One of the few portrayals of a good and pleasurable marriage is to be found in Ian McEwan’s novel, Saturday. At the core of its satisfactions is an unmodish view of desire and masculinity which sites its pleasures not in the anonymity and distance that cyber-sex or secret partners allow, but within a long-trusted intimacy. It is here that its hero can abandon himself to the ruthless self-absorption on which sexual excitement thrives. The middle-aged neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne, knows that he’s not in tune with his times in remaining faithful to his lawyer wife, Rosalind. He wonders whether he’s deficient in curiosity or in some element of masculine life force. Yet what he seems to need is ‘possession, belonging, repetition’.
By contemporary standards, by any standards, it’s perverse that he’s never tired of making love to Rosalind, never been seriously tempted by the opportunities that have drifted his way through the generous logic of medical hierarchy. When he thinks of sex, he thinks of her. These eyes, these breasts, this tongue, this welcome. Who else could love him so knowingly, with such warmth and teasing humour, or accumulate so rich a past with him? In one lifetime, it wouldn’t be possible to find another woman with whom he can learn to be so free, whom he can please with such abandon and expertise. By some accident of character, it’s familiarity that excites him more than sexual novelty.
When trouble comes into their lives, it is from the outside, and the solidity of their marriage helps them in facing it. Marriage, here, is a base for the rest of life.
Core to keeping the hopes we have of relationships alive and making them as successful as we can may be a re-estimation of habit itself. Our world of plenty and constant stimulus, our enshrinement of the excitements of youth and novelty, shroud habit with a negative aura. Of course, habit can be deadening and certain habits can prove irritating. But any enduring love needs habits–those structuring and orchestrating dailinesses which let us get on with the rest of life, with the whole business of doing, of living as full social beings. A habit, as the dictionary tells us, is the protective garment we put on to go out into the social world. Habits contain our excesses. Habit is also our ‘habitation’, a space of security and our ‘settled disposition’, the way we prefer to live. Enduring love needs a balance of mutually devised habits and excitements to create a cohabitation. It’s perhaps not incidental that in our era of agitated pursuits of ever new stimulants there has been a concurrent rise of so-called obsessive compulsive disorder: to order their lives individuals create complicated rituals, ever more excessive habits which introduce a repetitive order into their otherwise unmanageable lives.
A few other matters are fundamental to married love. These are iterated by experts of all ilks, from the professional psychologists to those who have simply learned from experience. An attentiveness to the emotions and interests of one’s partner is key. A sense of the value of separateness, a respect for the other’s desire for it, play into that ever shifting equation. Distance too easily topples into a sense of isolation, and with it can come that demon of contempt who belittles and undermines. Remembering what we value and admire about the other, keeping a hold on that through the everyday irritations of life, is at the very basis of intimacy. Appreciation is crucial. This is what those supposedly romantic, but actually rather pragmatic, commemorations of moments are all about. Anniversaries, birthdays, Valentine days, help to concentrate us on what it is that drew us to the other in the first place–their pluses, their kindness, their virtues.
Listening to our partners, hearing their words and reading their gestures, is important; as is not reconfiguring every ill, every negative feeling or mood, as an attack on oneself, which can then too easily translate into an attack on the other. Interpreting behaviour or tangible problems as a personality or character defect is invidious: we can alter behaviour and solve problems far more easily than we can change our selves. So if a partner comes home preoccupied by conflicts at work, or is worrying about a child or parent or boss, saying ‘That’s ridiculous’, ‘You’re a fool’ or ‘Get over it’, and thus dismissing their emotions and them, will not make matters better. Nor will saying, ‘You’re such a weakling.’ On the other hand, ‘Tell me more about it,’ or ‘What will help us get through this?’ or ‘You’re so good at putting up with all these problems’ may. Humiliations, minor or major failures at work or home, are part of all lives: understanding, seeing them through and focusing on better or stronger suits, helps.
These days, our social sense of entitlement, shored up by a culture of rights and ardent equality–perhaps, too, by a growing-up in which parents were so intent on building self-esteem that they forgot to tell us that not everything about us was estimable–can translate into coupled life in insidious ways. We cannot be entitled to the best and to happiness every moment of the day. Life is full of discontents. We all commit wrongs, have weaknesses. A certain hard-eyed, honest look at our own failings has never hurt the ongoing life of a partnership. As for that competitiveness, whether for constant signs of affection or of admiration, which often enough creeps into twosomes, it needs an admixture of generosity and fondness. Though sometimes life makes a battleground of the couple, declaring truce, compromising, is often a greater victory than triumphalist winning–which as all conflicts show brings an aftermath of resentment and a rearming for future skirmishes and major battles. The ongoing life of marriage makes star negotiators of us all.
Finally, it’s worth remembering that all human beings seem particularly adept at wanting incompatible things. Restless creatures, we’re simply not all that rational. We want to be babied, succoured and simultaneously want to inhabit a respected pedestal. We want passionate sex, yet may feel no desire. We want our partners to look beautiful, yet are overcome by jealousy when someone else notices the fact. We want to possess, yet lose interest in our possessions. We may love our partners, yet be fatally attracted to someone else. So in the proximity of cohabitation, it’s good to step back, take a deep breath and assess the measure of ourselves and our partners.
If all this brings with it the aura of relational platitude, it may nonetheless contain some truth. In Must You Go? Antonia Fraser notes that no matter how much she and her husband rowed, they always made up before night fell, which sounds as good a recipe for intimacy as thousands of others.
Trouble in Paradise
All marriages, all cohabitations triggered by love, like life itself, have their conflicts and disappointments. Sometimes the very weight of our expectations and hopes, or the very passion that ignited them, casts an admonitory aura over what follows. At other times, the very power we attributed to the other to assuage that childhood helplessness which haunts us all becomes a prison: we resent our own need, chafe against our bonds, which have become a form of bondage once willingly submitted to. We grow angry, projecting on to our mate all the inevitable grievances we had against our parents, and more. The once loved one becomes the hated one, cause of all our unhappiness.
The ways in which passionate love can turn into hate are many and various. Extreme emotions, the two have long been bedfellows. In marriage, the other can too easily become the mirror of all our failings–whether inside or outside the home. Once the supreme source of our satisfactions, he or she becomes the one who seems to prevent us from attaining them. The ties that bind in security have become the bonds that constrain. So we cut and slash, in verbal or physical violence, criticize and punish our mate, sometimes binding ourselves further in the process–though now in hate rather than love. The power struggles that ensue rarely produce an outright winner.
The battle of the sexes has raged ever since jealous Hera tried to constrain rampant Zeus from his myriad infidelities. Transported into all-too-human domesticity, the battle continued, waxing fiercer in periods when strong-minded women chafed or rebelled against inequality. The marital dramas of the turn of the 1900s revealed the psychosexual component of the power struggle. Love here is a sadomasochistic jousting to which both man and woman submit. In Strindberg’s gruelling Dance
of Death (1900), diabolical verbal jousting and malicious intrigues enact a master–slave dialectic between husband and wife. Hatred proves as addictive as love. The failures of the misanthropic, tyrannical Captain in both outside world and bedchamber are turned against him by his emasculating wife, once an actress, whose freedom he has taken from her with her initial compliance. Both are imprisoned in the claustrophobic fortress of a marriage from which there is no escape, yet they are both compelled to repeat the struggle to escape over and over again.
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962) replays the themes in a darkly comic idiom for early 1960s America. George and Martha (named after America’s first presidential couple) needle and abase each other and their dinner guests through the length of a drunken evening which constantly verges on and once tips over into physical violence. Games of ‘Humiliate the Host’, ‘Get the Guests’ and ‘Hump the Hostess’ are played. The abyss of a marriage–where neither the desired child, sign of female power and fulfilment, nor George’s projected novel, ever come–stands exposed, together with the pitiable extremes to which partners can drive each other. Hell, here, is distinctly ‘other people’, as Sartre’s famous line in No Exit goes: they reflect and expose our weaknesses and our sins. Their very existence is a torment to us.
Ingmar Bergman’s six-part television drama Scenes from a Marriage (1973)–also written as a shorter two-hander for the stage and released as a cinema film–reveals that the love–hate dynamic hardly vanishes with social equality. Marianne is a lawyer married to Johann, and the tensions, the sexual and affectional dissatisfactions in their marriage gradually lead to adultery, divorce and remarriage to others. The rub is that, once remarried, they engage in a secret affair with each other. What they have together, they realize, may be the closest they’ll ever come to love.
Through a long, dark night of the soul during which his forty-something scriptwriter hero, Jay, debates his resolution to walk out, come morning, on his partner and their children, Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy (2000) dissects the breakdown of a contemporary relationship. Restless, teetering on the brink of depression, all pleasure and most sex gone from his ten-year cohabitation with a successful and competent woman, honest about his own and his partner’s lacks, Jay wants more from life than this lifeless marriage–even though he is devoted to his children. Indeed, the only remaining passion he and Susan share is their passion for the children. Is that enough?
It is clear that though he admires much in Susan, the kind of love that covers over lacks has dissipated between them. Susan is a woman infuriated and frustrated by others, and critical of him–of his silences, his ability to do nothing, the lack of order in his life. ‘I can’t be in a room with her for too long without feeling that there is something I must do to stop her being so angry. But I never know what I should do, and soon I feel as if she is shoving me against the wall and battering me.’ He in turn has had his casual infidelities and a more serious one, which he has forced himself to give up, but which may go by the name of love. Which may indeed underlie his sense of her battering.
Around him there are other marriages, bad and good, as well as disastrous splits. He interrogates all of them. He is taking his decision seriously; and at any point, if Susan were (sexually) suasive, his mind could be changed. Of his parents’ marriage, a shaping example from an earlier generation when men put loyalty, the family and responsibility before desire and individual renewal, he thinks:
What did Father’s life show me? That life is a struggle, and that struggle gets you nowhere and is neither recognized nor rewarded. There is little pleasure in marriage; it involves considerable endurance, like doing a job one hates. You can’t leave and you can’t enjoy it. Both he and Mother were frustrated, neither being able to find a way to get what they wanted, whatever that was. Nevertheless, they were loyal and faithful to one another. Disloyal and unfaithful to themselves. Or do I misunderstand?
Kureishi leaves the way open for other understandings. Baby-boomers who grew up in a time of individualist plenty, a desire for satisfied desires as well as for social change and experimentation, have different understandings of the world and themselves from their parents. Yet one of the characters he depicts, the teacher Asif, lives a good marriage. Jay values it, but it isn’t his. In the morning, he leaves for his new life. He has convinced himself that ‘leaving someone isn’t the worst thing you can do for them’. The new beckons.
Will he find the satisfactions he seeks there? The narrative is not altogether optimistic. Kureishi’s hero is aware of the dangers: ‘I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold back, nothing interesting happens. At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you; too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?’ But with Susan things have gone dead: there is nothing left to explore, to discover, as there might be after years in a good relationship. All they mirror are each other’s lacks. So he takes the leap into betrayal and a new life.
Intimates, it is clear, can become our intimate enemies. If there is gross incompatibility or worse, we fortunate inhabitants of the twenty-first century can either see it arise in an initial period of cohabitation, or we have the recourse of divorce. We can walk out and start over again. There is, after all, rarely a single Mr or Ms Right in the course of a long lifetime.
That said, divorce–legally endorsed or simply a split after cohabitation–is no trifle. Tears, pain, anger, a will to vengeance, a sense of failure and, even if there is an immediate other waiting in the wings, a period tantamount to mourning and its accompanying depression, attend. When children are involved, the marriage is seldom altogether over. For better or worse, partners accompany us throughout our lives, as intimate ghosts or fractious negotiators. Or they’re reignited in the faces or character traits of our children. So it’s as well to recognize the pitfalls that seem to be part of the state of marriage itself as it unfolds in time and try to see them through if we can. After all, they may well recur with another partner unless we, too, have changed in the process and can learn to be alive to love in new ways.
The American philosopher Stanley Cavell puts the core difficulties with luminous precision:
Something evidently internal to the task of marriage causes trouble in paradise–as if marriage, which was to be a ratification, is itself in need of ratification. So marriage has its disappointment–call this its impotence to domesticate sexuality without discouraging it, or its stupidity in the face of the riddle of intimacy, which repels where it attracts, or in the face of the puzzle of ecstasy, which is violent while it is tender, as if the leopard should lie down with the lamb. And the disappointment seeks revenge, a revenge, as it were, for having made one discover one’s incompleteness, one’s transience, one’s homelessness.
Where to begin to unravel these riddles that stalk the condition of marriage whenever the social, the affectionate and the sexual are woven into the state, compounded with high expectations of each? Is it possible to domesticate sexuality without discouraging it, prevent once desired intimacy from tumbling into contempt or loathing?
The psychic grammar of love is mysterious. We all decipher it and live with its consequences as best we can.
Two stories
Joanne, thirty-three, is a hardworking academic historian, full of brio and determination, elegantly dressed and with the animated features of a young Paulette Goddard. Just over two years ago, she and her now thirty-five-year-old partner Rob, a journalist, tied the knot. They had met at a book launch some four years back. The attraction had been instantaneous. Afterwards, she said ruefully, he had told her he felt like the aged man at the start of When Harry Met Sally, who states to camera that when he saw his future wife walk into a restaurant he had turned to his friend and said, ‘You see that woman over there. I’m going to marry her.’
Rob and Joanne had a great many interests in common to bolster the initial attraction. They would talk ab
out anything and everything, argue vociferously, and he could send her into peals of laughter. After a few months of dating–during which the sex, as she told me, was ‘fabulous’–a rupture took place. She couldn’t bear Rob’s roving eye at parties, what she called his ‘flirting’, even though he insisted it rarely went further than that–perhaps only once, right at the start of their relations, when he was travelling. His excuse–that he liked women and they liked him, that flirting was a way of engaging with the world and made people sparkle–didn’t wash. Plainly put, she was jealous. And his wandering eye and manner humiliated her. She wanted Rob to give up his gallivanting. He had promised he would, though he couldn’t promise he could utterly change his social being. She, on her side, would have to learn to trust him. She was intelligent enough to realize that what had attracted her to Rob would attract other women too, and it was in part her own scepticism about relations–her father had left her mother when she was fourteen–that made her overly sensitive to the possibility of male infidelity.
They had moved in together, and after some six months had set a wedding date. They both knew that the social sealing of the bond was more important to her than to him: it buoyed her trust. Though they didn’t like to use the word ‘love’, they got on so well, were so alive to each other, so sustained each other’s sense of potential, that love was palpably in the air. And so it had continued until about six months ago. Then sex, which had already begun to grow routine and lose its imaginative edge, had become sporadic and dull. She knew from hearsay that this was in part inevitable, that the daily demands of work, tending to the house, engaging in a busy social life, the very texture of everyday intimacy, played against the adventure that sex between them had been. But she feared that if he wasn’t yet, Rob would soon be seeing someone else and she didn’t want to bring the child they had talked of having into a twosome that was already showing wear and tear, even if she loved him, perhaps more than ever.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 23
