All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Jasper is fifty-eight, balding, still relatively trim, and a successful corporate lawyer, though he has of late grown weary of his work and spends much of his time providing voluntary services for charities. He and Claire (fifty-two) have been married for almost twenty-six years and their two children have now both left home. For the last year Jasper has been engaged in an affair with a woman in her mid-thirties. He hasn’t told Claire. He can’t bear the suffering he knows he is going to cause. He loves her, but he thinks he may leave her, partly because he can’t stand the pain of confrontation and the guilt, which makes him more rather than less punishing. He knows. He has been through this once before. Then, too, he’s still ‘in lust’, as he says, with his lover, who makes him feel like a man in his prime, not just a tattered blanket to wrap oneself in on a wintry night. He doesn’t feel he has much time left.

  Jasper met Claire, who at that time worked as a television producer and now heads a small NGO, in his early thirties. He had lived with another woman before, but the relationship had floundered and they had agreed to split. They had simply, he says, been too young when they entered on their union, and had become different people. He and Claire were madly in love when they first met, he tells me with a smile. God, she was gorgeous. But now at home, she’s grumpy and menopausal and interested only in her work. He might indeed be doing her a favour by going off, though she wouldn’t see it that way, not at first, anyway. As for sex, they’ve more or less stopped. Even when he was still interested, some years back now, she would put him off, and sex became a site of fractious disappointment–to both of them, he imagined. He would have to fantasize madly, and not about her, to keep himself going. Probably she knew. Probably she had to do the same.

  He had had his first significant affair when their daughter was thirteen. Some six months in, Claire had discovered it, but, as he had pointed out to her, she wouldn’t have if he hadn’t half deliberately left signs lying around. He had been in agony about cheating and didn’t want to leave Claire, though they were having one of those fallow patches where everything in life was more important and more interesting than they were to each other. On top of that there were ageing parents and adolescent children to contend with, and home was a place of friction and daily problems. With his lover he felt alive, renewed, full of potential. That’s all he had wanted, he now thinks. He wondered whether any men I had interviewed had linked the activity of their penises, not to some evolutionary mumbo-jumbo about spreading their seed, but to the waving of a magic wand whose use wards off death.

  When Claire had discovered that first affair, she had talked of kicking him and his wandering and banal member out. She had raged and fumed. It came as a surprise to him, but suddenly sex between them had started up again: bed had once more become a place of excitement and exploration. Between rows, they had also had long intimate conversations: they had shared their lacks and frailties. She was even prepared to acknowledge that–though his was the far greater fault–she wasn’t altogether unimplicated in his infidelity. And she had decided to give him a second chance, which he wanted to take. He really did love her. She was a fine woman. And he valued their family and everything they had made together. But roll on the years, and that newly refound intimacy had once more vanished into torpor. This time, he really thinks he will go, though he doesn’t relish facing the children or the divorce lawyers. Yet he wants a future, not just a past.

  In the course of my writing this book, Joanne and Rob were beaming with the arrival of a baby. Jasper and Claire were in the midst of that wrenching pain which is betrayal and separation, even when apparently desired.

  That fleeting deity

  It is terrible to desire and not possess, and terrible to possess and not desire.

  W.B. Yeats

  The annals of love are replete with paradox. The very security we seek in coupledom can diminish passion, child of unpredictability. Working at sex, donning that new negligee, creating that romantic moment, buying the latest sex toy or DVD, as the magazines and self-help books advise, rarely provides more than a momentary solution. Sex is not a work-out with quantifiable effects. Couples-porn and Viagra–‘late capitalism’s Lourdes for dying marriages’, as Laura Kipnis in Against Love aptly calls it–simply don’t account for the complexities of the erotic, which engage our imagination, our phantoms, our very sense of ourselves and the other. Nor is there any necessary symmetry of desire between partners: they can be out of step, the disinterest of one provoking the interest of the other and so on, through the vagaries of time. Desire rarely plays by the rules of good citizenship to reward work or best intentions. It just isn’t rational. It may return, but it won’t be willed or reasoned with. Blaming oneself, one’s mate or the nature of the couple serves only to exacerbate unhappiness.

  So what is it that confounds our fondest hopes and makes of Eros a fleeting deity, often allergic to domestication? Analysts point to passion’s excessive nature–those violent transports that make one out of two, beyond the reach of language and other than the mere bodies which enact its ecstasy. Within the archaeology of the individual, the only kindred state is that of the preverbal infant whose whole world is mother or carer: he merges with her, takes his bliss from her, without ever recognizing her separateness. Two are one. And then, the babe grows, becomes a ‘self’, and recognizes himself and his mother as separate beings. Ever after, he may be trailed by a ghostly memory of greater plenitude, when world and self were one, a time before the measurement of time itself, with its demarcated separations.

  When two beings come together in passion, these archaic shadows of a lost past are revivified. The world revolves in and around the newly discovered other. Everything is exchanged, bodies, thoughts, feelings. The lovers become one another. Describing a tiff in the early months of Kitty and Levin’s exemplary marriage in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy brilliantly evokes the blissful rapture of their union and the attendant nascent conflicts that merging brings in its wake.

  Only then did he [Levin] understand clearly for the first time what he had not understood when he had led her out of the church after the wedding. He understood not only that she was close to him, but that he no longer knew where she ended and he began. He understood it by the painful feeling of being split which he experienced at that moment. He was offended at first, but in that same instant he felt that he could not be offended by her, that she was him. In the first moment he felt like a man who, having suddenly received a violent blow from behind, turns with vexation and a desire for revenge to find out who did it, and realizes that he has accidentally struck himself, that there is no one to be angry with and he must endure and ease the pain.

  The initial transcendent ecstasy of union may, some speculate, last for two years, perhaps more, in an echo of the time it takes for a child to acquire language. Then ecstasy dissipates. It is as if the passionate merger has become too much: the couple, the one that is made of two, now feels as if it may swallow up what has become a newly vulnerable because unbounded self, cannibalize it. If eroticism is a ‘movement towards the Other’, as Simone de Beauvoir writes, echoing Montaigne, ‘in the deep intimacy of the couple, husband and wife become for one another the Same; no exchange is any longer possible between them, no giving and no conquering. Thus if they do continue to make love, it is often with a sense of shame’, as if incest were taking place. In this incestuous sameness, the taboo of the sexual mother can re-emerge, and the very act of sex may feel frightening and breed impotence. Tenderness is possible in coupledom, but rarely the passion that confounds inside and outside, into which one feels one may disappear never to know separate boundaries again.

  Of course, the passion doesn’t go all at once or necessarily for ever. Rows that demarcate difference can reignite it. So, too, can exchanged memories of past lovers, or the eyes of a third party focusing on the beloved in a way which once more constitutes him or her as other–as that tantalizing, mysterious person first spied across a crowded room.

  Yet gradually the
passion that so forcefully drew two separate beings together and made them one, can seep away. Sometimes it may seem that this happens for only one partner, but in this coupling there is rarely only one, though only one may take the blame. For some, the tenderness, the fondness, the companionship and sharing that replace passion may be more than enough. For others, as sex diminishes in intensity or quantity, disappointment follows in its wake, and often enough irritation. The very differences that drew lover and beloved together, that made passion possible, now exasperate, seem too close to one. Every half of a couple has at one time or another felt shamed by the other’s comments or actions in public, as if the other were oneself. Once admired energy seems to have become overbearing loudness; sweet spontaneity, babbling silliness; austere rectitude, punitive stiffness, and so on. Trapped in a ‘we’, the partners chafe against the chains that were once the bonds of ecstasy.

  Domestic life inevitably requires some reformulation of early passion. Sexual intimacy can, of course, speak other idioms than that of obliterating passion. It can speak affection and tenderness. It can tease and laugh. It can speak the sensual and the playful. It can aspire to an erotic art. It can be a parenthesis for emotional recharging or be replete with a benign possessiveness. It can also be a site for power play, withdrawal, coldness and forms of deceit. In the lifetime of any couple, it can be all of these at different times. But to desire where one loves, to somehow incorporate the erotic with the familiar, is rarely straightforward. Love needs tending. It also seems to need a spirit of generosity and emotional intelligence in which the lines of privacy and togetherness can be redrawn. It may also need a cultural sense that the next available in a series of relationships won’t necessarily provide a cornucopia of greater fulfilments.

  The difficulty of sexual love in marriage is hardly peculiar to our own times: what is peculiar is that we have expectations of more and better and assume that this more and better will somehow be delivered by another cohabiting partner. Some 180 years ago, when the great French novelist Honoré de Balzac formulated his ebullient and wonderfully comic Physiology of Marriage (1830), he succinctly concluded: ‘Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster which devours everything, that is, familiarity.’

  No man [Balzac advises] should enter his wife’s boudoir. The man who enters his wife’s dressing-room is either a philosopher or an imbecile… It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say bright things from time to time… To call desire into being, to nourish it, to develop it, to bring it to full growth, to excite it, to satisfy it, is a complete poem of itself.

  The rituals of love, Balzac knew, need constantly and imaginatively to be reinvented.

  Cultural traditions impact on the way we imagine sex, rarely a simple animal act. One of my youngest interviewees, who had spent some time living in France, noted that her French boyfriend always brought her flowers and gifts, and treated sex as an elaborate ritual to be prepared for as meticulously as for a banquet. Seduction and its arts were in the air. She felt pampered but not swept off her feet. Brought up in a British tradition, where romantic sexual spontaneity is understood as a proof of love, all this made her uncomfortable. She preferred her current American boyfriend, who allowed her to feel ‘more equal, more normal’. In the long life of an ongoing relationship, however, sleep may end up coming far more spontaneously than sex. And the creation of rituals of erotic play allow the bedroom to be re-infused with imagination.

  In Mating in Captivity, her fine book on the travails of sex in ongoing unions, the therapist Esther Perel punctures the myth of spontaneity. She cites the case of a gay couple who came to see her because their sex life, now that they were living together, had lost its lustre. She points out to them that when they lived in separate cities, they anticipated their reunions, imagined what they would get up to, planned their dates. There was a lot of imaginative foreplay, ‘longing, waiting, and yearning’, an intentionality to the seeming spontaneity and artlessness of their coming together. The art now goes into epicurean meals rather than loving. ‘Is the titillation of seduction only the privilege of those who date?’ she asks one partner in the couple. ‘Just because you live with someone doesn’t necessarily mean he’s readily available. If anything, he requires more attention, not less.’

  Too often in our target culture where the sex industry is rampant, Balzac’s poem of erotic marital love gets infused with a work ethic. We install performance ratings in the bedroom, count the how many and how much, note outcomes. But sex as hard work loses its allure and becomes as dreary as composing an annual report for the ever vigilant appraisal team. How much better to engage in imaginative elaboration, to dream ourselves afresh, to abandon oneself in the company of our other, and play. Cupid, after all, is a plump child.

  When Ian McEwan’s hero Perowne thinks of the excitements of familiarity that life with his wife provides, he evokes a sexual site of freedom and abandon. In the inherited ethos, both Freudian and religious, of double sexual standards, which place the sacred in domesticity and emotional satisfactions and the profane outside of it in the passionate excitements of ‘debased’ sexual objects, this can sound counter-intuitive. Indeed, many grow shy and inhibited as soon as the bed moves into the marital chamber, and find themselves unable to enact an abandon available elsewhere–as if parental forbiddings now hovered over maritally sanctioned acts and we stood to lose our mates if we showed them our wild side. To bring the illicit home, both within ourselves and to our loved one, may be the ultimate challenge in domesticating Eros.

  Reinventions

  Pondering the mysteries of marriage and sexuality, Freud noted in ‘The Taboo of Virginity’ that ‘it must strike the observer in how uncommonly large a number of cases the woman remains frigid and feels unhappy in a first marriage, whereas after it has been dissolved she becomes a tender wife, able to make her second husband happy. The archaic reaction [the discharge of immature sexuality on to the man who first has coitus with her] has, so to speak, exhausted itself on the first object.’

  Though physical virginity is rarely these days the condition of women on entering a first marriage or cohabitation, it still remains the case that first unions may bring with them an ‘immature sexuality’, one that trails ‘archaic reactions’, fears of dependency or ‘bondage’. These bear the whiff of Mummy and Daddy, a submersion or loss of oneself in and to the other from which second unions can be relatively free. In the classic formations, young women tie themselves to older men, finding in them the father (or mother, since gender here is less the issue than unresolved ties to the past which the self in flux carries within) they aren’t quite ready to leave. At times, when this kind of union was less taboo, young men would regularly engage in passions with older women, a rite of passage that had the added benefit of putting the overpowering sexualized mother within them to rest.

  In our era of independent working women, sometimes more successful than their husbands, certain difficulties can be exacerbated for both. Men can too easily find themselves infantilized by their partners (who may indeed ‘baby’ them). An attractive wife then takes on the aura of a critical, suffocating mother. When children arrive, this maternal aspect of the feminine comes quickly into the picture, and the attractions of the woman whom the man once desired prove difficult to reawaken. What then? The problem is a recalcitrant one, emphatically so in an age where we put arguably far too high a value on sexual passion–ever short-lived in its intoxicating form. A rebalancing here towards the value of other kinds of loving would not come amiss: tenderness, care, conversation, a shared history, mutual projects, and a mutual investment in the good life a couple has constructed may serve individuals far better than serial relationships in which the tail wags the dog and sets him running.

  In his analysis of what he calls the Hollywood ‘comedy of remarriage’ of the 1930s and 40s, Stanley Cavell probes the ways in which marriage, second time round, can be turned into an ad
venture, a romance, rather than a tragedy or farce. Remarriage for him entails a reconstituting of the self or a growth in self-knowledge, as well as a seeing of the other afresh and an understanding of human frailty. The rupture–divorce or split–helps: it marks an important point on the journey from illusion to disillusion to re-illusionment. In The Philadelphia Story Katharine Hepburn (Tracy) and Cary Grant (Dexter), having divorced over a number of incompatibilities–her pride, rectitude, sexual fears, over-attachment to (regulating) Mum and Dad, his drinking–find ‘home’ in each other again on the very point of her marrying another.

  Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday begins with the journalist heroine, Rosalind Russell, telling her ex (and editor) Cary Grant that she is poised to marry another: in other words, she has constituted her freedom from him, she is once more a separate, independent being. But after a series of adventures, one of which entails her giving up the film’s mother-figure, the original couple are once more ‘at home’ together, poised to re-enter a familiar union on revivified terms. Crucially, the new union preserves something of an adventure, of the illicit–a ‘moral equivalent of the immoral’. It also holds out the promise of joint projects, a working life together.