The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010)

by Michael Foley

  Instead, they must squeeze round a tiny table between two other occupied tables, where anything above a whisper can be heard by all three sets of diners. So much for intimacy. And he had been hoping to make the romantic suggestion of watching a porn movie later, not, of course, anything crass but that woman-friendly, tasteful production he spent so much time searching for. She, on the other hand, had been hoping to discuss her diminished libido.

  Already moving into the wall seat with a view of the room, she says, ‘Do you mind?’ He laughs bleakly: ‘I’m used to looking at walls.’

  Now here are menu and wine list. He points out the considerable gap in price between the house red and the others. She reminds him that house red is invariably vinegar. He orders the expensive Chianti Riserva, which the waiter brings and pours, reminding them of another problem here. The waiters invariably rush forward to pour wine, robbing the diners of autonomy, forcing them to drink too fast and unjustly rewarding the greedy who drink fastest. To make a fuss or to accept this annoyance?

  As for food, in the interests of good theatre, an essential part of the eating-out experience, she likes them to order different dishes and romantically share forkfuls. But they usually like the same dishes – it is a symbiotic union after all. So he has adopted the strategy of choosing and announcing his choice in a nanosecond. Now, understanding his ploy, she says with cold contempt, ‘So this is your new approach.’

  ‘Why can’t we both have the same thing if that’s what we want?’

  Like so many of his questions, this is not worthy of an answer. Instead, she forgoes her first preferences, orders a starter and main different from his and slams the menu shut.

  And only now, when the waiter has left, do they notice that their table has no candle. Every other table has its billowing flame. So this waiter insists on pouring wine, which is not only unnecessary but infuriating, and then neglects the one essential thing. Bring a candle, asshole.

  But, even by candlelight, romance is not easy.

  Indeed, so numerous and varied are the illusions, difficulties, demands, resentments, burdens and strains that beset contemporary relationships that the wonder is not that so many fail but that any survive at all. Yet never have so many sought relationships so urgently or entered into them with such high expectations. For, as the actual relationships have become more like short-term business transactions, the belief in eternal love as an essential prerequisite has grown stronger. In the romantic 1960s 40 per cent of women were willing to accept marriage without love but, by the hard-headed, money-obsessed 1980s, only 15 per cent would countenance loveless financial security.248 There seems to be a weird and catastrophic inverse effect – the less tolerant the practice, the more demanding the theory. The lovers expect more but are willing to give less. Yet the inevitable disasters rarely chasten these romantics. Cyberspace teems with seekers of love entirely undaunted by constant past failure. In any other area of endeavour the bewildered and frustrated would give up, or at the very least ask searching questions. But the magic of potential, the key facilitator of the age, is strongest in sexual attraction. Love, or rather the expectation of love, is indeed blind.

  The primary illusion is that establishing a relationship is easy. This is built into the very language: to ‘fall in love’, as though it is merely a matter of passive acceptance; to ‘be in love’, as though the passive acceptance leads to a definitive, final state. Erich Fromm addresses the problem at the start of his classic work The Art of Loving: ‘This attitude – that nothing is easier than to love – has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.’249 And, in order to fall in love and be in love, it is simply a matter of finding the right person, who will immediately remove difficulties, insecurity and loneliness by providing eternal, protective love.

  This belief that it is only a matter of finding the right person is further encouraged by the refusal of personal responsibility, the tendency to look outward in demand rather than inward in obligation. It is up to the other to provide love so, when the relationship breaks down, it must be the fault of the other. This was not the right one after all and the solution is to resume the search with greater urgency. It is astonishing how those with a string of failed relationships rarely accept that they themselves must be at least part of the problem. Even more astonishingly, the succession of failures does not make another failure seem more likely. The series of disasters is, in fact, a guarantee of success next time. Because, after so many painful failures, success is deserved. The sense of entitlement is strengthened by grievance: I really deserve this to work this time. So instead of caution there is recklessness. The distraught singleton plunges back into the game like a gambler betting ever more heavily to recoup heavy losses.

  And when singletons find partners they fling themselves into the relationship with desperate abandon, believing that love is the ecstatic surrender of self and fusion with the beloved, a kind of mystical unity. They shower each other with flattery, promises, gifts and sexual favours, introduce each other’s relatives, colleagues and friends, are rarely out of each other’s company and, when separated, bombard each other with romantic messages – a total abandonment and immersion that encourages a sadomasochistic relationship to develop without either party being aware of it. In fact, this dependency is often initially exhilarating, a release from the burdens and anxieties of freedom. So the domineering one thinks that the control will be permanent and the submissive one that all needs will always be met by the controller. And, when problems and tensions arise, each lover is baffled – how can this be going wrong when I’ve given myself so completely? But the surrender that was meant to ensure love has actually made it impossible. The result is bewilderment, anger and impatience – and the conclusion that this was not the right person after all.

  Because the relationship, for all its intensity, will also have been unconsciously provisional – there is no longer any permanence even in marriage. And, though reversible decisions appear attractive, such choices satisfy much less than the irreversible and permanent. So there is a self-fulfilling prophecy – a relationship understood as potentially less than final will more than likely turn out to be less than final.

  There is also the problem that, in contemporary cities, the couple relationship may be the only source of connection, structure, meaning and enchantment. In traditional societies there were religions to confer meaning and magic, rituals to structure the year, communities to offer strong connections and extended families to provide support. Now the poor groaning ‘relationship’ has to provide all of this, to take upon its weakened back the entire burden of living. No wonder it collapses under the strain.

  And there is the problem that the initial phase of the relationship is always more exciting, especially in an age fond of fantasy and bewitched by the glamour of potential. In fact the early and later stages are so different that they deserve different names. It would be more accurate to describe the initial stage as infatuation and the later stage as love. And the crucial misconception is that everyone claims to be seeking love but is usually seeking only infatuation.

  This is hardly surprising. Almost all so-called love stories are really infatuation stories. Is there a novel or film that portrays mature, happy love? Everyone claims to want such bliss but no one wants to read about it or see it portrayed.

  In fact, the Western notion of romantic love is frequently based on the impossibility of cohabitation. Dante barely even met Beatrice. Abelard was swiftly separated from his nuts and so spared the tedium of actually living with Heloise. The treacherously slain Tristan never went house-hunting with Iseult. The courtly love of the troubadours was reserved for unattainable married ladies – they could not even touch, much less shack up with, the beloved. Romeo and Juliet died after one night together (the notion of the single night of ecstasy is perennially popular in infatuation stories, from Tristan and Iseult to the novel and film Cold Mountain). Young Werther gets the hots for Charl
otte who is conveniently engaged to another man – and avoids messy developments by shooting himself. In Wuthering Heights Cathy and Heathcliff get their kicks from thwarting each other. And the classic analysis of infatuation, Stendhal’s De L’Amour, was based on an unrequited passion for a woman called Mathilde Dembowski.

  Stendhal described falling in love as a process of crystallization of the beloved. As a bough thrown into an abandoned salt mine becomes studded with ‘scintillating diamonds’, so love ‘draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one’.250 In other words, the lover creates a fantasy that has little to do with the actual person and falls in love with this entirely personal creation: ‘In love one enjoys only the illusion one creates for oneself.’251 So the love is really self-love, a form of narcissism. And it flourishes mostly in anticipation. As Stendhal remarks, meeting the real lover may even become an unnecessary embarrassment. The world also shrinks and the beloved expands until they merge into one overwhelming image that eclipses everything else. So infatuation is a way not of accepting responsibility but of actually escaping it – lovers are entitled to avoid the tedious obligations of life beyond the beloved. In the legend of Tristan and Iseult the influence of potions excuses the irresponsible behaviour of the lovers – and, in the modern world, the sanction is infatuation’s involuntary, even irrational, nature. It’s a clinical disorder. The lovers can’t help it.

  But infatuation may appear irrational only because the forces driving it are not understood. It may be a delirious matching of pathologies, as when sadist meets masochist. Or the beloved may be unconsciously chosen to re-enact some murky childhood business. There may even be an unconscious social motivation. For instance, working-class young men who become educated are fatally attracted to middle-class princesses – the very type most likely to despise and deride them.

  The infatuated like to believe that they are the random victims of Cupid’s arrows – but are more likely to be victims of neediness, loneliness and insecurity, keen to surrender responsibility, and with a talent for fantasy rather than for self-awareness or understanding. But what does this matter if they are overwhelmed by an ecstasy that invests life and the world with such radiance? Don’t the infatuated have great sex – and more fun all round? The problem is that infatuation does not last. There is general agreement that the maximum duration is two years, though it is more likely to be much less, with an average duration of somewhere over a year (and, like the average attention span, this is probably shrinking). But the infatuated themselves are blissfully unaware of a time limit so the disenchantment comes as a nasty shock.

  Why must it come to an end? Infatuation is a transcendent state, a loss of self, and transcendent states cannot last. The tran-scender always comes back to earth. Reality and the stubborn self always re-establish their dominance.

  Recent neuroscience research has confirmed the distinction between infatuation and love. The anthropologist Helen Fisher uses the terms ‘romantic love’ and ‘attachment’ for the two phases and has identified ‘romantic love’ in all of the 175 cultures she studied. To investigate how the old black magic actually works, she set up a team of neuroscientists to scan the brains of those in the different stages of love. These scans revealed that ‘romantic love’ and ‘attachment’ involve entirely different brain circuits and neurotransmitters. Romantic love is associated with increased levels of dopamine and lower levels of serotonin, while attachment is associated with oxytocin in women and vasopressin in men, both neurotransmitters involved in pair-bonding in animals. And the brain pathways and dopamine levels prominent in romantic lovers are similar to those in users of all the major addictive drugs. Fisher concludes that romantic love is indeed a form of addiction.252 This confirms Stendhal’s insight that such love, which presents itself as the most selfless activity, is in fact largely selfish. The lover is in love not with a person but with a high. The beloved is indeed thrilling – but only as a line of coke is thrilling to an addict. And this also explains why infatuation never lasts. Addiction creates tolerance – with ever higher dosages required to produce the same effect. But infatuation cannot increase the dosage beyond a certain point, so the high finally wears off. Another team of neuroscientists has investigated the time span of the love high and concluded that the popular perception is correct – infatuation usually lasts between twelve and eighteen months.253

  What to do when infatuation fades? One option is stoic acceptance – by this time the couple may be married and have children. This was a solution common in traditional societies. The prince in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard describes love as ‘a year of fire followed by thirty years of ashes’254 and goes to prostitutes for his pleasure. In the contemporary world, a popular alternative would be adultery, the adventure tourism of the middle-aged middle classes. Another option is a different kind of acceptance – to understand that the guttering flame is a signal to find a new partner. Why live among ashes if fire can be rekindled elsewhere? Why not skip the disillusionment and enjoy only serial infatuations? This, too, is popular, but depends on not wanting to bring up children and on being always attractive to new partners, an attribute that diminishes with time. The twilight of the serially infatuated is likely to be as bleak as that of the hedonist.

  The final option is to attempt the transition from infatuation to love. So, while the infatuation story ends with ‘Reader, I married him’, the love story begins with ‘Reader, I suddenly realized I would have to spend the rest of my life with him’. There are not many such love stories. One is Tolstoy’s Family Happiness, in which a couple falls madly in love, marries and enjoys a happy life of intimate suppers, music and laughter. But, over time, infatuation wears off. As the wife explains, ‘We had long since ceased to be the most perfect people in the world for each other, and now we made comparisons with others, and judged each other in secret.’255 She knows that her husband is a good man, kind and gentle, an excellent partner and father – but comes to find his wisdom predictable, his perpetual calm irritating and his appearance old and unpleasant. Depressed and angry, she longs for movement, excitement and danger and, like Emma Bovary, attempts to recreate romance by a hectic society life of parties and balls. But this excitement also wears off, and its only consequence is to drive the couple further apart. Unlike Emma, though, this wife wants the marriage to be meaningful. She confesses her feelings to her husband and discovers that his calm is not just a ploy to infuriate her, but the product of a detachment that has foreseen and understood their problems. He explains that there was no alternative to working through the experience: ‘All of us…must live through all life’s nonsense in order to return to life itself; it’s no good taking someone else’s word for it.’ She understands and begins the journey back to life: ‘From that day my romance with my husband was over; the old feeling became a dear, irrevocable memory, but my new feeling of love for my children and for the father of my children laid the beginning of another but now quite different happy life.’

  Unfortunately, Tolstoy does not explain the nature of this ‘quite different happy life’ or how it was achieved, other than to suggest that the process is long and painful. And, in fact, the transition from infatuation to love is difficult because the two are opposites in many ways. Infatuation is transcendent; love is down to earth. Infatuation creates a fantasy; love accepts a reality. Infatuation is an addiction; love is a commitment. Infatuation craves unity; love cherishes separateness. Infatuation evades responsibility; love wholeheartedly accepts it. Infatuation is effortless; love is hard work.

  And just when down-to-earth realism is most needed, there is often the most disastrous form of expectation – planning the perfect wedding. Another bizarre development is that, as investment in marriage has declined, investment in weddings has shot up, so that the average UK wedding now costs much more than the average annual wage.256 This is another example of the emphasis on image over substance – planning not for the reality of a life but for the symbol
ism of a day. As with most pageantry, the idea is to suggest solemn tradition by means of historical locations, costumes and accessories – castles and country houses, tiaras and top hats, horse-drawn carriages and vintage cars (though the significant requirement these days is a disposable camera on every table). So a contemporary wedding is like the Olympic Games, a spectacle of stupendous complexity and ruinous expense, which requires years of detailed research and preparation but lasts only a short time. Even if it all goes according to plan, a wedding is over in a day, much of it spent being ordered around by photographers, and when the audience is gone and the costumes returned to their boxes (never again to be taken out), an ordinary man and woman look at each other and think: ‘Is this all it is?’

  It may well be that an analysis of figures would reveal a law – the duration of a marriage is inversely proportional to the cost of the wedding. Or, to put it another way, any union celebrated with personalized toasting flutes is doomed.

  After the dream wedding, reality makes a shocking return and the problems suppressed by the spell of potential are suddenly all too apparent. Because not only is no one the ‘right’ person, no one is easy to live with, much less capable of enveloping a partner in instant, enduring, unconditional love. This is a fundamental axiom: no one is easy to live with. There are only degrees of difficulty – and it is essential to realize that the other is encrusted, not with scintillating diamonds, but with irritating beliefs, habits, superstitions, neuroses, moods, ailments, indulgences and bad taste, not to mention appalling relatives and inexplicable friends. And living together exposes all this banality and squalor. The lustrous hair that gleamed so seductively in candlelight becomes a matted wad in the shower plug, and the member that was so thrillingly erect becomes a flaccid, shrunken fillet dribbling urine over the toilet seat. If there is ever compatibility it is a hard-earned end product rather than a natural precondition. But, while the infuriating habits of the partner will eventually become apparent, it is more difficult to recognize the equivalent in oneself. Many, especially those with doting parents, seem to believe that their eccentricities are sanctioned by the natural law and that even that their most revolting habits are charming and endearing.