All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (4 page)

Love crops up in multifarious discourses–from soaps to statistics, from cyberspace to science, from religion to fiction, philosophy, psychoanalysis and sociology, and many of those guidebook and self-help points in between. It has long been part of an energetic cultural conversation, which loops from life to writings and images and back again, each shaping and reshaping the other. Since a single book is no encyclopaedia, I have had to wend my way through sources, magpie-like, and pick and choose. These choices reflect what I have learned about love through partners, friends and children, from reading, observation and gossip as well as from the more structured interviews I conducted in the course of research (though, of course, for reasons of privacy, I have anonymized these in the text). So I should say something about my choices, limits and prejudices.

Humans live love as a narrative: we tell ourselves stories embedded in the stories our culture and traditions have given us. Purported facts, often contradictory, sometimes garnered from the labs of biologists, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, as well as their theories, feed into these and into our cultural definitions and expectations of love. I have used all these but often focused on the narratives: they simply reveal more about how love is lived. So the stories people tell about themselves or others, whether in interviews or more artfully, in fiction, form the bedrock of this book. Because some of the great psychoanalytic thinkers have made love their subject and illuminated its vagaries, I find myself often enough drawing on Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and Adam Phillips. Given that their observations are garnered from years of listening to and observing those who came to see them often because they were troubled by love’s unruliness or failure or their own incapacity to love, this seems apposite. If, as my last book
Mad, Bad and Sad
showed, the profession isn’t uniformly reliable, some of its best thinkers offer up intriguing perceptions on that mysterious and paradoxical creature that the human is.

One dominant and fashionable set of explanations about love comes from the thinking of evolutionary psychologists and biologists. The impetus of science is to reduce, in the best sense of that word, complexity to a generalizable hypothesis. But to assume that we are primarily, like animals or selfish genes, driven by a reproductive urge which can explain all the manifestations of either sex or love, adultery or jealousy, hetero-or homosexual, is a reduction too far. Of course, the analogy with animals can be drawn, and sometimes fruitfully, particularly when we take into account the huge diversity of the animal world. Yes, we want to survive and many of us want to have children and look after them as best we can and in security. But humans also have language: they make and tell stories about themselves, elaborate their urges, play out their fantasies through complicated technologies, construct hypotheses, and remember all of these. They bear little resemblance to single cells or the proverbial birds and bees, which themselves may bear little resemblance to each other. A great part of our lives, which includes love in its manifold forms, has little to do with being driven by evolutionary forces. We spend little enough of our time reproducing, and some never do, sometimes out of choice rather than failure. I’ll believe in evolutionary psychology more, perhaps, when it’s used less as an explanation for male philandering and female nesting. These natural men and women, after all, don’t still shit in their back gardens.

Then, too, while it’s exciting to think that neuroscientists have, according to press releases, found love or God spots in our hard-wiring, located chemical compounds in our brains which determine our love choices and their success or failure–and sometimes jump to grand conclusions, based on limited studies in laboratory conditions, about innate gender differences–this may tell us as little about the way we live love as a leap in a synapse in our prefrontal lobes tells us about Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason.
The best of them, whose work I am familiar with from earlier research, would concur. So there is only a little of these kinds of sciences in the love in this book.

In drawing limits somewhere, I have concentrated on the Western world, which is, of course, permeated by influences from the East and elsewhere. But the West is what I know best, so it seemed presumptuous to attempt to draw on traditions I could only know in the most cursory manner.

I have also rarely singled out homosexuality as an altogether specific form of love, or focused on the cultural practices which in various epochs have attended homosexuality. I apologize in advance for this lack and for too often erring on the side of ‘he and she’ rather than the doubling of one and the other–even if in the interviews that have informed this book there have been a variety of homosexuals and in the sources I cite there are many. I have a kind of rationale here, apart from the one of space.

Societies and religions have long constituted themselves by drawing a line between the permissible and the criminal. But desire, even of the ordinary enough ‘he and she’ kind, always seems to have been something of a loose cannon where rules are concerned. Rapture at bottom contains something of the asocial, the criminal, and desire may indeed be fuelled by the breaking of bounds, whether of clans, families or godly and social rules.

Through history, everything has been done, while various epochs have sanctioned things for one group of individuals, though perhaps not for another. Shepherds in mountain regions have buggered their sheep, people have pleasured themselves whatever their Church’s edicts; in a gathering tide during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries solitary sexual acts were turned into a medical condition to be disciplined and expunged. The ancient Greeks sanctioned particular kinds of homosexuality but not others, and practised what we would now call paedophilia: we have come a long way towards legitimating homosexual practices and gay marriage, but draw the line at paedophilia. What is clear is that most systems of law and most regimes want to disallow certain aspects of the polymorphously perverse creature that the human animal is–able to take his pleasure in so many ways and to suffer for so many others of them, including unrequited love. The nature of these desires, the love that fuels them or results from them, may in its living-out–when not socially ostracized–depend less on the gender of the couple than on the individuals in play.

Freud, who thought we were all bisexual–in other words, that we all contained the mental and psychological attributes of both sexes–once noted that the sex of our chosen object in love was not in any simple way related either to our physical sexual character or to our mental sexual character. Object choice was simply the
visible
indication of homosexuality or heterosexuality. So, I, a woman who ostensibly lives with a man, might in fact be living out a homosexual relationship with him, loving the mother or sister in him–and so on through countless permutations. Yet the fact that I may love the soft pleasing feminine creature who inhabits my otherwise ordinarily virile man and despise other more masculine bits of him, does not make me gay by any contemporary definition of identity.

Nor is gender itself, as we know from the transgender politics of our time, an altogether stable category. We make mistakes about the gender of others, emphatically so in early childhood. The little girl who came home from playing with another pretty curly-haired creature and announced to her mother that Andrea is a nice girl, but you know she has a willy, is not unusual. Others feel out of place in the gender to which they have been assigned and go to great lengths to change it–through hormones and surgery. But desire and gender identity through the length of a life may not always coincide. In one case, recounted to me by a friend, a father of two decided at the age of around thirty that he was in fact homosexual. He abandoned his family to pursue his now spoken desires. After a while, dissatisfied, he came to the conclusion that he was inhabiting the wrong gender and was in fact a woman. He went through surgery and became one. Soon enough, he determined that he was not a heterosexual woman, but a gay woman, and started living with another. When one night his-now-her partner thought it would be nice to experience penetration, he/she broke down…

In what follows, I have on the whole steered clear of such matter, and of identity politics as a whole, and instead steered into the dynamics of love as they take us through life and time. Though I may talk of ‘he and she’ in couples, it could often enough as easily be ‘she and she’, while my use of the word ‘marriage’ for contemporary unions intended to last includes cohabitation as well as the kinds sanctioned by Church and law.

Nor have I focused on the more sensationalist reaches where Eros can lead–material I have culled in
Mad, Bad and Sad
and elsewhere. Extremes of sadomasochism, murderous abuse, bleak distortions of maiming love, dramatic perversions of power and fantasy: though all these are part of an extended picture of love and its stalking partner, hate, it seemed to me more important, in times when excess is so rampant in the media, to attempt a rebalancing and concentrate on what I call ordinary love, in itself already quite extraordinary enough.

My sources are various: literature of all kinds, from fiction to ‘fact’, to memoir or philosophy, and interview. We are all, in one way or another, experts on love while remaining puzzled by its vagaries. If I turn in some sections mostly to fiction, it is in part because truth and lies in this area of the passions and intimacy are so often mixed up in each other. Talking or writing about their own lives within a factual mode, people are hardly guaranteed to tell the whole truth or even part of it–even in so-called objective questionnaires. People lie about love and sex, or ‘fictionalize’, tell their story in one way or another, depending on when they tell it or when they are asked and by whom. So fiction, which observes life, including one’s own, may be as reliable here as other kinds of truths.

It’s interesting, parenthetically, to note that academic discourse has in this last decade moved some steps away from theorizing sexuality and gender and into love. This may be another indication that our culture feels a need to rebalance what has gone awry. The ‘desiring machines’ and performances of gender that characterized an intellectual moment of pleasure and plenty are being edged aside. This may, in part, have to do with the renewed prominence of religion in the public arena. In these pages I have not ventured into the love of God, that ultimate absent presence. That would take another book–though this doesn’t mean that the impact of the Abrahamic religions on the way we love hasn’t informed my thinking.

Nor have I dealt with the love of those significant others that pets can be, the love of nation and patriotism, the love of art or place, or that mainstay for many, the love of work–though all of these can evoke our energetic passions. I hope that neither the constraint I have had to practise, nor my choices, are too delimiting.

Working on this book, I was often enough aware that writing about love was not unlike writing about life. My little four-letter word simply carried too many meanings and went charging off, like Cupid himself, or Freud’s libido, into a host of unruly directions. Living does really seem to be ‘all about love’, which carries the best and the worst of us.

But onwards, to the starting point on our journey–the tumultuous seas of our first passions. What is it that constitutes them and drives their intensities, so that even if they don’t last for ever they mark us ineradicably, making us the beings we are? What is this thing called rapturous love?

Falling…

They were thirteen or thereabouts. He was a moody, beetle-browed boy; she, a radiant creature with honey-coloured skin, slender limbs, brown bobbed hair and a big bright mouth. His mother had died when he was three: her elder sister stepped in with a ‘fatal rigidity’ to look after him and his philandering, straight-talking, adored Dad. The girl’s parents were conventional and as strict as the boy’s aunt.

He lived on the French Riviera. Her family had rented a villa for the summer nearby. Clean sand, sea vistas, bright sun or clusters of pale stars attended their meetings. Already at the first, they had everything in common: tennis, a preoccupation with their own minds, infinity. Their thoughts floated into one another. The same dreams, they discovered, had long permeated their sleep. They were both moved by the softness and delicacy of baby animals.

And suddenly they were madly, frenziedly in love. Their agonizing desire for each other could only be assuaged by taking each other in, body and soul, assimilating every particle of the other. Prevented by youthful clumsiness and the perpetual presence of vigilant elders, they managed only half-hidden touches, a grazing of fingers, knees, salty lips. Then one night, they stole away to a mimosa grove to slake their passion with deeper kisses and more ardent caresses, no less ecstatic for being broken off by the interruption of parental voices. There was only one other tryst before she was taken away. Four months later, she was dead. He never forgot her.

Falling in love, as everyone knows, is intoxicating. It catches you unawares. It’s magic. It’s the light or the place. It’s chemistry or the brush of an angel’s wings. It’s beyond reason. It’s instinctual. It’s unwitting.

And when you fall, you plunge into an ungovernable ocean. The first time in, the intensity is at its greatest.

Anything, large or small, can ignite the attraction. The toss or turn of a lock of hair, the arc of a nose, the quick stride, the lolloping run, the sudden upturned glance, the tickle of a laugh, the bashful smile, the pallor or glow of a cheekbone, the lulling timbre of a voice, the scent caught in the air, a thought solemnly declared, a shy or earnest aside, the brush of fingers on skin… The subject may be a passer-by, a face in a crowded room, an acquaintance, or someone you’ve long known. The ‘who’ of them is all that counts.

Once you’ve fallen, you discover that you’re twinned. You’re permeable, your thoughts ‘float into one another’. You mirror each other. You have everything in common. It’s ecstasy when you’re together, agony when you’re apart. When reality conspires, as it so often does, to put obstacles in your path, to prohibit, to make secrecy a need, passion is fuelled, excitement doubled. All your senses are newly alive. The universe accrues in significance. The smallest signs are meaningful. When your lover is absent, you long, you yearn, you adore the memory of him. When he’s present, you’re blissful, omnipotent.

Unrequited, spurned, love turns into hate. The very singularity of the desired one metamorphoses into a set of loathsome attributes. Overweening pride, gross indelicacy, cheap taste, meanness… the list is unending. Though once, there was only him or her.

If death or that death-in-life which is rupture intervenes, it is as if a knife had hacked out bits of yourself. As potent as love is its loss. Love tumbles into searing, enveloping hatred. Or mourning, a sense of utter destitution.

This arc of love with all its individual variations embosses itself within you, ever ready to mark or underpin subsequent experience.

These bare phenomena of early love seem to be universal, though not everyone experiences them. Or not the first time round.

My initial account of first love between the beetle-browed boy and the radiant girl is culled from the early pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita
that ‘Confession of a White, Widowed Male’. Here the ‘demented diarist’, the notorious Humbert Humbert, having died in legal captivity and asked in his will for his memoirs to be published, recounts his adolescent passion for Annabel Leigh, the girl-child who is a precursor to Lolita, his later more outrageously illicit lover. Indeed, as Humbert Humbert underlines, without the time-stopped Annabel and the imprint she left on him, ‘there might have been no Lolita at all’.

First love, as the poets, songwriters, filmmakers and chroniclers tell us again and again, can be the most intense of life’s passions. The heightened perceptions, the tumultuous sensitivities of adolescence, the wakening sense that anything and everything is possible, play into its power. ‘It is a commonplace,’ Stendhal, the great French Romantic realist wrote in his book
On Love
, ‘that sixteen is an age which thirsts for love’. The rub is that it’s also an age that ‘is not excessively particular about what beverage chance may provide.’ As yet himself unformed, the teenager’s love object can be equally fluid and shifting–like Proust’s Marcel, enraptured by all the girls ‘in a budding grove’ who race by on their bicycles, conferring glamour as they go, yet seem hardly distinguishable from one another, until one in particular leaps to his attention. Biologically driven, suffused with desire which may have no immediate object, alive to nature and to sensation, filled with expectation and an inwardness through which the lyrics of pop songs, stories or poetry play, the dreamy adolescent is ripe for passion of turbulent proportions.

The narrator of Turgenev’s novella,
First Love
, captures the febrile state with precision:

When the slender, flirtatious and slightly cruel twenty-one-year-old Princess Zinaida comes to live nearby and shows him a little favour, Turgenev’s sixteen-year-old hero, Voldemar, tumbles into the ‘melting bliss of the first raptures of love’. In that chaos of emotions, that keen awareness through all the senses, which all lovers recognize, pleasure and pain walk hand in hand: ‘I spent whole days thinking intensely about her… I pined when away… but in her presence I was no better off. I was jealous; I was conscious of my insignificance; I was stupidly sulky or stupidly abject, and, all the same, an invincible force drew me to her…’ One day, obeying the incomprehensible and desired Zinaida’s careless command, Voldemar jumps off a high wall. In his state of semi-consciousness he feels her covering his face with kisses, hears her say she loves him. His bliss is total.

If Turgenev’s young lover sounds like a hopelessly old-fashioned romantic hero, here’s an account from a seventeen-year-old contemporary Londoner: ‘When I am with her… I get grabbed by a feeling and get thrown around,’ he tells his therapist, evoking the roller-coaster of emotions that attend his first love. The girl is so perfect for him that they are one and he no longer knows where his own body ends and hers begins: ‘When we are in her room nothing else matters. I forget about everything. Sometimes hours afterwards I notice that I was lying uncomfortably, like the edge of the bed has cut into my arm, but I don’t even notice that. It’s like magic. Is that normal?’

Whatever the verdict on ‘normality’, it’s clear that the experience is hardly unusual.

Adolescence is a time of labile intensity. Giddy heights reached when the desired one acknowledges you, plunge as quickly into depths of rejection when he doesn’t. Yearning is a predominant emotion and can be so painful as to shade into morbidity. Suicidal thoughts stalk the young lover. Death seems a warm, embracing oblivion, as attractive as the living ‘other’ who will shatter the discomfort and banality of the quotidian. A sense of cocooned isolation persists through these years, even within the floating groups of friends. Most teenagers, whatever they may seem from the outside, feel something in common with Morrissey’s ‘half a person’, whether ‘sixteen, clumsy and shy’ or fifteen, clumsy and fat. Desperate to break out of the childhood self the family, however good or bad, keeps structurally imprisoned in just that self, they sense that love is the consummate escape artist. Only in the gaze or embrace of the ‘other’ can the butterfly inside them be recognized and take wing.

The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observes that the potency of first love lies in the particularly intense way it brings both body and imagination into play. In adolescence, a set of physical cravings upon which our survival literally depends are elaborated into feelings, beliefs, thoughts–indeed, a whole series of stories and ideas which have the meeting of two people at their core. It’s ‘an imaginative elaboration of physical functions’. Carnal desire transports the lovers into a heightened world and everything in that world takes on powerful new meanings.

The shape of the stories the lovers tell themselves can be romantic, spiritual, marital or, in our ironic times, confined to a sexual or even a chemical and neural register. Narratives, images, the language of reflection we give to love are always already there in our culture and our history. Our desire may sing of beauty, of seduction and challenges overcome, a meeting of true minds or a laddish conquest, or the self-abnegating pain of terrible longing. We project all our wishes on to the desired one and make them the keepers of our happiness and our solace.

This passionate, sexually charged love is in no simple way a mere invention of the individualist West or the idealizations of romance. Lovers in all cultures attribute inordinate power to the beloved. Poetry extolling passion’s raptures and ills has been found amongst Egyptian papyri and on vase fragments dating back to 1000 BC. Scholars agree that such poetry was part of an oral culture in Southeast Asia and India, and was shared through trade routes. ‘The sight of her makes me well!… Her speaking makes me strong,’ hymns one Egyptian lover, underscoring the ‘love as sickness’ theme. And another, exulting that love gives him strength, chants

The Chinese legend of the ‘Butterfly Lovers’, adapted in traditional opera, dates back to the late Tang Dynasty (618–907). It tells the tale of a young woman, Zhu Yingtai, who takes on a male identity to pursue her studies in a distant city. Here she meets Liang Shanbo, a fellow student. They become inseparable friends. When a parental order comes for Zhu to return home, she begs Liang to visit her–so that he can meet her younger sister. He does and is overjoyed to discover her true identity. They vow eternal love, but Zhu has been betrothed by her wealthy family to another man. Forced apart, Liang pines away to die of a broken heart. Learning of his death on her wedding day, Zhu’s wedding procession takes her to his grave. Her tears move heaven and earth. The ground cracks open and she leaps in to die beside him. But love conquers. The two are miraculously transformed into butterflies and flutter away together, never to be separated again.

Sanskrit literature abounds in tales of passionate, sensuous love, saturated in romantic longing. The cow-herding maiden, Radha, grows up with Krishna: the two play, fight, dance together and never want to be parted, but the world pulls them apart. He leaves to embark on great battles and adventures, as well as the search for virtue. He becomes lord of the universe. Radha waits. She waits for him through his marriage to two other women, through the raising of a family. But at last, in great bliss, the two lovers are reunited and marry in front of a vast cohort, which includes all the gods and goddesses of heaven.

The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, listening to the spontaneous outpourings, gossip and tales of the Trobriand Islanders, observed: ‘Love is a passion to the Melanesian as to the European and torments mind and body to a greater or lesser extent; it leads to many an impasse, scandal or tragedy; more rarely, it illuminates life and makes the heart expand and overflow with joy.’

Whatever the structuring narrative and its personal inflections, this passionate young love, both carnal and soulful, is an agent of change, while its violent intensity imprints the experience on mind and body alike.

Coup de Foudre

One of my informants, let’s call her Clio, an attractive and successful woman of thirty-five, self-avowedly a romantic, was emphatically marked by her experience of first love. The daughter of American parents who worked in Southeast Asia, she was sent to an English boarding school at the age of fourteen in the early 1980s. She had almost no experience of sex, though, of course, she had some received knowledge. She had kissed before, yet despite her enthusiasm for the act in make-believe (she had, as a child, played with her Ken and Barbie dolls and left them in wild compromising positions about the house), the actual act had always filled her with disgust. She had always been taught by her mother to think of sex and love as a pair.

On the first day of school in the foreign–and one can only imagine lonely–country that England was for her, she saw a boy in the common room. Their eyes met. She remembers his gestures minutely, though she can’t any longer picture his face: he had a trilby hat and he flung it and his coat on to a chair. Everything grew vibrant, as if a light had been switched on. She knew she was in love.

It is worth pausing over this description of the moment the French call the
coup de foudre
, the lightning bolt that signals falling in love. The ‘look’ of the loved one may be central, as all those Renaissance sonnets hymning the beloved’s eyes and lips tell us; or Shakespeare’s Friar Lawrence in
Romeo and Juliet
who opines, ‘young men’s love then lies/Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes’. Today’s advertising industry similarly relies on manifest beauty to sell its products. It’s backed up in this by psychological research which shows that individuals regularly rate as most attractive features that appear proportionate and symmetrical. In such experiments, the test subjects also regularly select out as desirable images that bear a relationship to parental features. Yet for all this, Clio, like so many others, cannot in retrospect picture the face of the beloved, not even in that crucial moment when the thunderbolt struck.