LOVE AND EDUCATION
The idea of wanting to change our partners sounds deeply disturbing because, collectively, we have been heavily influenced by a particular aspect of the Romantic conception of love. This states that the principal marker of true affection is the capacity to accept another person in their totality, in all their good and bad sides – and in a sense, particularly their bad sides. To love someone is, according to Romantic philosophy, quite simply to love them as they are, without any wish to alter them. We must embrace the whole person to be worthy of the emotion we claim to feel.
At certain moments of love, it does feel particularly poignant and moving to be loved for things that others have condemned us for or not seen the point of. It can seem the ultimate proof of love that our trickier sides can arouse interest, charity and even desire. When a partner finds you shy at parties, they don’t laugh – they are sweet and take your tongue-tied state as a sign of sincerity. They’re not embarrassed by your slightly unfashionable clothes because, for them, it’s about honesty and the strength to ignore public opinion. When you have a hangover, they don’t say it was your own fault for drinking too much; they rub your neck, bring you tea and keep the curtains closed.
But we draw the wrong conclusion from such sweet moments: the idea that loving someone must always mean accepting them in every area, that love is in essence unconditional approval. Any desire for change must, according to this ideology, arouse upset, annoyance and deep resistance. It seems proof that there can’t be love, that something has gone terribly wrong …
But there is another, more workable and mature philosophy of love available, one that’s traceable back to the ancient Greeks. This states that love is an admiration for the good sides, the perfections, of a person. The Greeks took the view that love is not an obscure emotion. Loving someone is not an odd chemical phenomenon indescribable in words. It just means being awed by another for all the sorts of things about them that truly are right and accomplished.
So, what do we do with what we perceive as their weaknesses, the problems and regrettable aspects? The Greek idea of love turns to a notion to which we desperately need to rehabilitate ourselves: education. For the Greeks, given the scale of our imperfections, part of what it means to deepen love is to want to teach – and to be ready to be taught. Two people should see a relationship as a constant opportunity to improve and be improved. When lovers teach each other uncomfortable truths, they are not abandoning the spirit of love. They are trying to do something very true to genuine love, which is to make their partners more worthy of admiration.
We should stop feeling guilty for simply wanting to change our partners and we should never resent our partners for simply wanting to change us. Both these projects are, in theory, highly legitimate, even necessary. The desire to put one’s lover right is, in fact, utterly loyal to the essential task of love.
Unfortunately, under the sway of Romantic ideology, most of us end up being terrible teachers and equally terrible students. That’s because we rebel against the effort necessary to translate criticism into sensible-sounding lessons and the humility required to hear these lessons as caring attempts to address the more troublesome aspects of our personalities.
Instead, in the student role, at the first sign that the other is adopting a pedagogical tone, we tend to assume that we are being attacked and betrayed, and therefore close our ears to the instruction, reacting with sarcasm and aggression to our ‘teacher’.
Correspondingly, when there is something we would like to teach, so unsure are we that we’re going to be heard (we develop experience of how these things usually go) or that we have the right to speak, our lessons tend to be expressed in a tone of hysterical annoyance. What might have been an opportunity for a thoughtful lesson will emerge – under the panicky, scared, ‘classroom’ conditions of the average relationship – as a series of shouted, belittling insults met with rebellion and fury.
It’s a paradox of the field that our teaching efforts tend to succeed the less we care that they do so. A sense that everything is at stake and the world is ending – easy enough impressions to reach in relationships when it is late at night and the irritation is large – guarantees to turn us into catastrophic pedagogues.
The good teacher knows that timing is critical to successful instruction. We tend automatically to try to teach a lesson the moment the problem arises, rather than when it is most likely to be attended to (which might be several days later). And so we typically end up addressing the most delicate and complex teaching tasks just at the point when we feel most scared and distressed and our student is most exhausted and nervous. We should learn to proceed like a wily general who knows how to wait for just the right conditions to make a move. We should develop a cult of optimal timing in addressing tricky matters, passing down from generation to generation stories of how, after years of getting nowhere with impulse-driven frontal assaults, a great teacher stood patiently by the dishwasher early in the morning, when everyone was well rested, until their partner had put down the newspaper, reflected on the upcoming holidays and then carefully advanced a long-prepared point, and eventually won a decisive teaching victory.
The defensive have no trust in the benevolence of teachers. There is in their deep minds no distinction between a comment on their behaviour and a criticism of their right to exist. Defensiveness raises the cost of disagreement – and thereby dialogue – intolerably.
Somewhere in the early years of the defensive person there will have been a sense of grave danger about being in the subordinate position, which would have inspired a flight into claims of hyper-competence. It is the task of all parents to criticize their children and break bad news to them about their wishes and efforts. But there are rather different ways of going about this. The best form of pedagogy leaves the child at once aware of a need to improve and with a sense that they are liked despite their ignorance and flaws. Yet there are also cases where criticism cuts too deep, where the child is left not just corrected but tarred with an impression of utter worthlessness. To recognize – without shame – and understand sympathetically why one has become excessively defensive are key to unwinding habits of self-protection and therefore to opening oneself up to education and improvement. We needed those defences once. Now we can afford to let them go.
When teaching and learning fail, we enter the realm of nagging. Nagging is the dispiriting, unpleasant, counterproductive but wholly understandable and poignant version of the noble ambition to improve a lover. There is always so much we might fairly want to change about our partners. We want them to be more self-aware, punctual, generous, reliable, introspective, resilient, communicative, profound … Nagging is, in essence, an attempt at transferring an idea for improvement from one mind to another that has given up hope. It has descended into an attempt to insist rather than invite, to coerce rather than charm.
Lamentably, it doesn’t work. Nagging breeds its evil twin, shirking. The other pretends to read the paper, goes upstairs and feels righteous. The shrillness of one’s tone gives them all the excuse they need to trust that we have nothing kind or true to tell them.
It seems one can change others only when the desire that they evolve has not yet reached an insistent pitch, when we can still bear that they remain as they are. All of us change only when we have a sense that we are understood for the many reasons why change is so hard for us. We know, of course, that the bins need our attention, that we should strive to get to bed earlier and that we have been a disappointment. But we can’t bear to hear these lessons in an unsympathetic tone; we want – tricky children that we are – to be indulged for our ambivalence about becoming better people.
The tragedy of nagging is that its causes are usually so noble and yet it doesn’t work. We nag because we feel that our possession of the truth lets us off having to convey it elegantly. It never does. The solution to nagging isn’t to give up trying to get others to do what we want. Rather, it is to recognize that persuasion alway
s needs to be couched in terms that make intuitive sense to those we want to alter.
We should at the same time stop judging faulty attempts at instruction so harshly. Rather than reading every grating lesson as an assault on our whole being, we should take it for what it is: an indication, however flawed, that someone can be bothered – even if they aren’t yet breaking the news perfectly. We should never feel ashamed of instructing or of needing instruction. The only fault is to reject the opportunity for education if it is offered, however clumsily. Love should be a nurturing attempt by two people to reach their full potential, never just a crucible in which to look for endorsement for the panoply of present failings.
2 The Importance of Sex
SEXUAL LIBERATION
We are often given the impression that we live in sexually enlightened times and belong to a liberated age. We ought therefore, by now, to be finding sex a relatively straightforward and untroubling matter. But a narrative of enlightenment ignores the fact that we remain intermittently hugely conflicted, embarrassed, ashamed and indeed odd about sex, only with one added complication: we are meant to find the matter simple.
In reality, none of us approaches sex as we are meant to, with the cheerful, sporting, non-obsessive, clean, loyal, well-adjusted outlook that we convince ourselves is the norm. We are universally eccentric around sex, but only in relation to some highly and cruelly distorted ideals of normality. Most of what we are sexually remains very frightening to communicate to anyone we would want to think well of us. We may choose to die without having had certain conversations.
The dilemma is how simultaneously to appear normal and yet allow ourselves to be known. That we have to endure such a searing division is a direct legacy of Romanticism, for this movement of ideas blithely insisted that sex could be a beautiful, clean and natural force utterly in sympathy with the spirit of love. It might be passionate at points, but at heart it was kindly, tender, sweet and filled with affection for a single person. This sounds charming – and once in a while, for a bit, it is even true. But it woefully neglects some critical components of erotic excitement and can’t help but leave us deeply embarrassed about certain sides of what we want.
To start the list, here are just some of the unpalatable truths that stir in our minds:
■ it’s very rare to maintain sexual interest in only one person, however much one loves them, beyond a certain time;
■ it’s entirely possible to love one’s partner and regularly want to have sex with strangers, frequently types who don’t align with our ordinary concerns;
■ one can be a kind, respectable and democratic person and at the same time want to inflict or receive very rough treatment;
■ it’s highly normal to have fantasies about scenarios one would not wish to act out in reality and that might involve illegal, violent, hurtful and unsanitary aspects;
■ it may be easier to be excited by someone one dislikes or thinks nothing of than by someone one loves.
These aren’t just points of mild curiosity. They are fundamentals of the human sexual personality that stand in shocking contrast to everything that society suggests is true.
Despite our best efforts to cleanse it of its peculiarities, sex can’t be normal in the ways we might like it to be. True liberation is a challenge that remains before us as we patiently build up the courage to admit to the nature of our desires and learn to talk to our loved ones and ourselves with a pioneering, unfrightened honesty.
THE MEANING OF SEXUAL EXCITEMENT
Sexual desire makes us want, and do, what are, by the standards of ordinary life, highly peculiar things. We seek to put our mouths in unusual places in other people’s bodies, penetrate implausible orifices and say surprising and uncommon things.
Throughout the twentieth century the biggest influence on how people thought about sex came from the work of Sigmund Freud. The psychoanalyst moved sex from a marginal topic of discussion to the centre of the cultural conversation. Radically, he insisted that sex might be profoundly connected with almost everything else in our lives. But, problematically and rather unwittingly, he made it sound as if everything else could be degraded or at least made sinister by this connection. One might have thought oneself interested in noble subjects like art or politics, but in truth, Freud seemed from a distance to be suggesting, one was just being rather base in a disguised way. Through a Freudian lens, everything appeared to have been contaminated by a hidden stratum of sexual concern.
Yet, with no disrespect to Freud himself, exactly the reverse might be true. It is not the case that when we look at art or politics we are merely being kinky; rather that when we think we are merely being kinky we are in fact pursuing some very earnest and intelligible goals that are connected with a raft of other, higher aspirations. Our sexual lives are much more in contact with our values than we tend to suppose. What seems incomprehensibly perverse is usually a very logical endeavour to reach a profound and honourable goal by bodily means: we are, via sex, seeking to connect emotionally with, and make ourselves understood by, another person.
Take the practice of jamming our face against someone’s vulva or testicles. Oral sex can be hard to explain. Yet as in so many sexual acts, a feeling of being accepted is at the heart of the draw. For most of life, we learn to keep our eyes strictly averted from others’ genital areas. We take immense care in changing rooms to deploy towels in strategic ways to ensure that no one will glimpse parts of us that we have learned to refer to, tellingly, as ‘private’. The thrill of oral sex is connected to a brief, magnificent reversal of all our internalized taboos. We no longer have to feel ashamed or guilty. The act may be physical, but the ecstasy is in essence an emotional relief that our secret and in subjective ways ‘bad’ sides have been witnessed and enthusiastically endorsed by another.
Much the same holds for anal sex. The anus is the most proscribed and dangerous part of the body, surrounded by the strictest taboos and most severe dictates on hygiene. But this restriction only directly feeds into the tenderness of being allowed to explore this part of another person and of oneself in the context of a relationship. We’re not forgetting that the anus is the locus of disgust; we are, within sex, relishing the fact for symbolizing how much we have, with our partner, created a small, fenced-off utopia in which the normal rules do not apply. Anal play would lose much of its capacity to delight if the anus were no more ‘dirty’ than a forehead or a shin; the pleasure is dependent on another human letting us do something avowedly filthy with and for them, and upon the implication that this is something they would never do with a person they cared little about. It is exactly the feeling that something is wrong, perverse or obscene that makes the mutual agreement to try it so great a mark of trust.
Similar psychological dynamics apply to degradation within sex. Normally – and with immense justification – we take instinctive offence at the slightest signs of condescension. We are furious or depressed if someone calls us a ‘cunt’ or a ‘fucking bastard’ or tells us we’re a ‘shit’ or ‘worthless’. These are the terms people use when they most want to hurt or upset another person, when they are desperate to show contempt or hatred. So on the face of it, it is shocking and disturbing to think that we (or our partner) might get erotically excited by using just these sorts of abusive terms in bed.
We would be wise to begin studying the issue through the lens of perhaps the greatest novel of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In the first volume, Swann’s Way, Proust’s unnamed narrator, then a young teenager, is taking a walk near his grandmother’s house in the French countryside. As he passes a building at the edge of the village, he notices, in an upper bedroom, a woman, Mademoiselle Vinteuil, making love to a female friend. He is mesmerized and climbs a little hill for a better view. There he sees something even more surprising unfolding: Mademoiselle Vinteuil has positioned a photograph of her dead father on the bedside table and is encouraging her lesbian lover to spit on the image as they have se
x, this gesture proving extremely exciting to them both. Early readers of Proust’s novel were puzzled by and heavily critical of this scene of erotic defilement. What was this revolting episode doing in an otherwise gracious and beautiful love story, filled with tender evocation of riverbanks, trees and domestic life? Proust’s editor wanted to cut the scene, but the novelist insisted on retaining it, asking the editor to understand its importance within his overarching philosophy of love.
Proust tried hard to make sure his readers would not judge Mademoiselle Vinteuil harshly, going so far as to suggest that even the woman’s father wouldn’t ultimately have minded being spat on by her lover, so long as he understood what was really going on: ‘I have since reflected that if Monsieur Vinteuil had been able to be present at this scene, he might still, and in spite of everything, have continued to believe in his daughter’s soundness of heart.’ Proust’s argument is that defilement during sex isn’t what it seems. Ostensibly, it’s about violence, hatred, meanness and a lack of respect. But for Proust, it symbolizes a longing to be properly oneself in the presence of another human being, and to be loved and accepted by them for one’s darkest sides rather than just for one’s politeness and good manners. Mademoiselle Vinteuil is, in her day-to-day behaviour, an extremely moral and kindly character, and yet this pressure to be always responsible and ‘good’ also begs moments of release.
Sex in which two people can express their defiling urges is, for Proust, at heart an indication of a quest for complete acceptance. We know we can please others with our goodness, but – suggests Proust – what we really want is also to be endorsed for our more peculiar and dark impulses. The discipline involved in growing up into a good person seeks occasional alleviation, which is what sex can provide in those rare moments when two partners trust one another enough to reveal their otherwise strictly censored desires to dirty and insult. Though defiling sex seems on the surface to be about hurting another person, really it’s a quest for intimacy and love – and a delight that, for a time at least, we can be as bad as we like and still turn out to be the object of another’s affection.
The School of Life Page 14