We start off in childhood believing parents might have access to a superior kind of knowledge and experience. They look, for a while, astonishingly competent. Our exaggerated esteem is touching but also intensely problematic, for it sets them up as the ultimate objects of blame when we gradually discover that they are flawed, sometimes unkind, in areas ignorant and utterly unable to save us from certain troubles. It can take a while, until the fourth decade or the final hospital scenes, for a more forgiving stance to emerge. Their new condition, frail and frightened, reveals in a compellingly physical way something which has always been true psychologically: that they are uncertain vulnerable creatures motivated more by anxiety, fear, a clumsy love, and unconscious compulsions than by godlike wisdom and moral clarity—and cannot, therefore, forever be held responsible for either their own shortcomings or our many disappointments.
In those moods when Rabih can at long last break free of his ego, it isn’t just one or two people he feels he can forgive more easily. It may even be, at an extreme, that no human being any longer lies outside the circle of his sympathy.
He sees goodness in unexpected places. He is moved by the benevolence of the office administrator, a widow in her mid-fifties whose son has just gone off to university in Leeds. She is cheerful and strong, an extraordinary accomplishment which she extends over every hour of every working day. She takes care to ask all the staff how they are. She remembers birthdays and fills in idle minutes with reflections that are always encouraging and tender. As a younger man he wouldn’t have taken any notice of such a minor demonstration of grace, but by now he has been humbled enough by life to know to stoop down and pick up the smaller blessings wherever they come. He has without trying, and without pride, become a little nicer.
He is readier to be generous, too, from a sense of how much he needs the charity of others. When others are vindictive, he is more interested in mitigating circumstances, and in any bits of the truth that cast a less moralistic light on viciousness and bad behavior. Cynicism is too easy, and it gets you nowhere.
He becomes aware, for the first time in his life, of the beauty of flowers. He remembers harboring a near hatred of them as an adolescent. It seemed absurd that anyone should take joy in something so small and so temporary when there were surely greater, more permanent things on which to pin ambitions. He himself wanted glory and intensity. To be detained by a flower was a symbol of a dangerous resignation. Now he is beginning to get the point. The love of flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with disappointment. Some things need to go permanently wrong before we can start to admire the stem of a rose or the petals of a bluebell. But once we realize that the larger dreams are always compromised in some way, with what gratitude we may turn to these minuscule islands of serene perfection and delight.
Held up against certain ideals of success, his life has been a deep disappointment. But he can also see that it is, in the end, no great achievement simply to fixate on failure. There is valor in being able to identify a forgiving, hopeful perspective on one’s life, in knowing how to be a friend to oneself, because one has a responsibility to others to endure.
Sometimes he has a hot bath in the middle of the night and takes stock of his body under the bright light. Aging is a bit like looking tired, but in a way that no amount of sleep will repair. Every year it will get a little worse. Today’s so-called bad photograph will be next year’s good one. Nature’s kind trick is to make everything happen so slowly that we don’t get as scared as we should. One day his hands will be liver spotted, like those of the elderly uncles he knew in his childhood. Everything that has happened to others will happen to him, too. No one gets away.
He is a collection of tissues and cells delicately and intricately conjoined and brought to life for only an instant. It will take just one sharp collision or a fall to render them inanimate again. All the seriousness of his plans depends on a steady flow of blood to his brain through a vulnerable network of capillaries. Should any of these suffer even the tiniest of failures, the tenuous sense he has begun to make of life will at once be erased. He is just a fortuitous constellation of atoms which have chosen to resist entropy for a few moments within cosmic eternity. He wonders which of his organs will fail first.
He is only a visitor who has managed to confuse his self with the world. He had assumed he was yet another stable object, like the city of Edinburgh or a tree or a book, whereas he is more like a shadow or a sound.
Death will be nothing too bad, he supposes: the constituent parts of him will be redistributed and returned. Life has been long already, and it will, at a point whose outlines he now intuits, be time to release and give others a go.
One evening, returning home through the dark streets, he spots a florist’s shop. He must have passed it many, many times, and yet he’s never taken any notice of it before. The front window is brightly illuminated and filled with a variety of blooms. He steps in, and an elderly woman smiles warmly at him. His eye is drawn to the first native flowers of a tentative spring: snowdrops. He watches the woman’s hands wrap the little bunch in fine white tissue.
“For someone nice, I think?” She smiles at him.
“My wife,” he replies.
“Lucky woman,” she says as she hands him the bundle and his change. He hopes to get home and, on this occasion, prove the florist right.
Ready for Marriage
They have been married for thirteen years and yet only now, a little late, does Rabih feel ready for marriage. It’s not the paradox it seems. Given that marriage yields its important lessons only to those who have enrolled in its curriculum, it’s normal that readiness should tend to follow rather than precede the ceremony itself, perhaps by a decade or two.
Rabih recognizes that it’s a mere sleight of language that allows him to maintain that he has been married only once. What has conveniently looked like a single relationship in fact sits across so many evolutions, disconnections, renegotiations, intervals of distance, and emotional homecomings that he has in truth gone through at least a dozen divorces and remarriages—just to the same person.
He is on a long drive down to Manchester for a client meeting. This is where he can think best, very early in the morning, in the car with the roads almost entirely clear and no one to talk to but himself.
Once, you were deemed ready for matrimony when you’d reached certain financial and social milestones: when you had a home to your name, a trousseau full of linen, a set of qualifications on the mantelpiece, or a few cows and a parcel of land in your possession.
Then, under the influence of Romantic ideology, such practicalities grew to seem altogether too mercenary and calculating, and the focus shifted to emotional qualities. It came to be thought important to have the right feelings, among these a sense of having hit upon a soul mate, a faith in being perfectly understood, a certainty of never wanting to sleep with anyone else again.
The Romantic ideas are, he knows now, a recipe for disaster. His readiness for marriage is based on a quite different set of criteria. He is ready for marriage because—to begin the list—he has given up on perfection.
Pronouncing a lover “perfect” can only be a sign that we have failed to understand them. We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.
However, the problems aren’t theirs alone. Whomever we could meet would be radically imperfect: the stranger on the train, the old school acquaintance, the new friend online . . . Each of these, too, would be guaranteed to let us down. The facts of life have deformed all of our natures. No one among us has come through unscathed. We were all (necessarily) less than ideally parented: we fight rather than explain, we nag rather than teach, we fret instead of analyzing our worries, we lie and scatter blame where it doesn’t belong.
The chances of a perfect human emerging from the perilous gauntlet are nonexistent. We don’t have to know a stranger very well before knowing this about them. Their particular way of being madde
ning won’t be immediately apparent—it could take as long as a couple of years—but its existence can be theoretically assumed from the start.
Choosing a person to marry is hence just a matter of deciding exactly what kind of suffering we want to endure rather than of assuming we have found a way to skirt the rules of emotional existence. We will all by definition end up with that stock character of our nightmares, “the wrong person.”
This needn’t be a disaster, however. Enlightened romantic pessimism simply assumes that one person can’t be everything to another. We should look for ways to accommodate ourselves as gently and as kindly as we can to the awkward realities of living alongside another fallen creature. There can only ever be a “good enough” marriage.
For this realization to sink in, it helps to have had a few lovers before settling down, not in order to have had a chance to locate “the right person,” but in order to have had an ample opportunity to discover at first hand, and in many different contexts, the truth that there isn’t any such a person; that everyone really is a bit wrong when considered from close up.
Rabih feels ready for marriage because he has despaired of being fully understood.
Love begins with the experience of being understood in highly supportive and uncommon ways. They grasp the lonely parts of us; we don’t have to explain why we find a particular joke so funny; we hate the same people; we both want to try that rather specialized sexual scenario.
It cannot continue. When we run up against the reasonable limits of our lovers’ capacities for understanding, we mustn’t blame them for dereliction. They were not tragically inept. They couldn’t fully fathom who we were—and we did likewise. Which is normal. No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else.
Rabih feels ready for marriage because he realizes he is crazy.
It’s profoundly counterintuitive for us to think of ourselves as mad. We seem so normal and mostly so good—to ourselves. It’s everyone else who is out of step . . . and yet, maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun.
Rabih is ready for marriage because he has understood that it isn’t Kirsten who is difficult.
They seem “difficult,” of course, within the cage of marriage when they lose their tempers over such petty things: logistics, in-laws, cleaning duties, parties, the groceries . . . But it’s not the other person’s fault, it’s what we’re trying to do with them. It’s the institution of marriage that is principally impossible, not the individuals involved.
Rabih is ready for marriage because he is prepared to love rather than be loved.
We speak of “love” as if it were a single, undifferentiated thing, but it comprises two very different modes: being loved and loving. We should marry when we are ready to do the latter and have become aware of our unnatural—and dangerous—fixation on the former.
We start out knowing only about “being loved.” It comes to seem, quite wrongly, the norm. To the child, it feels as if the parent were just spontaneously on hand to comfort, guide, entertain, feed, and clear up while remaining almost constantly warm and cheerful.
We take this idea of love with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly, and make everything better. It sounds “romantic,” yet it is a blueprint for disaster.
Rabih is ready for marriage because he understands that sex will always cohabit uneasily with love.
The Romantic view expects that love and sex will be aligned. We are properly ready for marriage when we are strong enough to embrace a life of frustration.
We must concede that adultery cannot be a workable answer, for no one can be its victim and not feel forever cut to the core. A single meaningless adventure truly does have a recurring habit of ending everything. It’s impossible for the victims of adultery to appreciate what might actually have been going through a partner’s mind during the “betrayal,” when they lay entwined with a stranger for a few hours. We can hear their defense as often as we like, but we’ll be sure of one thing in our hearts: that they were hell-bent on humiliating us and that every ounce of their love has evaporated, along with their status as a trustworthy human. To insist on any other conclusion is like arguing against the tide.
He is ready for marriage because (on a good day) he is happy to be taught and calm about teaching.
We are ready for marriage when we accept that, in a number of significant areas, our partner will be wiser, more reasonable, and more mature than we are. We should want to learn from them. We should bear having things pointed out to us. And at other moments we should be ready to model ourselves on the best pedagogues and deliver our suggestions without shouting or expecting the other simply to know. Only if we were already perfect could the idea of mutual education be dismissed as unloving.
Rabih and Kirsten are ready to be married because they are aware, deep down, that they are not compatible.
The Romantic vision of marriage stresses the importance of finding the “right” person, which is taken to mean someone in sympathy with the raft of our interests and values. There is no such person over the long term. We are too varied and peculiar. There cannot be lasting congruence. The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace.
Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the “right” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.
Rabih is ready for marriage because he is fed up with most love stories and because the versions of love presented in films and novels so seldom match what he now knows from lived experience.
By the standards of most love stories, our own real relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation and divorce so often appear inevitable. But we should be careful not to judge our relationships by the expectations imposed on us by a frequently misleading aesthetic medium. The fault lies with art, not life. Rather than split up, we may need to tell ourselves more accurate stories—stories that don’t dwell so much on the beginning, that don’t promise us complete understanding, that strive to normalize our troubles and show us a melancholy yet hopeful path through the course of love.
The Future
It is Kirsten’s birthday, and Rabih has arranged for them to spend the night at a wildly luxurious and expensive hotel in the Highlands. They drop the children off with a cousin of hers in Fort William and drive to the nineteenth-century castle. It promises battlements, five stars, room service, a billiard room, a pool, a French restaurant, and a ghost.
The children have made their unhappiness clear. Esther has accused her father of ruining her mother’s birthday. “I just know you’re going to get bored without us and that Mummy is going to miss us,” she insists. “I don’t think you should be away for so long.” (They will be meeting again the following afternoon.) William reassures his sister that their parents can always watch television and might even find a games room with a computer.
Their room is in a turret at the top of the building. There is a large bathtub in the center, and the windows look out over a succession of peaks dominated by Ben Nevis, still carrying a light dusting of snow on its tip in June.
Once the young bellboy has dropped off their luggage, they feel awkward in each other’s presence. It has been years, many years, since they have been alone in a hotel room together, without children or anything in particular to do over the next twenty-four hours.
It feels as if they are having an affair, so differently do they act towards each other in this setting. Encouraged by the dignity and quiet of the vast, hig
h-ceilinged room, they are more formal and respectful. Kirsten asks Rabih with unaccustomed solicitude what he might like to order from the room-service tea menu—and he runs her a bath.
The trick is perhaps not to start a new life but to learn to reconsider the old one with less jaded and habituated eyes.
He lies on the bed and watches her soak in the tub: her hair is up, and she is reading a magazine. He feels sorry for and guilty about the troubles they have caused each other. He looks at a set of brochures he has picked up off the desk. There is shooting offered in September, and options for salmon fishing in February. When she is finished, she rises from the bath with her arms crossed over her breasts. He is touched, and a little aroused, by her reserve.
They go downstairs for dinner. The restaurant is candlelit, with high-backed chairs and antlers hanging on the walls. The headwaiter describes the six-course menu in an absurdly high-flown manner which they nonetheless surprise themselves by very much enjoying. They know enough about the squalor of domesticity by now not to resist the chance to revel in a bit of elaborately staged hospitality.
The Course of Love Page 18