Khushwant Singh on Women, Sex, Love and Lust

by Khushwant Singh

  LOVE AND LUST

  îshq se tabîat ne zïst kã maza(h) pãyã

  dard kï davã pãï, dard-e be davã pãyã

  (Through love, I tasted the spirit of life.

  Curing one pain, it yielded another

  incurable one.)

  – Mirza Ghalib

  22

  What is Love?

  The romantic edifice of love has to have sex as its foundation stone. Once that is gone love becomes something else: companionship, friendship. Or whatever else.

  It is easier to say what it is not than what it is. Even after you have excluded emotions that have nothing to do with it, you are up against many kinds of love which have little in common. You may love your god, your country and your parents but you’ll sense that there is a qualitative difference between these kinds of love and the love that envelopes a man and a woman of somewhat the same age and capable of sexual intercourse. Dorothy Tennoy, an American psychiatrist, has defined this kind of love as ‘an obsessive, all-embracing passion for another person that strikes seemingly from nowhere and makes life a hell of uncertainty, punctuated by brief moments of ecstasy.’ She has given this brand of man-woman fixation the name ‘limerance’.

  Tennov’s definition of love is as good as I have seen anywhere but it does not explain why this ‘obsessive, all embracing passion’ erupts, why it loses intensity and why it often turns to sour hate.

  How and why two people of the opposite sexes are attracted to each other to the exclusion of others has never been fully explored. The urge is without doubt physical, because it usually manifests itself on the approach to puberty. It is also often entirely a yearning of the body without any mental or emotional overtones. Both males and females pass through such a period when compulsions of the body are so explosive that they will seek their fulfillment through the most readily available persons without the slightest affection for them. This is lust not love. Love is more subtle than lust, and while lust can be fulfilled by expending the lust, love has more frustration than fulfillment.

  Why two people fall in love with each other can only be explained by probing their psyches. It is believed that most people fall in love with people very much like themselves. This has been confirmed by computer matings. If it is so, we can presume that there is a strong element of narcissism in a person’s choice. It has been noticed that many couples in love resemble each other like brother and sister. But, just as often, a couple totally unlike each other in their physical makeup are strongly drawn towards each other. This may be explained as the negative aspect of narcissism It is apparent that love is initially stirred by physical attraction and is born in the eye. It is on the physical that the mental and emotional relationship is built. Even the emotional is frequently reinforced by appeals which are essentially physical: ‘You are the most beautiful person in the world’ etc. Love is not man’s quest for an idealized Helen; it is elevating a girl who is available to Hellenistic heights. That is why men do not roam the world looking for the girl of their dreams but weave them around the girl next door. She is there, others are not. This phenomenon has been given the label ‘equity’ – in love people get what they deserve. However idealized the love may become, its consummation is in the act of sex. As Donne put it in his earthy way:

  Who ever loves, if he do not propose

  The right true end of love, he’s one that goes

  To sea for nothing but to make him sick

  The romantic edifice of love has to have sex as it foundation stone. Once that is gone love becomes something else: companionship, friendship. Or whatever else.

  The circumstances in which a couple meets each other often compels them to fall in love. The same couple in a different setting might not even notice each other. In one of her novels, Rosamund Lehmann narrates how two children who happened to be playing together by the seaside saw a flock of geese swoop down through a misty sky to land on the sea in front of them. When they met again many years later they promptly fell in love because of the mystic experience they had shared in their childhood. I have little doubt that if an Indian mountaineer getting on top of the Everest from the Indian side were to meet a Chinese lass coming up from the other, they would immediately fall in love. And not in the Hindi-Chini-bhai-bhai or the bhai-bahin way.

  American researchers have further discovered that a man in an excitable state is more prone to fall in love than when he is calm and placid. Apparently, excitement causes chemical changes in his blood and brain vessels which make him more receptive to emotional stimuli. High altitude brings about similar effects hence, the high incidence of marriage between air hostesses and passengers. The Americans have further established that the traumatic experience of rejection induces hunger for certain types of compensatory food like chocolate.

  Speaking from personal experience, I can say that all this theorizing about love is hogwash. People fall in and out of love all the time, in all kinds of places, and make the most impossible combinations. There is nothing exclusive about love because people can be in love in varying degrees of intensity with many people at the same time. I do not know if other people suffer anguish when they are rejected; I have an exhilarating sense of release.

  Talking of love, I am reminded of an Indian friend posted in Canada who had read what I had written about love and lust in my columns, and sent me an extract from Somerset Maugham’s The Summing Up. Although I have read almost every novel and short story written by Maugham and rate him among the best storytellers of all times, I do not hold him in much esteem as a stylist or a thinker. The extract sent to me, though not couched in immortal prose, is certainly very lucid on the theme of love. I would have liked to reproduce the entire text but refrain from doing so lest I be accused by readers of cheating them and filling my column with quotations. So I will just give a gist of what Maugham has to say and add my comments to it.

  But before I do that let me make it clear that we are not talking of love in the broadest sense to include love of God, king, country, parents, children, nature, music, literature, etc, but specifically of love between adult men and women. In this limited context, Maugham believes love means two things: sexual love and loving-kindness. This is not very original. Plato differentiated between love which involved sex and heavenly love which did not. Maugham prefers to call it loving kindness rather than platonic love: ‘Love passes, love dies. The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love. Not the least of the evils of life, and one for which there is small help, is that someone whom you love no longer loves you.’ I go along with him all the way. I would add one qualifying explanation. When an erstwhile sweetheart ceases to love you, what causes pain is not so much the betrayal but the bruised ego. After some time the hurt goes and you are ready to fall in love again with someone else.

  Maugham makes the sexual urge the bedrock on which the edifice of love is raised. I go along with him in this as well. He writes: ‘However much people may resent the fact and however angrily deny it, there sorely can be no doubt that love depends on certain secretions of the sexual glands. In the immense majority these do not continue indefinitely to be excited by the same object, and with advancing years they atrophy. People are very hypocritical in this matter and will not face the truth. They so deceive themselves that they can accept it with complacency when their love dwindles into what they describe as solid and enduring affection. As if affection had anything to do with love! Affection is created by habit, community of interests, convenience, and the desire for companionship. It is a comfort rather than an exhuberation.’

  Love is a transitive verb, said some grammarian. It shifts its focus from one person to another. Tolstoy wrote that ‘to say that you can love one person all your life is just like saying that one candle will continue burning as long as you live.’ Hence, the tragedies in marriages made till deaths do them part. Ellen Key in her Works wrote: ‘Love has been in perpetual strife with monogamy.’

  Maugham makes it clearer: ‘We ar
e creatures of change … we are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. Mostly, different ourselves, we make a desperate pathetic effort to love in a different person the person we once loved. It is only when the power of love, when it seizes us, seems so mighty that we persuade ourselves that it will last for ever. When it subsides we are ashamed, and blame ourselves for our weakness, whereas we should accept our change of heart as a natural effect of our humanity.’

  Maugham dismisses loving-kindness as a kind of dancing: ‘One dances for pleasure of the rhythmic movement, and it is not necessary that one should go to bed with one’s dancing partner.’

  Love, as Maugham understands it (and I concur), is what Balzac describes as ‘poetry of the senses’. Platonic love is love from the neck up, cerebral and devoid of passion. Love is earthy and heart downwards to the groins. The poet Donne captured its essence in these lines:

  Whoever loves, if he does not propose

  The right true end of love, his the one that goes,

  To sea for nothing but to make him sick

  Where there is no sex, there is no real love.

  23

  Love is Dead

  …you think a little lying to your husband, wife or sweetheart will do no harm. You become more self-centred, more reluctant to deny yourself anything and justify it as ‘I owe it to myself.’

  Words of wisdom appear in the oddest of places. The following I found inscribed on a wall of a urinal of the transit lounge of Los Angeles airport during one of my travels many years back: ‘Love is basically give and take – as much as you can give and as much as I can take.’

  I pondered over them while emptying my bladder. Surely this means love is dead – love is giving all you have without expecting anything in return. Love is its own reward. No longer true. No sooner is love institutionalized into marriage or turned into a lover-mistress relationship than it is devalued into a contract between the two parties. Spouses and lovers become partners as in business and thereafter business mores govern their relationship. Each tries to extract as much as he or she can and give as little in return as possible. They develop what is aptly described as a ‘ledger psychology’ balancing what they’ve given against what they have received with a view to making a net profit for themselves. Innumerable examples of how what was once a relationship based on love degenerated into a business association are available, the most scandalous being from the United States. Years back, Rita, wife of the-then Congressman John Jenrette, when their marriage broke down, sold intimate details of their love life to Playboy magazine and a television network. Not to be outdone, her husband filed a suit asking for a share of the money his ex-wife made out of the exposure of what had once been their joint love life. Marilyn Barnett, longtime lesbian partner of the tennis champion Billie Jean King, sued Billie for ‘galimony’ when Billie let her down by marrying a man. Having failed in her suit Marilyn offered Billie’s love letters to her for sale.

  Psychologists believe that love has fallen victim to the changed values of society. It was based on trust and now no one trusts anyone any more. Distrust is so widespread that love has withered to lifelessness. Why has trust become so scarce? A society in which corruption is rampant generates a climate of pervasive deception. When you hear of the millions made by politicians and blackmarketeers, you don’t feel uneasy fiddling your tax returns, indulging in a little cheating with the customs and smuggle in a an extra bottle of whisky. Soon this cheating mentality transfers itself to personal relationships and you think a little lying to your husband, wife or sweetheart will do no harm. You become more self-centred, more reluctant to deny yourself anything and justify it as ‘I owe it to myself.’

  Distrust is learnt from experience. When somebody you have trusted lets you down, you begin to distrust everyone else. In America it is a kind of personalized Pearl Harbour experience. All of us have experienced Pearl Harbours in our lives. Unless we overcome these baneful effects, we become suspicious of professions of affection and prefer fleeting intimacies wherever we can find them without any intention of getting involved. It can be established that most adulterous affairs take place not because the marriage is unhappy but because a safe opportunity to commit adultery becomes irresistible. When an opportunity to have a fling with little danger of discovery presents itself, the vast majority of adults, male and female, will avail of it. The choice before them at the time is between a transitory sense of guilt and letting go of the opportunity that may not come again, and feeling stupid afterwards. Most people prefer not to feel stupid.

  What profound thoughts a full bladder can produce!

  24

  Love and Lust

  ‘There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored, that’s the time for sex.’

  During my first year at college in England, the Regent Park Zoo arranged the first ever display of creatures which are best studied at night. The centre of attraction was a grassy mound on which thousands of glow-worms had been assembled. It was a spectacular sight: a mini-mountain aglow with slowly moving iridescent green dots. There was a crowd around this enclosure. As I tried to muscle my way to the front, I was gently pushed aside by a keeper to make way for celebrities. I recognized one of them, the scientist, Sir Julian Huxley, who was a professor in my college. The other was a nondescript, podgy, middle-sized man who looked vaguely familiar; I had seen his photographs in the papers. He turned out to be H.G. Wells.

  A couple of years later, Professor G. S. Marvin with whom I lodged, took me to have tea with H. G. Well’s son who lived close by in a lovely little cottage through which ran a stream. I spoke enthusiastically about having met his father. He quickly changed the subject. Professor Marvin later admonished me for the faux pas. Anthony was H. G. Well’s illegitimate son through Rebecca West and hated both his parents. His mother he regarded with unconcealed contempt. After he migrated to the United States he wrote his autobiography. Although Rebecca prevented its sales in England, I was able to lay my hands on a smuggled copy. I was amazed at Anthony’s portrayal of her as an insensitive, selfish and self-centred bitch. He was far more understanding of his father.

  Almost 30 years later I met Rebecca West at a writers’ conference in Edinburgh. She was a strikingly handsome woman in her sixties with regal manners and a waspish tongue. I had greatly admired her reporting of the Nazi trials and having met her ex-love and bastard son, was curious to meet her. I was able to extract an invitation to lunch. She subsequently cancelled it on the excuse that her husband was unwell.

  Then came the great man’s own version of his affairs, H. G. Wells in Love. Some chapters from the book were published in Indian papers but no one ever bothered to analyze Wells’ views on love and lust. What made Wells a compulsive fornicator? After reading his confessions I am convinced he was never in love with anyone except himself. He calls it the lover-shadow which never leaves a man. When he feels the urge for lust he takes what is available. In a remarkably candid admission to Charlie Chaplin, he said: ‘There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored, that’s the time for sex.’

  His first marriage ended within a year with his eloping with the woman who became his second wife. She did not particularly relish the kind of no-holds-barred sex that Wells was after. (He boasts of having broken two beds by his vigorous performance.) For a while he picked up with a photo-assistant, ‘a cheerfully amoral and already experienced young woman.’ Then followed a succession of blue-stockings with literary pretensions including a young Australian who came to see him in her raincoat with nothing beneath it. Some like Rebecca whom he named ‘panther’ because of her voracious appetite for sex, became pregnant (on the second enco
unter) and had to be taken care of in a separate establishment, others persuaded to abort and then got rid of. He admits that he developed a taste for ‘free, ambitious, self-reliant women who would mate with me and go their way.’ At times Wells had three mistresses installed in different cities and had to use all his stamina to keep them satisfied and all his cunning to prevent them running into each other. Wells confessed to Somerset Maugham, ‘the need to satisfy these (sexual instincts) had nothing to do with love.’ He suffered no sense of guilt: ‘I never get the slightest regret out of any of my sexual irregularities. They were amusing and refreshing and I wish there had been more of them’. One wonders why he could not satisfy his lust by simply going to prostitutes. In the long run it would have been cheaper and taken less toll on his nerves and time. It is evident that in his pursuit of women (he was more pursued than pursuing) Wells wanted love and admiration from his women without feeling the slightest obligation to give in return anything more than lust.

  Wells made himself out into a randy he-goat. He was nothing of the sort. Many men (and women) go through their lives with as many if not more affairs but take great pains to conceal their peccadilloes. In this matter there is not much difference between the sexes. In short, when it comes to human relationships, there is no such thing as ‘love till death do us part.’ A new lover proves more lethal to an old love than the old lovers’ demise.

  25

  Love and Matrimony

  ‘Complete physical union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide – and yet not quite real, for it stops when the telephone rings.’