All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (30 page)

Rob and Joanne had a great many interests in common to bolster the initial attraction. They would talk about 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.

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

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.

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.’

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.