Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

  Now, see! There you go. A perfect example. Here’s this young woman (I presume she’s fairly young from the writing and the content) who encounters me in a series of books and gets all grunched out of shape because she thinks I’m downcast, and she wants me to spill the beans on myself, to tell her what makes me smile and laugh and love.

  And apart from wanting to keep some personal feelings to myself—Gawd, you’re a greedy bunch, no matter how much I blather and reveal, you’re never satisfied—the things I do unleash are frequently as happy as they are miserable. But when I try to look on the bright side, and pass along the lucent limbus of my personal joy, everyone who remembers those screams of anguish comes down on me like a tsunami, accusing me of being maudlin and saccharine.

  So if the observations I make about love seem just a tot on the pragmatic, even cynical, side…well, it’s purely an attempt to walk the tightrope: to indulge an uncommon (to my readers) softness of spirit without spastically lurching into a hideous rigadoon of wretched and nauseating mawkishness; to be as tough-minded as possible (and thereby as useful as possible) about something as worrisome and intangible as love, without sounding bruised or discouraged; to avoid cliché without purposely bumbling about like a boob in the glades of perversion.

  So I have consciously eschewed “diary” or “reminiscence” and shunted my observations over into fiction. It’s in the story-form that I feel most at ease writing my views of love. Unless one is Shelley, a Nuñez de Arce or La Rochefoucauld, one has no business publicly shooting off one’s mouth about something as mysterious and ethereal as love. Unless one is le Marquis de Sade, in which case one has a personal vision of love that defies all strictures.

  But in fiction, even a groping dullard like myself can stumble upon a truth or two; or at least a rule-of-thumb that seems to work in certain situations, among certain kinds of people. So when I pass along these remarks, I’ll try and couch them in anecdotal terms, all the better to entertain you, my dears, and not coincidentally to alleviate my own nervousness in this area.

  So here is just about all I know concerning love. Some of it light and happy, some of it cynical, perhaps some of it even accurate and truthful. One never know, do one.

  The minute people fall in love, they become liars.

  You’d think such good feelings in the gut and other places would make people want to ensure the continuance of those feelings. But their fears overcome their good sense, not to mention their ethics. They begin to lie, virtually from the first moment they feel the stirrings in the aorta…or wherever it is love is supposed to make itself felt.

  They lie in a hundred different ways. From the first tentative social conversations that bore them silly, they lie by pretending to be interested in inanities. This is a generality, but I think it holds: if it’s guys, they listen to banal bullshit just on the off-chance they’ll get laid. If it’s women, they listen to the blown-out-of-proportion nonsense of men so they can reinforce the guy’s need to be a Big Man. They lie to one another with looks and with words, and only the body-language tells the truth.

  They lie to keep the upper hand, even before they’re threatened. The fear of rejection is so ingrained, from the schoolyard, from the locker room, from the parties, from the Homecoming Dance, from the years of seeing lithe tanned women in bikinis and feral muscular men with shirts open to the sternum up there on four-color billboards; they fear the unknown outer darkness of someone saying, “No.”

  So they lie to one another. Granted, it’s akin to the social lying we all do at parties, in restaurants, at social events: putting up with trivia to be politic or civilized or “gracious,” whatever that means. Nonetheless, it is lying. And by feigning interest in that which bores or turns one off, they set up artificial grounds for a potential relationship that they have to maintain all through the rest of the association. I know a young woman who met a guy at a party. He turned her on, and he started voicing some of his rustic views on busing. She had worked for the integration legislation as a regional attaché to one of the senators pushing the facilitation of busing. She came out of ten years of hard and thankless work trying to achieve racial balance. He was a divorced businessman with two kids, who was, at heart, a man who feared and hated blacks. Though he would have gone to his grave swearing there wasn’t a scintilla of bigotry in his well-clothed body. But they turned each other on, and she listened and nodded, and said nothing. They started dating. It lasted six months. Then it fell apart. When his narrow view of the world became too much for her, she started to fight back. Now he tells everyone she was a “castrating bitch” and she harbors guilt feelings for her own intransigence. False and untenable rules for the relationship had been the order of their mating from the git-go. It was doomed to fail.

  Earlier, I passed along a generality. There are, of course, exceptions. There are women who listen to the crapola put out by guys at parties because they want to get laid, and there are guys who put up with women’s inanities because they want to be polite. It happens. But the point still holds. They do it because they want to be liked. They lie and listen to lies so they’ll be accepted. The first faint stirrings of love—barely codified, still inarticulate—force them into the role of liar.

  And then the lies, once having been freed from Pandora’s Hope Chest, begin to breed. They multiply like maggots and riddle a relationship like a submarine hit by a depth charge. Consider just the most obvious ones we’ve all either used or been victimized by:

  You walk into a room and she (or he) is brooding.

  “What’s the matter, something wrong, something bothering you?” That’s what you say.

  Then he (or she) replies, “Nothing.”

  A lie, a bald-faced lie. You know damned well there’s something wrong. The way the legs are crossed, the way the arms are folded, that telltale pursing of the lips, the vacant, abstracted stare, the peremptory way the words are bitten off. There’s something wrong. But she (or he) says, “Nothing.”

  Is it because the brooding party really has something heavy to brood about and, out of love, chooses to lie rather than to lay it on the other person? Is it (more likely) that the brooder has been brought down by something the other party did, and wants to whip a little unconscious, free-floating guilt on the perpetrator before spilling the load of shit being carried in the gut? Is it part of the stylized ritual of hide-and-seek so many lovers play? Is it a physical manifestation of the brooding party’s having done something they mutually consider “wrong” (like going out and getting laid on the sly), and getting him or herself set to rationalize it in such a way that the other member of the team feels like the criminal, using the brooding dark mood as a kind of head start in the argument that will follow?

  What does it matter? What we’re dealing with here is dishonesty, cupidity, misdirection, acting-out…lying.

  Here’s another one. And you’ve all been on one or the other end of this one:

  “No, I have a headache.”

  “No, I’m tired.”

  “No, I’m a little inflamed.”

  “No, I have a hard day tomorrow.”

  “No, it isn’t right.”

  “No, I’m still in love with [fill in appropriate name].”

  Now none of those oldies but goodies is being spoken by a man or woman on a first date. I’m talking about their use in an already ongoing relationship. But a relationship in which one of the partners has been turned off, and won’t cop to it! So he or she lies. Again and again and again. Instead of simply saying, “You have bad breath,” or “I’m not sexually turned on by you any more,” the lies are ranked like MIRV missiles and fired off, one each time an enemy approach is sighted.

  Here’s another one. Before they met, he was attracted to medium-height, auburn-haired females between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight with high conical breasts and very thin legs. She was attracted to guys with tight little asses and an almost total absence of chest and arm hair; guys with blue eyes and heavy torsos and English accen
ts and thin, aquiline noses. But one time he made the error of going on admiringly about one of those fantasy-women just a few seconds too long, as they sat there watching the hair-coloring commercial in which the woman appeared, and she got extremely uptight. And one time she made the error of spending a half-hour in a corner at a party talking to a guy just like the kind she lubricated for, and he (her boy friend) went into a towering Sicilian machismo rage about her flirting.

  So now, they purposely turn away from the somatotypes that attract them, when they’re out driving, when they’re walking in the shopping mall, when they go to the movies, when they spend an evening at the bowling alley, when the tv camera pans across the bleachers at the football game, when they’re at a party. She’ll test him by drawing his attention to a girl he’s already clocked and turned away from, by saying, “Do you think she’s attractive?” And he’ll glance over quickly, and with feigned disinterest mumble, “Legs’re too skinny.” But he has a stack of beaver magazines hidden away in his work bench, each magazine containing 372 unretouched shots of girls just like the one he dismissed. He’ll test her by introducing her to a guy at the office party who fits her secret sex fantasies, and later asking, “What’d you think of Ken?” And she’ll go right on basting the roast or drawing up the blueprints for the new museum wing or finishing the sketches for that children’s book, and she won’t even look up as she says, “He’s nice enough, I suppose. Not very bright, though, is he?” But half the time when she’s fucking him, she’s envisioning Ken.

  These are only a few. There are others, many others. Add your own at leisure. Talk it over with your mate or love-partner. See if you can get further examples to convince yourself that what I’m talking about here is hypocrisy and fear, not standards of sexual conduct. What I’m talking about is the title of this book: love ain’t nothing but sex misspelled. The perversion of sex in the name of love, using two quite clearly separable needs as reinforcements of one another, because you’re not secure enough in either to think they stand by themselves and take care of themselves and enrich through their separate powers. The perversion of love to obtain sex as a commodity. The lies that are told because honesty might well mean rejection. And the unbelievably crippling fear of rejection that moves most of us more than we care to admit. Thus doth love make liars of us all.

  An obnoxious woman is a strong man’s “limp.”

  (I’m sure there’s a reverse to this, as seen from the viewpoint of a woman; but being a man, I’m most familiar with this side of it. You’ll forgive me if I report this section only from what I know, even if it is one-sided. Female readers can mentally write an addendum in which they project what I’m about to say for the flip-side.)

  Here’s this really sensational sweet guy. He’s gentle, fair, moderately talented, seems to be happy with his life and what he’s doing; and he’s involved with a woman who is a righteous phony. She’s loud, she drinks too much, she’s a fucking pain in the ass at a dinner table: name dropping, interrupting, belittling him in front of his friends, cutting the other women who try to show some warmth to the guy because they’re embarrassed for him, interrupting everyone, rearranging the environment to suit herself ( “I have to sit here, not there”…“Would you ask the maîitre d’ to lower the air conditioning”…“There’s absolutely nothing on this menu, would you ask the waiter if they can find me an abalone steak”…“Sid, would you mind not smoking, I washed my hair this afternoon”).

  And you ask yourself, how can this terrific guy hang out with such a creep?

  (It occurs to me that the reverse, a sensational woman tied to a shmuck guy, is more clearly changing these days. The incidence of women splitting from their husbands, initiating divorce or dissolution of a living-together situation, is very much on the rise. Female-initiated divorces have risen in this country alone by three times what they were even fifteen years ago. Now it’s the men who try to hang in there with a lousy relationship while the women, I suppose because of widespread consciousness-raising that has advised them it’s feasible to break up without social stigmatization, are taking off. But that’s just a guess.)

  I’ve fiddled around with trying to come up logical on this one, finding some kind of Universal Truth why strong people should harness themselves to albatrosses, but this is one of those aspects of love that I’ve seen again and again, and every time it’s for a different reason. In one case it was that the guy wasn’t sufficiently secure in his ego-strength, sufficiently filled with feelings of his worthiness to love and be loved in return. In another case it was because the woman was devoted to the guy in private, absolutely revolved around him. In yet another case the guy felt guilt about how he and his woman had gotten together, and he hung in there because he was paying dues.

  Lori shrugs and says, “Love is blind.”

  Maybe that’s the best answer. I don’t know. It’s one of those troublesome areas that defies pat answers.

  All I know for sure is that there are many, many women and men who are hanging out—because of “love”—with partners who are clearly their inferiors.

  Shit, maybe it’s that one of the selfish aspects of love is that we be able to feel we’re the dominant love-partner in the link-up. I don’t know. Think about it; maybe you can write a critical study, then we’ll both know.

  Love weakens as much as it strengthens, and often that’s very good for you.

  The operable part of that aphorism is that vulnerability is a good and enlarging thing. When you fall in love, you start to need. For people whose self-sufficiency or fears of life have made them encysted creatures, love opens them.

  For instance, the other day Lori and I were talking about what a prick I am when someone tries to chop me conversationally. Being a “fast gun” in a verbal encounter has always been a stance I believed to be extremely pro-survival. There aren’t too many people who have as vicious and insulting a manner as I can manifest when I’m annoyed. That’s because in some ways I’m conversationally suicidal: I’ll say anything. There are no bounds to how deeply I’ll cut to win. That’s simultaneously one of my strengths and one of my weaknesses. I won’t go into how it got started, it goes ’way back. I’ll just say that it makes me a very enclosed individual a lot of the time. I’m constantly on the alert for the attack.

  So Lori put forth the proposition that I was stronger than she in such situations, and I said, “No, we’re evenly matched.” And then she said, with considerable disbelief, “But you could cut me up in a minute and we both know it.”

  Which led me to think about it and I responded, “Then why don’t I?”

  “Because you love me,” she said.

  “Right,” I said.

  Then she grinned and made the perfect point. “You’re handicapped.”

  Right!

  Willingly, gladly, joyously handicapped. A mercurial sprinter happily tying a bag of cement to his left leg so he can race with fairness to the competition, because he loves the race, not the winning.

  Love can do that. It can make you dull those savage aspects of your nature so you become more nakedly ready to accept goodness from your love-partner. It is even more pro-survival, if one accepts the theory that life is a string of boredoms, getting-alongs, sadnesses and just plain nothing-happening times, broken up by gleaming pearls of happiness that get us through the crummy stretches on that string.

  Weakness becomes strength.

  After you’ve had the Ultimate Love Affair that has broken you, leaves you certain love has been poisoned in your system, then, and only then, can you be saved and uplifted by the Post-Ultimate Love Affair.

  Because that’s when you’re most uncertain, most self-doubting, most locked into a tunnel vision of love and life. And that’s when new experiences come out of nowhere to wham you.

  I guess this ties in with what I was saying about pain in the introduction to PAINGOD and about how we cannot savor the full wonder of joy unless we’ve gone through some exhausting, debilitating times of anguish. No one
likes pain (and please be advised I’m not advocating S-M or any of the torture-games some people need to get them off; I’m talking about life-situation pain; enemas and shtupping amputees and whips ’n’ chains may be superfine for Penthouse and other sources of communication for those who’re into such things, but I’m not, and so when I talk about pain I mean getting your brain busted, not your body shackled; okay?) but it seems to me that we spend so much time avoiding pain of even the mildest sort, that we turn ourselves into mollusks. To love, I think, one must be prepared to get clipped on the jaw occasionally.

  Otherwise, one would always settle for the safest, least demanding, least challenging relationship. Wouldn’t we?

  I think that makes sense.

  And so, having been destroyed by an affair, knowing one has had the Ultimate Love, one wanders lost and broken in a new place. And then, from out of nowhere—and I’ve seen it happen time and again—comes this whirlwind that sweeps you up and carries you along, and three, four, five months later you realize it isn’t a rebound affair, it’s the Post-Ultimate Affair, and you’re whole again, and stronger than ever.

  So go find the greatest love of your life, the one that burns and sizzles and chars everything around it, and fling yourself into it like a child in a playground. Drain all you can from it, and then get your back broken. Suffer and stumble around and weep and piss and moan. And then look out! Because here comes The Lone Ranger or Wonder Woman, ready to make it all good again…and this time probably for keeps.

  Here are a few more things about love I think work.

  Friendship is better than passion.

  As Richard Shorr says, if you can say to your partner, even when you hate him or her the most, I wish you well, then you’ve got a chance to make it. Lust works wonders, it puts apples in your cheeks (and sometimes crabs in your bed), but it ebbs and flows. Friendship sustains and enriches and stays constant.