The Parental-Resemblance Argument
There is a move many of us make in the heat of an argument with our partner that is at once devastating, accurate and entirely uncalled for. In a particularly contemptuous, sly and yet gleeful tone, partners are inclined to announce, as if a rare truth were being unearthed, ‘You’re turning into your mother’ or ‘You’re turning into your father.’
The claim is apt to silence us because, however much we may have tried to develop our own independent characters, we can’t help but harbour a deep and secret fear that we are prey to an unconscious psychological destiny. In one side of our brains, we are aware of a range of negative qualities we observed in our parents which we sense are intermittently hinted at in our own personalities. And we are terrified.
We catch ourselves rehearsing opinions that once struck us as patently absurd or laughable. At moments of weakness, we find ourselves replaying just the same sarcastic or petty, vain or angry attitudes we once felt sure we would never want to emulate. The accusations of our partner hurt so much because they knock up against a genuine risk.
At the same time, the criticism is deeply underhand. First, because even if we ourselves occasionally share an account of our parents’ failings with our partners, the universal rules of filial loyalty mean that we – and only we – are ever allowed to bring these up again in an aggressive tone.
Second, the accusation is unfair because it is attempting to push us into denying something that is invariably partly correct. How could we not be a little like our parents, given the many years we spent around them, the untold genes we share with them and the malleability of the infant mind?
We should never get railroaded into protesting that we are unlike those who put us on the earth; we should undercut the implicit charge by immediately candidly admitting that we are – of course – very much like our parents, as they are akin to theirs. How could we be anything else? Why wouldn’t we be? But, in a twist to the normal argument, we should then remind our partners that we chose to be with them precisely in order to attenuate the risks of an unexamined parental destiny. It was and remains their solemn duty not to mock us for being like our parents, but to assist us with kindness to become a little less like them where it counts. By hectoring and accusing us, they aren’t identifying a rare truth from which we hide away in shame; they are stating the obvious and then betraying the fundamental contract of adult love. Their task as our partner isn’t to bully us into making confessions that we would have been ready to accept from the start, but to help us evolve away from the worst sides of people who have inevitably messed us up a little and yet whom we can’t – of course, despite everything – stop loving inordinately.
The Argument from Excessive Logic
It seems odd at first to imagine that we might get angry, even maddened, by a partner because they are, in the course of a discussion, proving to be too reasonable and too logical. We are used to thinking highly of reason and logic. We are not normally enemies of evidence and rationality. How, then, do these ingredients become problematic in the course of love? But from close up, considered with sufficient imagination, our suspicion can make a lot of sense.
When we are in difficulties, what we may primarily be seeking from our partners is a sense that they understand what we are going through. We are not looking for answers (the problems may be too large for there to be any obvious ones) so much as comfort, reassurance and fellow feeling. In the circumstances, the deployment of an overly logical stance may come across not as an act of kindness, but as a species of disguised impatience.
Let’s imagine someone who comes to their partner complaining of vertigo. The fear of heights is usually manifestly unreasonable: the balcony obviously isn’t about to collapse, there’s a strong iron balustrade between us and the abyss, the building has been repeatedly tested by experts. We may know all this intellectually, but it does nothing to reduce our sickening anxiety in practice. If a partner were patiently to begin to explain the laws of physics to us, we wouldn’t be grateful; we would simply feel they had misunderstood us.
Much that troubles us has a structure akin to vertigo: our worry isn’t exactly reasonable, but we’re unsettled all the same. We can, for example, continue to feel guilty about letting down our parents, no matter how nice to them we’ve actually been. Or we can feel very worried about money, even if we’re objectively economically quite safe. We can feel horrified by our own appearance, even though no one else judges our face or body harshly. Or we can be certain that we’re failures who’ve messed up everything we’ve ever done, even if, in objective terms, we seem to be doing pretty well. We can obsess that we’ve forgotten to pack something, even though we’ve taken a lot of care and can in any case buy almost everything at the other end. Or we may feel that our life will fall apart if we have to make a short speech, even though thousands of people make quite bad speeches every day and their lives continue as normal.
When we recount our worries to our partner, we may receive a set of precisely delivered, unimpassioned logical answers – we have been good to our parents, we have packed enough toothpaste, etc. – answers that are entirely true and yet unhelpful as well, and so in their own way enraging. It feels as if the excessive logic of the other has led them to look down on our concerns. Because, reasonably speaking, we shouldn’t have our worries, the implication is that we must be mad for having them.
The one putting forward the ‘logical’ point of view shouldn’t be surprised by the angry response they receive. They are forgetting how weird and beyond the ordinary rules of reason all human minds can be, theirs included. The logic they are applying is really a species of brute common sense that refuses the insights of psychology. Of course our minds are prey to phantasms, illusions, projections and neurotic terrors. Of course we’re afraid of many things that don’t exist in the so-called real world. But such phenomena are not so much ‘illogical’ as deserving of the application of a deeper logic. Our sense of whether we’re attractive or not isn’t a reflection of what we actually look like; it follows a pattern that goes back to childhood and how loved we were made to feel by those we depended on. The fear of public speaking is bound up with long-standing shame and dread of others’ judgement.
An excessively logical approach to fears discounts their origins and concentrates instead on why we shouldn’t have them – which is maddening when we are in pain. It’s not that we actually want our partner to stop being reasonable; we want them to apply their intelligence to the task of sensitive reassurance. We want them to enter into the weirder bits of our own experience by remembering their own. We want to be understood for being the mad animals we are, and then comforted and reassured that it will all be OK anyway.
Then again, it could be that the application of excessive logic isn’t an accident or a form of stupidity. It might be an act of revenge. Perhaps our partner is giving brief, logical answers to our worries because their efforts to be sympathetic towards us in the past have gone nowhere. Perhaps we have neglected their needs. If two people were being properly ‘logical’ in the deepest sense of the word – that is, truly alive to all the complexities of emotional functioning – rather than squabbling around the question ‘Why are you being so rational when I’m in pain?’, the person on the receiving end of superficial logic would gently change the subject and ask, ‘Is it possible I’ve hurt or been neglecting you?’ That would be real logic.
The No-Sex Argument
It could, on the surface, be an argument about almost anything: what time to leave for the airport, who forgot to post the tax form, where to send the children to school … But in reality, in disguise, unmentioned and unmentionable, it is typically the very same argument, the no-sex argument, the single greatest argument that ever afflicts committed couples, the argument which has powered more furious oblique exchanges among lovers than any other, the argument that, right now, explains why one person is angrily refusing to speak to another over a bowl of udon noodles in a restaurant i
n downtown Yokohama and another is screaming in an apartment on an upper floor of a block in the suburbs of Belo Horizonte, why a child has acquired a step-parent and a person is crying over a bottle or at their therapist’s office.
The real injury – you have ceased to want me and I can no longer bear myself or you – can’t be mentioned because it cuts too deep; it threatens too much of our dignity; it is bigger than we are. Late at night in the darkness, time after time, our hand moved towards theirs, tried to coax theirs into a caress and was turned down. They held our fingers limply for a moment and then, as if we were the monster we now take ourselves to be, curled away from us and disappeared into the warren of sleep. We have stopped trying now. It may happen once in a blue moon, a few times a year, but we understand the score well enough: we are not wanted. We feel like outcasts, the only ones to be rejected in this way, the victims of a rare disease. We are nursing an emotional injury far too shaming to mention to others, let alone ourselves, the only ones not to be having sex in a happy, sex-filled world. Our anger aggravates our injury and traps us in cycles of hostility. Perhaps they don’t want us in the night because we have been so vile in the day; but so long as our hand goes unwanted, we can never muster the courage to be anything but vindictive in their presence. It hurts more than being single, when at least the neglect was to be expected. This is a sentence without end. We can neither complain nor let the issue go. We feel compelled to fight by proxy about anything we can lay our hands on – the washing powder and the walk to the park, the money for the dentist and the course of the nation’s politics – all because we so badly need to be held and to hold, to penetrate or to be penetrated.
It is in a sense deeply strange, even silly, that so much should hang on this issue, that the future of families, the fate of children, the division of assets, the survival of a friendship group should depend on the right sort of frottage of a few centimetres of our upper limbs. It’s the tiniest thing and at the same time the very largest. The absence of sex matters so much because sex itself is the supreme conciliator and salve of all conflict, ill feeling, loneliness and lack of interest. It is almost impossible to make love and be sad, indifferent or bitter. Furious perhaps, in a passionate and ardent way. But not – almost never – truly elsewhere or beset by major grievances. The act forces presence, vulnerability, honesty, tenderness, release. It matters inordinately because it is the ultimate proof that everything is, despite everything, still OK.
As ever, so much would change if only we could be helped to find the words to fight our way past our shame and not feel so alone (this should be proof enough that we aren’t); if we could point to the problem without fury, without humiliation, without defensiveness; if we could simply name our desperation without becoming desperate; if the one who didn’t want sex could explain why in terms that made sense and were bearable and the one who felt cast aside could explain without giving way to vindictiveness or despair.
We would ideally, alongside physics and geography, learn the basics of all this in our last year at high school: learn how to spot and assuage the no-sex argument with an in-depth course and regular refreshments throughout our lives. It is the paradigm of all arguments. Those who can get over it can surmount pretty much any dispute; those who cannot must squabble to the grave.
Were our species to learn how to do this, the world would be suddenly and decisively calmer: there would be infinitely fewer fights, alcoholic outbursts, divorces, affairs, rages, denunciations, recriminations, civil wars, armed conflicts and nuclear conflagrations. At the first signs of no-sex arguments, couples would know how carefully to locate the words that would address their sorrows. There would not always be an answer, but there would always be the right sort of conversation.
PESSIMISM
Whatever disappointing experiences we have lived through in love, we tend to console ourselves with a highly reasonable-sounding thought: that our problems to date have resided not with our expectations, but with the people they were directed towards. It feels profoundly implausible that the difficulties might be structural, might lie with relationships in general, when issues have manifested themselves so distinctly in relation to particular people we were with.
The solution to our agitation lies, strangely, in a philosophy of pessimism: in the expectation of a blunt inevitability that two people will never understand more than a fraction of each other’s minds. We are all, in diverse ways, highly arduous propositions. Love begins with the discovery of harmony in very specific areas, but widespread disagreement, misunderstanding, boredom, a certain amount of rage and loneliness are what happens when love finally truly succeeds.
The only people we can think of as profoundly admirable are those we don’t yet know very well.
For many of us, love starts rapidly, often at first sight: with an overwhelming impression of the other’s loveliness. This phenomenon – the crush – goes to the heart of the modern understanding of love. It could seem like a small incident, a minor planet in the constellation of love, but it is in fact the underlying secret central sun around which our notions of the Romantic revolve. A crush represents in pure and perfect form the essential dynamics of Romanticism: the explosive interaction of limited knowledge, outward obstacles to further discovery and boundless hope.
We wouldn’t be able to develop crushes if we weren’t so good at allowing a few details about someone to suggest the whole of them. From a few cues only, perhaps a distant look in the eyes, a forthright brow or a generous wit, we rapidly start to anticipate an intense connection and stretches of happiness, buoyed by profound mutual sympathy and understanding.
We cannot be entirely wrong, there are surely genuine virtues to hand, but the primary error of the crush is to ignore the fact that life will in important ways have twisted us all out of shape. No one has come through completely unscathed. The chances of a perfectly admirable human walking the earth are non-existent. Our fears and our frailties play themselves out in a thousand ways – they can make us defensive or aggressive, grandiose or hesitant, clingy or avoidant – but we can be assured that unfortunate tendencies exist in us all and will make everyone much less than perfect and, at moments, extremely hard to live with.
Every human can be guaranteed to frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us – and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. This is a truth chiselled indelibly into the script of romantic life. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is therefore merely a case of identifying a specific kind of dissatisfaction we can bear rather than an occasion to escape from grief altogether.
UNREQUITED LOVE
When love remains unreciprocated for too long, a particular agony can descend. We are haunted by a sense of all that might have been. Epochal happiness seemed tantalizingly close yet is now maddeningly out of reach. We are often kindly counselled to try to forget the beloved and to think of something or someone else. Yet such kindness is misguided. The cure for love does not lie in ceasing to think of the fugitive lover, but in learning to think more intensely and constructively about who they might really be.
What prevents us from loosening our grip on love is simply a lack of knowledge. This is what can make unrequited love so vicious. By denying us the chance to grow close to the beloved, we cannot tire of them in the cathartic and liberating manner that is the gift of requited love. It isn’t their charms that are keeping us magnetized; it is our lack of knowledge of their flaws.
The cure for unrequited love is, in structure, therefore very simple. We must get to know them better. The more we learn about them, the less they will ever look like the solution to our uneasy lives. We will discover the endless small ways in which they are irksome; we’ll get to know how stubborn, how critical, how cold and how hurt by things that strike us as meaningless they can be. That is, if we get to know them better, we will realize how much they have in common with everyone else.
Passion can never withstand too much e
xposure to the full reality of another person. The unbounded admiration on which it is founded is destroyed by the knowledge that a properly shared life inevitably brings.
The cruelty of unrequited love isn’t really that we haven’t been loved back, rather that our hopes have been aroused by someone who can never disappoint us, someone whom we will have to keep believing in because we lack the knowledge that would set us free.
In a position of longing for a new person when we are constrained within an existing relationship, we must beware too of the ‘incumbent problem’: the vast but often overlooked and unfair advantage that all new people, and also cities and jobs, have over existing – or, as we put it, incumbent – ones. The beautiful person glimpsed briefly in the street, the city visited for a few days, the job we read about in a couple of tantalizing paragraphs in a magazine all tend to seem immediately and definitively superior to our current partner, our long-established home and our committed workplace and can inspire us to sudden and (in retrospect sometimes) regrettable divorces, relocations and resignations.
The School of Life Page 18