The Golden Condom

by Jeanne Safer

  After two years of self-abasement, she could take no more and packed a suitcase and fled, leaving her master no forwarding address. Within ten years, she was working successfully as an assistant to an interior designer and was living with a man who genuinely cared for her but knew nothing of her former profession; I was the only one who did.

  I told her that if she wanted a future with this man—which she longed for—she had to reveal her past to him. With surprisingly little hesitation, she did so (it must have been a burden to harbor such a secret), and his response proved him worthy: he hated what her life had been, but he knew she was a different person now and that she was his.

  They lived together for five more years when she finally admitted to herself that being his companion wasn’t enough to satisfy her; she wanted to be his wife. The sanctity and legitimacy of marriage were essential for her in order to neutralize the furtive unreality she had once vanished into. She had never before recognized, let alone verbalized, that she wanted to be uniquely special to anybody—you have to have a sense of self to do that—but she wanted it now, even though she was deathly afraid to reveal her desire. I told her she had to inform him, directly and unequivocally; she had to feel she deserved and then to hear herself ask for him to make a lifelong commitment to her. Just as her first act of selfhood was to flee one man, her second would be to embrace another. And to do that, she had to speak.

  Ironically, it was far more torturous for her to tell him that she wanted to marry him than it had been to reveal her shame. She was giving him power over her fate and opening herself to the possibility of being rejected. He had been unhappily married before and was reluctant to go through the formalities again, but after a two-year struggle, she managed through force of will to make herself clear. Finally, he bought her a ring—she proudly showed me the sleek and unusual one that she had selected—and they set a date.

  Her success had an unexpected consequence. To my astonishment, she came to her next session in a state of terror, weeping, almost hiding, and more silent than I had seen her in all the years I had known her. She was getting the thing that mattered most to her: being seen, heard, and chosen. She was loved and honored for the first time in her life—why was she quaking? She looked at me with frightened eyes and said in a passionate whisper, as if saying it any louder would make it magically come true, “What if he dies?”

  I told her that loss is built into love. When someone becomes precious and you let yourself need him and tell him you want him, there is no way to avoid this eventuality. You are putting yourself in his hands, and he becomes irreplaceable. When you give yourself that way, the real way—neither embodying another’s fantasy nor disconnected from your authentic self—an essential part of yourself is forever bound up with the other’s fragile life. You merge your destinies. Only the whole person she had now become could join her beloved so completely. When you have someone, you have someone to lose.

  Since risk hangs over shared lives, ardor and anxiety are inextricable. You never know how the loss will come—whether he will lose you or you him, but it is a certainty that there will be a shattering involuntary separation. Death is the abandonment caused not by betrayal but by fidelity. Even so, a relationship this deep lives on as part of you. It becomes inextricable from your identity; it cannot be wrested from you utterly. Could she dare to take the chance? She steadied herself and proclaimed, “I will.”

  * * *

  Half a century earlier, another young woman was also paralyzed by shyness and unable to speak. Since she lived in Vienna in Freud’s heyday, she decided to seek therapy after more than one young man bewitched by her soulful beauty but put off by her silence had declared, “For such a pretty girl, why are you so arrogant?”

  She told me this anecdote as a seventy-five-year-old matron the first time she invited me to a dinner of wiener schnitzel and apple strudel in her rambling apartment on Central Park West when I was a twenty-six-year-old graduate student. We had met working in the research department of a psychoanalytic institute, where she, a social worker in her youth, edited a newsletter.

  All I really knew about her then was that she was the widow of a psychiatrist and founder of the institute (its library was named for him), who had been the protégé of Wilhelm Stekel, one of Freud’s earliest and most radical adherents,1 and that he had died years earlier. But the real story went far deeper.

  I had never been anywhere like Lilly’s apartment. The place was a time warp, furnished entirely with perfectly preserved artifacts from the late 1930s. The old concert grand was in the living room, where the couple and their musical friends had played quintets on Sundays, with Lilly on piano and her husband, Emil, on viola, which his mentor had decreed that he had to learn so they would always have the requisite string parts. She had lost him suddenly from a heart attack when she was sixty-three and he was seventy, but his consulting room, a book-filled oval space behind the living room—complete with an archetypical oriental carpet–draped analytic couch and walls covered with old photographs of the Freudian elite—seemed untouched and still ready to hear secrets. She showed me a calling card of Freud’s and the handwritten file where Emil had transcribed and organized by theme all the dreams of his patients, which became the basis for his book on the subject. There was an entire shelf of copies of this book—one of many he wrote—in numerous languages, and she gave it to me. That night, she also opened her wardrobe and displayed the hand-embroidered linens from her trousseau, carefully folded and perfumed, which her mother had begun stitching at her birth.

  I asked her the identity of the ravishing woman whose full-length portrait hung in her dining room, and she replied with downcast eyes, “It is myself.” Her husband, she said, had accepted it in lieu of payment from the artist, who had been his patient—one of his countless acts of generosity. Her admiration of him was boundless; it was because of his clearheaded judgment that her entire family had escaped to America before the Anschluss.

  I was curious to know how they had met. Only then she told me that at the end of her last session, her analysis successfully concluded by mutual consent, she sat up on the couch to bid a grateful farewell to the compelling young psychiatrist who had helped her overcome her anxiety and find her voice. But instead of showing her to the door, he turned to face her and asked a question engraved on her memory: “And when may I see you?” They married within the year. “He was my analyst. Now it can be told,” she said shyly, almost blushing to reveal at last what had been a transgressive secret, a taboo-breaking risk, for decades; sexual relationships—even marital ones—between therapists and their erstwhile patients were then considered verboten because of the Oedipal implications and boundary violations involved.

  Soon after her revelation, we went to a concert of chamber music together. It was a program of string quartets by Schubert, her favorite composer, and she idolized the dashing young first violinist. At the end, moved to tears, she said with quiet intensity, “That was too beautiful to bear. It was like analysis”—an analogy that would be absurd uttered by anyone else, but was the simple truth from her. Analysis, music, and falling in love were ecstatically intermingled for her in an inimitable way. No ordinary suitor could compare, then or now.

  Lilly didn’t exactly lower her voice when she spoke her husband’s name, but it brightened, and her eyes softened, every time she did so, and the many circumstances in which she evoked him suggested that he was a constant point of reference; her inner monologue was dialogue and communion. She often referred to him both obliquely and directly, and yet it was never morbid or off-putting, because he was so alive for her. For example, when I told her I was marrying a man who was eight years younger than I, she replied, “Ah yes, the perfect age difference,” since it was the interval between hers and Emil’s age, even though in reverse.

  Was she just living in a bygone era, obsessed with lost love, immersing herself in it to avoid her present loneliness yet afraid to move on? I think not. She seemed not so much clinging
to her past as buoyed up by it; she saw life through the lens of their relationship and the power of his personality. Her solitude was not lonely. Hers was a quietly intense, self-contained world, infused with memories that were living presences, into which others were welcomed. Freud said that “neurotics suffer from reminiscences,” but Lilly was consoled by hers.

  Psychoanalytic theory, from Freud’s day to the present, has not had nearly as much to say about healthy passion as about the more grotesque pathological kind. What would it make of hers? Self psychology, the modern theoretical approach founded by Heinz Kohut, would recognize Emil as Lilly’s “selfobject,” her internal touchstone of sustenance, solace, and self-esteem. Making use of another in this way is a sign of mental health and a source of stability. But Otto Kernberg,2 who has written extensively about the prerequisites for long-term erotic fulfillment, might be wary of an all-consuming romance after death like hers and question her unassailable fidelity. According to him, an earmark of mature love is the ability to grieve fully for the dead beloved, to retain the relationship within oneself, and then to accept (and to seek) a new partner “without guilt or insecurity.”

  In Lilly’s case, giving herself to another would have been sacrilegious, because she felt that she had the ultimate experience of marriage, and it sufficed for her. Their relationship was so unique and precious and so vividly present that it could never be superseded. Emil’s love for her, and hers for him, continued to fulfill her. To seek another love would be an unthinkable act of infidelity not only to him but to herself and to the woman she had become, the life she had had, because of him. It was choice, not fear or limitation in her ability to relate, that bound her eternally to him.

  I was always struck by the remarkable contentment, the lack of bitterness, that Lilly exuded as she faced old age and death alone; she had two grown sons and several grandchildren, but they had their own lives at some remove from her. Of all the American institutions she admired, she loved Thanksgiving the most, because, she said, “I have so much to be thankful for.” She took joy in small things and seemed utterly devoid of the envy that many in her situation are corroded by (with one glaring exception: “The only thing I’ve ever envied,” this fine musician confessed without a trace of irony, “is my brother’s perfect pitch”). Other than a severe mouse phobia—Emil once found her in their hotel room after a traumatic sighting, standing on one leg on the bed, trying to read a book while she waited for him to rescue her—I never saw a sign of psychopathology such as depression, intense anxiety, or withdrawal in her.

  A birthday card she sent me, one of the few I have ever saved or whose message I’ve remembered, epitomized her attitude: “Life itself is life’s great treasure.” And she did not hoard her treasures; her wedding gift to me was an exquisite set of sleek red-and-gold-banded art deco demitasse cups from her trousseau. The gesture brought to mind “Hello, Young Lovers” from The King and I, one of the most generous love songs ever written, in which the middle-aged heroine Anna exhorts a pair of furtive lovers not to pity her, because their passion recalls her own. Lilly was overjoyed for me.

  * * *

  The risk that my silent patient daringly embraced, my formerly shy Viennese friend had actually endured: the loss of the man who had given her a voice and saved her—my patient, from a life of degradation, Lilly, from literal death in the Holocaust. Like Pygmalion, each man was irreplaceable to the woman he had rescued—with her active participation—from silence and enlivened through love. At the beginning, my patient did not know that she could sustain herself through him even if he died, but I knew that she could, as Lilly had done; he was hers forever.

  Lilly, the most romantic, fulfilled soul I have ever known, was alone but not lonely. My patient had been lonely as only a person without a center, who had never known comfort or been prized before, can be. Thanks to her husband, she could never feel that way again; even his death could not take away what she had become. Kohut would say that she, like Lilly, used her husband as her selfobject.

  I say they are both true lovers, sustained from within, and mated, like swans, for life.

  * * *

  Both my patient and my friend clearly idealized their husbands; they found fathers and mothers and saviors in them. This was realistic on their parts; the personalities and actions of both men made them highly idealizable. But the way these women looked up to and needed their husbands did not make them dependent or infantile; they functioned as professionals in their own right and as friends and soul mates to the men they admired, and they were admired in turn by their husbands. Their attitude was an essential part of their fully adult appreciation of how remarkable their mates and their marriages genuinely were.

  Psychoanalytic theorists are ambivalent about whether idealization is a sign of mature love or a regression to childish reliance on a parental stand-in who cannot be seen as realistically flawed because the fantasy of the loved one’s perfection shores up an immature sense of self. Michael Balint, one of the original members of the British object relations school of thought, believes that idealization “is not absolutely necessary for a good love relation” and agrees with Freud’s observation that idealizing a beloved can actually hinder the development of fulfilling love as an adult; perhaps Freud was speaking from personal experience, since his adoring letters to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, are full of idealization, and there are questions about how ultimately satisfying that union was. But Otto Kernberg claims—and I agree with him—that “a mature form of idealization” is fundamental to a marriage of true minds. I believe that this type of adulation must not just be one-sided, and, unlike Kernberg, I think it can outlast death. Not every marriage is like my patient’s or Lilly’s, but the deepest ones are. They are like the halves of the reunited primordial egg that Aristophanes refers to in Plato’s Symposium: “And when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself … the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other’s sight … even for a moment: These are the people who pass their whole lives together.…”

  * * *

  When I went to see Lilly in the hospital during her last illness, she was welcoming, overjoyed to have company, full of praise for the care she was getting, thankful for the first solid food she was able to eat. She gently corrected my husband’s German accent when he wished her a gallant farewell. There on the table next to her bed, where she could gaze at it until the last, was Emil’s photograph. It was as though her favorite Schubert song, “Du bist die Ruh,” was silently surrounding her, bearing her back to him:

  You are my peace, my joy and rest,

  You are the yearning in my breast

  I pledge to you, my sacred place,

  all pain and joy.

  Towards me now face

  and softly close the door behind …

  My eye’s whole sight, so much in thrall

  in your own light—

  oh, fill it all!

  11

  LOVE HIM, HATE HIS POLITICS

  How a Liberal and a Conservative Stay Married

  Next Election Day, like every Election Day for the last three decades, I’ll show up faithfully at my polling place, rain or shine. I’ll make it my business to get there even if there’s a blizzard, a hurricane, or a tsunami, and if I can’t go in person, I’ll use an absentee ballot. Once again, I’ll be pulling the levers (or tapping the screen) for some people I actually agree with, for some I’m not crazy about, and for others I’ve never heard of. Of course I’m planning to participate in every future presidential election, but I’ll be sure not to miss the midterms, either. On the first Tuesday after the first Monday of every November, for the rest of my life, I’ll register my choices for senators, congressmen, governors, state senators, assemblymen, mayors, city council members, and judges. As long as they’re Democrats, they can count on my support.

  It’s a matter of moral obligation, not just civic duty: I’ve got to cancel out my husband’s vote
.

  For thirty-five years, I, a card-carrying liberal, have been married to a conservative Republican. My husband is not just a fervently committed conservative Republican; he is a professional fervently committed conservative Republican—a senior editor of the leading right-wing journal in America.

  My husband and I violently disagree on every conceivable political issue, including abortion, gun control, and assisted suicide, as well as on the necessity of an impregnable wall of separation between church and state—all of which he opposes and I passionately support and consider sacred. The only public issues we agree about are that both parties in New York State government are riddled with corruption and that increasing the number of gambling casinos here is a terrible idea. His deepest convictions haven’t budged in the thirty-eight years I have known him, and mine haven’t, either. Nonetheless, I can say unequivocally that marrying him was the best decision I ever made and that he is probably the only man I could ever live with.

  I’ve long been aware that our mixed marriage is unusual (until recently, I knew of no other among my acquaintances), but I didn’t realize just how exotic—bordering on extinct—it actually was until I saw a study from Stanford University1 stating that the ferocity of political partisanship in the United States is so intense that marriages across party lines are “exceedingly rare”—9 percent—and that the prejudices that each side feels about the other are even more deeply ingrained and virulent than racism. Parents now worry about their children marrying outside party affiliations, and, to my astonishment and dismay, many single people consider political orientation a more important criterion in a potential mate than physical or personality attributes.2 Our prejudices haven’t changed, but antagonism in the rest of the country toward the other side has escalated ominously since we wed in 1980, thanks in part to the Internet and ever more rabidly partisan radio and television.