by Jeanne Safer
How did we find each other? So insular was I in my youth that I was not even conscious of knowing any Republicans other than my father and certainly never imagined having one as a boyfriend. I equated conservatism with the fanatical, paranoid John Birch Society. But in my late twenties, I joined a Renaissance singing group, and there he was—tall, clever, with intense blue eyes and a lyrical baritone. I was delighted to discover that he was a professional writer, although I was taken aback when I learned where he worked. It didn’t stop me, though; I’d been treated abominably by too many men who shared all my opinions to let his convictions get in the way.
My future husband was considerably more open-minded about love across party lines than I. Even though his parents were both committed conservatives, he grew up in the era when liberalism was the dominant ideology, which gave him much more exposure to the opposition at an early age. He even dated a former Communist in college.
Our wedding was a bipartisan affair. My mentor, one of the early victims of the McCarthyite purges, gave me away, and my husband’s publisher, one of McCarthy’s most avid enforcers, gave a reading. A knowing friend quipped, “Bedfellows make strange politics.” Somehow everyone behaved, setting a trend that we have emulated—and worked at—with only a few painful exceptions ever since.
The most bruising of those exceptions occurred in 1989, the only time we had our version of a knock-down, drag-out confrontation, and it was so unnerving that I remember all the particulars. It was initiated by me; my husband knew better than to broach so radioactive a topic. One morning, I picked up The New York Times and read the front-page headline about the Supreme Court’s Webster decision, which allowed states to place significant restrictions on abortion rights. I knew that this would open the door to massive efforts by conservatives to dismantle Roe v. Wade, and I was beside myself. I said, half under my breath but audible all the same, “This is the end. I’m going to have to join a protest march.” He uncharacteristically rose to the bait and countered, with grim determination, “If you march, I march.” Fortunately, I knew not to respond to his counterpunch and let the tension escalate into real warfare; this was a fight neither he nor I could win, with the potential to destroy everything we had carefully built and that we both cherished, without accomplishing anything. We kept our distance for the rest of the day. It was torture. I felt lonely and bereft, and so did he. That night, we agreed to disagree and drop the subject. We pulled ourselves back from the precipice and have made sure never to approach it again.
Even after I learned to inhibit such outbursts, it took our first decade together for me to fully accept how yawning our ideological divide really was, despite how much we were in harmony about virtually everything else. Slowly, I became reconciled to the fact that not even my considerable powers of persuasion—not to mention the self-evident correctness of my positions—would make him change his mind, but, alas, it is so; he never even tried to change mine.
It is a pernicious fantasy that you can alter your spouse’s political opinions any more than you can transform his other habits, character traits, or ways of seeing the world. Persuasion doesn’t work, and showing him the error of his ways doesn’t work because he doesn’t think his ways are in error even if you do.
Does our marriage endure because we have both mellowed and become so serene and levelheaded that we have found a civilized way to rise above the fray and debate matters politic? No. Absolutely not. Experience has taught us that there are times when avoidance alone, enforced by self-control and silence aggressively and consistently applied, is the key to forestalling painful and hopeless arguments, extended icy silences, and sinking feelings in the night. It’s like learning to forcibly restrain yourself from telling your spouse “You’re just like your mother” when he has done something infuriating, even if it’s horribly true. It does not erode our integrity or prevent us from supporting whatever causes we wish without provocatively announcing our beliefs or our actions to each other; the moral high ground is dangerous territory in any marriage. This limitation on my freedom of expression in my own home is a price I willingly pay. Why is it worth it? Because the companionship of the other resident is the greatest joy in my life.
* * *
Twenty-five years after the Webster affair, I read another front-page Times headline announcing that most of the abortion clinics in Texas were being forced to close. I felt exactly the same way about the issue in 2014 as I had in 1989, but I behaved differently: I simply said that it disturbed me deeply, with no threat attached. My husband said nothing. I dealt with my outrage by making an unannounced contribution and commiserating privately with people who agree with me; I assume he did the same, although I wouldn’t think to ask. We don’t have to share everything; we just don’t rub each other’s faces in it. I don’t feel untrue to my convictions because I cannot make the slightest dent in his.
These days, we rarely fight, at least about public policy, and we never begin sentences when discussing the news with “Do you really believe [fill in the blank]?” We have learned to resort to nonincendiary inquiries like “What does your side think about X?” or “Who will you nominate?” My husband’s years as a journalist have made him a savvy political analyst, and I find his insights fascinating. I am much better informed and more sophisticated—and more liberal—as a result of being married to him than I otherwise would be. My opinions, however, are reserved for my fellow liberal colleagues and friends, and if they ask me, as they often do, how my charming and sensitive husband can possibly hold the opinions he does, I suggest they ask him directly. It takes tact and dexterity, but doesn’t marriage require these things of everybody? Doesn’t every couple have profound, fundamental disagreements, even if they vote the same ticket at the polls?
Living together so long has taught us that it is possible to tolerate our opposition on serious issues because we agree on what matters most, which is that the camaraderie we have created in every other sphere is more basic, and far more precious, than ideology. Nobody makes me think, makes me laugh, or comforts me when I cry, the way he does. We both have reason to know that, when you’re lying in a hospital bed receiving chemotherapy, you don’t check the party registration of the person by your side faithfully getting you through it.
It also helps that we have an enormous amount in common in every other arena. Both of us are psychologically minded nature lovers who prefer each other’s company to almost anybody else’s. We both write books; I’m delighted that his recent ones are historical rather than polemical, so I can enjoy them wholeheartedly. Our temperaments are at once similar and complementary, and we enjoy a rare degree of mutual appreciation, lack of envy, and delight in each other’s company. He expresses his political views in writing or with his colleagues, not in conversation with me. Over the years, I have also come to know many of these colleagues—who disagree with me as much as he does—and count them as friends. It stretches the mind.
The things that bring us together are deeper than the things that could have torn us apart; we can finish each other’s sentences on every subject but politics. He loves me for what I am, which includes the ways I am maddeningly different from him.
Living with someone who profoundly disagrees makes you think about what you really believe and why. Paradoxically, it broadens and deepens your convictions. Agreement in the political sphere, however, is no shortcut to compatibility in any other, and a life partner’s convictions, even the most passionately held ones, are only as important as the character of which they are a part.
So why don’t we both agree to stay home on Election Day? The reason that we don’t is one of the keys to why our marriage endures: even though I trust him with my life, I don’t trust him, and would never ask him, not to vote his conscience. I respect his right to his opinions, even though they seem dangerously benighted to me; this, we both believe, is the American Way. I also respect them because they are an integral part of him—just like mine are part of me. I married the whole man; he would not
be who he is without them.
I’m sorry for the growing number of people who look for love only on dating Web sites that are segregated, like radio or television networks, by redness or blueness. It’s really no better than a match by astrological sign or any other external criteria, because the political beliefs people subscribe to say surprisingly little about who they really are. They will never discover, as I did, that it’s possible to find a soul mate with whom the only thing you don’t have in common is politics.
* * *
I know only one other couple who are married across the ideological divide. They make our differences appear slight, but the underlying dynamics of their forty-year union are the same. They had more to overcome than we did, because when they met in graduate school, back in the Nixon administration, they agreed with each other more or less, but he changed allegiances radically later on. She has been a socialist and an activist since her student days. “He used to be two steps to the left of center,” she told me a little wistfully. “I just didn’t know yet that I really was a neoconservative,” he countered.
Politics is too ingrained in each of their identities for an avoidance strategy like ours to work for them. He, too, is a political journalist, with a more combative style than my husband’s, although it is tempered by his fundamentally sweet disposition and his reverence for his wife’s intellect. She, with all her quiet intensity, is a formidable opponent, both persistent and well informed about their numerous hot-button issues. Unlike my husband and me, these two go head-to-head about politics regularly. “She’s hard to fight with because she always has her facts and dates right,” he complained. She didn’t say so, but I know that he’s hard to fight with because he never concedes and revisits old battles as a point of honor.
Outside the political arena, however, their rapport is touching to behold. The way they look at each other and talk of and to each other, after so many years together, shows that lasting love is an ongoing achievement, not a happy accident. Their amity is profound, and it has seen them through differences that would seem irreconcilable. Their goodwill transcends the ideas that divide them; their fundamental values—loyalty, honesty, kindness—unite them. This has allowed them to face numerous tragedies and reversals of fortune over the years and never to fail each other.
The pilot-philosopher Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” That direction is neither to the right nor to the left but straight to the heart of things.
12
RECOVERING THE GOOD FROM A LOVE GONE BAD
It took me a year to wear her earrings again, the ones she had bought me in Paris. She had bought them long before her failure to visit me in the hospital and our awkward, painful breakup. Those wonderful earrings were purple carved acrylic crystals resembling quartz, and only she would have recognized them as my taste. I’d let them languish in my drawer, intentionally overlooked, because they forced upon me the stark reality of losing her—the intimate friend who had witnessed and participated in all the vicissitudes of my life for twenty-five years, with whom I would create no more memories and get, or give, no more special gifts.
Putting them back on for the first time was an act of defiance: I don’t miss you. I don’t need you. I refuse to deprive myself of these charming baubles any longer just because you’ve deprived me of yourself.
Soon I put them away again. Try as I might, I found I could not yet separate the gift from the giver; the shock of her ill treatment still hurt too much to be neutralized by an act of will. So back they went into the drawer after their brief foray on my ears—out of sight and out of mind once more.
Another year went by. I’d almost forgotten about their existence, but I found myself reaching for her earrings again, just as I began to write about her. Seeking them out was a palpable part of the process of reconsidering and working through the meaning of our relationship, of not just filing it bitterly away but letting it live again, if only in my own mind.
What I felt when I put on her earrings again was unexpected. The pain, the anger, and the sorrow had not completely dissipated, but another emotion had now joined them, welcome but unbidden: appreciation. This time, the earrings rekindled the memory of having been loved and understood in a unique way by a person the likes of whom I would never find again. I wasn’t cutting off hope for other intimate friendships in the future, but I knew that no one could ever replace her, because relationships are not interchangeable. Even if her gift was the only artifact left of her love for me, even if I could never forgive her, that love was real, precious, and indestructible. She had changed, but I retained what she had given me, the good she had done me—and her later unloving actions could not wrest it from me. I had no illusions about rekindling our relationship, but I began to recall it with pleasure and gratitude, despite its shocking, inexplicable denouement.
Only grieving—reengaging with every feeling and looking away from none of them—allows you to begin the process of recovering love. Mourning a loss acknowledges there was something to lose. It ultimately restores to you what was valuable (if anything was), burns off some of the devastation without entirely erasing it. You find that you are left with more than ashes in your mouth.
* * *
I faced a related but different predicament trying to come to terms with Michael, the golden-haired faithless lover of my youth: was there anything worth retrieving from that tormented relationship? At least I had my friend’s earrings and two decades of devotion before she abandoned me. But he had been in my life for a much shorter time and caused me more harm than good. I had no photograph, nothing concrete but my own words in a tattered diary left to remind me of him. I myself had destroyed his letters almost fifty years ago and had tried my best to bury my memories of the sorrow and unquenchable longing I felt in order not to be crushed by them.
Then I remembered the one “gift” that had passed between us. It was the golden condom I had created and sent him when he had written to me to ask advice on how to seduce another woman. Gilding and mailing that condom was a flamboyant gesture that had the unexpected, paradoxical effect of impressing and re-seducing him. Although the occasion was one of the worst rejections of my life and the aftermath was bitter, the memory of my action and the impact it had was sweet indeed.
For all the grief he caused me, I cannot say that I wished we’d never met or that I’d never loved him; this meant that there was good to be recovered. We had shared episodes of passionate delight, even though they were interlaced with pain for me almost from the beginning. I certainly did not love wisely, and part of my love was desperate and blind, but it was never mere masochistic submission; the joy I felt with him was precious and real, worthy of being remembered—unique, indelible, mine forever.
Rediscovering good things among the ruins does not mean denying the bad ones, but it requires a rigorous effort of excavation and a willingness to relive experiences that felt unbearable at the time; you have to spread the whole relationship before you, and to hold all its contradictions in consciousness simultaneously, in order to judge it accurately. When I no longer had to wall off the worst of him, the best of him became accessible to me again—a parallel experience to my rediscovering my friend’s value.
I will always carry a scar as well as a spark of the eternal desire I felt for him. All this is part of me, and I welcome it all, without bitterness or hatred. My beloved, like my lost woman friend, is woven into the fabric of my self, where delight and damage intermingle. Now my memories of both of them are real, three-dimensional, bright as well as dark.
* * *
Harry Guntrip, one of the major figures of the British object relations school of modern psychoanalysis, reported in a starkly revealing and moving autobiographical essay1 a life-changing observation that his analyst, the profoundly gifted D. W. Winnicott, made to him. This observation ultimately consoled him and cured him of a despair so deep that it had almost fatally und
ermined his health numerous times. It has always resonated for me. Winnicott asserted that even though Guntrip’s mother had become shockingly violent and abandoned him early on, she had been a naturally good mother for the first few months of his life. The recognition that he had once been loved by her, Guntrip realized, became a source of inner sustenance for him and had permitted him to refind that primordial loving mother again in his nurturing male analyst.
I believe that it is one of the most important things in life not to lose anything of value that you have ever gotten, from the living or the dead, even from those who later forsook you, betrayed you, or bitterly disappointed you. Love, joy, and meaning can be resurrected from the most unlikely sources, from relationships saturated with sorrow, shame—even hatred. While it is impossible to predict what will emerge as meaningful when you choose to search it out, the very effort creates the potential for discovery and gives you more of a say in your own life. I don’t think it’s possible or necessary to recover appreciation for everyone who has violated your trust, but when there is something meaningful to retrieve, celebrating it is a genuine compensation for loss. It sustains you from within.
If anything in your love was real—imperfect, ambivalent, obsessive, or selfish in part but tender and true at the core—it is yours forever, even though the one you loved loves you no longer or never fully returned your devotion. The authentic core of love is eternal, even if the person who inspired it will never return to you. But you have to hold fast to it and fight through your despair, your disappointment, and your bitterness to find it, to resurrect it, to claim it. With work and with will, the consoling promise of Dylan Thomas’s words comes true: “Though lovers be lost love shall not.”
NOTES
2. Of Human Bondage
1. A study of 155 men and women (R. Baumeister, S. Wotman, and A. Stillwell, “Unrequited Love: On Heartbreak, Anger, Guilt, Scriptlessness, and Humiliation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, no. 3 [March 1993]: 377–394) found that only 2 percent of them had managed to avoid being on one side or the other of an unrequited love affair.