open exploration, once more became dangerous. The sexuality of gays was no sooner out in the open than it was tragically shadowed by Aids. Regimes of ‘safe sex’ came into play and were often enough rebelled against: again, sex seemed to lose some of its lure without the impetus of transgression. Increasingly through the eighties and nineties, dating and love rules made their way on to American campuses in a flurry of political correctness: desire, love and sex were re-bound within a set of strictures that demarcated the limits of the permissible or the socially acceptable.

Outside the campuses, particularly in America, religion returned with a vocal evangelicism, again wrapping sex and love into the safe bundle of marriage. Where more liberal regimes were in operation, say in Britain or France, dating rules began to prescribe a kind of strict serial monogamy which forbade the casual infidelities of the brief moment of liberation.

In other quarters today, particularly amongst the urban very young, commodified, off-the-shelf, almost anonymized sex has become de rigueur, and the taboo is against linking it with any form of intimacy or love, any sense of commitment or continuity. Women as well as men are in play here. In a reversal of older romantic codes, to be ‘cool’ is to fuck, to perform sex in any position except the one that engenders feeling or sometimes even talk. This contemporary libertinage, seemingly transgressive, is itself as rule-bound as the older one that made virginity or purity the boundary which needed to be broken through for love to flourish.

Overcoming barriers in the self, catapulting inner defences and inhibitions, can be as potent as external prohibitions when it comes to falling in love. Traditionally, a father’s forbidding ‘no’, internalized as a rule, could act as a stimulus. Today, it may be the equally forbidding ‘no’ to engaging fully with another human being as more than a body, a mere breathing version of a porn-site image, habitually revisited.

To love entails breaking through the secure, established, fixed boundaries of the known self. For some, particularly young women, this can mean conquering the disgust which the carnal–with its link to generation, to the dying human animal–can elicit. In one of their guises, this was the purpose of those old arts of seduction: the older man charmed the innocent maid into taking the bodily leap. For others, particularly boys, it can mean having to engage in aggression, where one might wish to be tender; tangling with power, where one might rationally prefer being equal. Love, in short, means violating inner defences: even that ideological defence which so-called sexual empowerment and its tally of casual sexual partners can today supply. A young woman who has had any number of sexual partners may well find herself ‘in love’ with the one man who won’t sleep with her.

A breaking-away from the old, encased self into a new one forged through the link with another is what falling in love is all about. Risk is involved. So, too, is the adventure of finding oneself newly vulnerable, and despite this, hurtling towards the unknown who is the other. Without obstacles, without difficulties in the path to sexual satisfaction, Freud once wryly noted, ‘love becomes worthless and life-empty’. In our permissive age, we grapple with new obstacles to re-infuse life and love with meaning.

The appeal of Stephenie Meyer’s hugely popular young teen
Twilight
series and its accompanying films owes something to the way in which fantasy prohibitions stand in when society fails to provide real ones. Child of divorcees, no sooner has the heroine, Bella, been shipped away to the paternal home from the maternal one (while her mother holidays with her new husband) than she falls into romance with moody teen vampire, Edward. Now vampires really are more dangerous than the boy next door (who in this case anyway happens to be a werewolf). Thus there are substantial prohibitions for Bella to overcome so that the course of love may run deep and true–even if Edward’s family has substituted a diet of animal blood for the traditional human one. The ‘True Love Waits’ pro-abstinence movement of its author has far fewer attractions in its prescriptiveness than the seductive danger of falling in love with a vampire–the daunting prohibition of supernatural exogamy. And when Bella in the last book of the series finally marries her vampire, she really does undergo that transformation that true love promises. She becomes an immortal. Heaven, it seems, comes with fangs, though Edward’s have been whittled down and his teeth merely glow pearly white.

Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
provides a more radically textured instance of forbidden love’s dangerously metamorphic potential. In this totalitarian dystopia where all life and thought outside the reach of the state are forbidden by the omnipresent surveillance of the Party, Orwell’s hero Winston Smith acquires an inner existence, a sense of vital individuality which also means the ability to think for himself, through his secret and rebelliously risky love affair with Julia. ‘If a right to a secret is not maintained, then we are in a totalitarian space,’ the philosopher Jacques Derrida has written. Winston Smith’s dawning secret and inner life, sparked by love, constitutes a revolt against the totalitarianism of Big Brother. The grave hazards he and Julia run in their love affair not only reshape them, but define a resistance to the state. Love is the ultimate challenge to an annihilating conformity which would stamp out the heart of individual life and the very language in which it thinks.

Indeed, the ultimate challenge for Orwell’s imagined state is to repress and eliminate love and sex, including that rich, old English language which feeds and enshrines it. Love, of its very nature, Orwell underlines, breeds unorthodoxy. It’s a loose cannon on the social scene. The imposed daily hate sessions which ritualize the sublimation of sexual energy are vehicles for turning all private love into a love and devotion directed only at Big Brother. The state’s horrifying triumph at the book’s end is marked by the fact that Winston, subjected to an exquisitely mental torture which requires him to betray his love, has subjugated his inner life. He now, at last, loves only Big Brother, the omniscient deity of the post-religious surveillance state, where privacy is outlawed.

In our far more ordinary lives, too, risk, rebellion and danger strengthen the love bond, and provide our inner lives with a range of deeper textures and hues. The combination of danger and sexuality is most potent during the years between puberty and the early twenties. As neuroscientists underline, the adolescent brain is still incompletely formed in its reasoning and planning centres. Charged with disturbing hormonal surges, it is also highly malleable. Just as in earliest childhood, impressions and sensations received during adolescence run deep. This is arguably what makes first love so powerful and memorable that it trails us for life, for good or ill. Some social scientists have even suggested, one would hope ironically, that it might be better somehow to skip its excitements, so as not to damage future, more stable, attachments. ‘In an ideal world you would wake up already in your second relationship. If you had a passionate first relationship and allow that feeling to become your benchmark, it becomes inevitable that future, more adult partnerships will seem boring and a disappointment.’

Happily, we rarely allow social scientists altogether to rule our desires and dreams. Measures to promote our well-being, happiness quantifications, rarely alter the attraction we seem to feel for the torments of love and the anguish of displeasure. We are not in any simple way rational beings, nor do we always know where our satisfactions lie. Counter to rational expectations and despite the weight of a feminist critique of romance, the general belief amongst the young in transformative love remains, whatever the anguish quotient. It persists alongside ironical grumblings and cynical expressions of disbelief, and despite the flux of partners.

The New Religion

In
The Normal Chaos of Love
, sociologists Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim indeed argue that love has far too emphatically taken on a central role in shaping how we think of and live our lives. Love–unlike its nearest kin, the religion it displaced–gives us the illusion of being free agents who make intentional decisions. In an increasingly atomized late-capitalist world, where families are dispersed through financial imperatives, where society has become a matter of virtual networks and where politics has been devalued, love has become the prime measure of individuality and authenticity. It has become our god of privacy, meaning, romance, and all the highs of experience. We expect self-realization through our intimacies. When love is absent, we feel its lack strongly and set out to seek the raptures it may provide.

An overvaluation of passionate love may well bring disappointment in its train, particularly, as the authors argue, in times when parity between partners is seen as crucial. But so too does the kind of pragmatism that shuns any possible intensity and settles for mere convenience in relations.

Despite and alongside our preferred ironic mode, everywhere there are signals of renewed cultural hope in love. The extraordinary worldwide success of
Mamma Mia!
, the highest-grossing film musical of all time, is one such. A romantic fairy-tale dreamed by baby-boomers, it also acts as a mild corrective to the gender and generational relationships they put in place.

The film’s heroine, Donna, played by Meryl Streep, is a feisty single mother who looks no more than forty. The blurring of time frames is part of the dream: we know she’s sixty and the ABBA music dates from 1976. Donna has lived out her adult life on a paradisial Greek island where she has raised her daughter, Sophie, and built her slightly ram-shackle home-hotel. On the verge of marriage, Sophie feels driven to find out who her father is: she can’t make the leap into matrimony, break away from her mother and her childhood, without acquiring the stamp of paternal legitimacy. Indeed, there is a sense that her project of marriage, whatever love may be involved, is also the enactment of her wish to give her mother a responsible husband. Fathers are crucial, even if only symbolically, for the journey into adulthood, however fully the independent woman may have loved and provided for her child.

Enter three possible candidates, three icons of modern fairy-tale paternity, secretly invited to the wedding by Sophie: the architect, Sam, who drew the design of Donna’s hotel on a sheet of paper; the roving über-male writer-adventurer, Bill; and the shy gay banker, Harry, for whom Donna marked his sole sexual encounter with a woman. Each of these anymen could be the perfect fairy-tale father. Having lived out her generation’s ‘hippy’ and sexy adolescence, Donna has no idea which potential father is the actual one. But it is Sam who is her first and great love and, at the altar, it is he who steps in to be wed to Donna. Having supplied a husband for her mother, Sophie is now free to leave home and travel the world with her boyfriend, without needing to care for her parent, who was not quite complete in her single form. And Donna is free to live out the ultimate romantic fairy-tale, a return to that first transformative love, now publicly legitimized in marriage.

Ironically, the newest of technologies of both dream and information, the Internet, is abetting the traditional power of first love. Social sites such as Friends Reunited and Facebook make it easy to trace ‘friends’ long lost. Life may have ruptured that passionate first love because its partners were simply too young for ‘commitment’, or had disparate universities or jobs to go to. They may, in the intervening years, have married, had children and divorced. Now, through the Internet, they can rekindle that first passion. In an American survey of randomly selected adults, one-third said they would reunite with their first loves if they could. According to anecdotal lore, it’s not altogether unusual for couples to rediscover each other and take up again, if not quite where they left off. Everyone seems to know one such happily-before-and-ever-after couple.

After the upheavals and disillusionments that life brings, it seems that first love can retain its old power and also bring new advantages. The old lover now feels almost familial, easy to be with. The new-old partners are returned to a more carefree youth. Each sees something in the other beyond the accretion of wrinkles. Love, Adam Phillips has noted, is, amongst much else, a recognition or mirroring, a making available through the other of aspects of oneself that have hitherto been occluded. So the return of first love may be a version of Blake’s notion of wise innocence, the ultimate redemptive step after that innocence lost through the journey of experience. In the process, it may well be that our capacity for loving has also grown more generous, less rapacious. If first love is the breaking-out of revolutionary passion, its return, after the disappointments of life, is a form of re-pairing. The best of reparations, it brings youth and age together.

The Question of Sex

Voluptuous pleasure. All the senses in play–sight, sound, smell, touch. The body rampant, deliciously, supremely alive.

That will do. Sexual pleasure and words aren’t natural bedfellows. If sex scenes have proliferated in contemporary literature, it’s simply because sex for humans, even when performed alone, is rarely simply sex. The physical act with its soaring excitements, its pleasures and pains, usually comes accompanied by a host of often obscure desires, fantasies, needs, aspirations, familial and cultural attitudes–whatever our episodic wishes for a Lawrentian animal spontaneity. Trying to explain to himself the character of G., his revolutionary Don Juan of a protagonist, the writer John Berger reflects: