On Love’s Intensity

We’re deep in the preparations for Christmas here, which will be at my house this year, and with my son and husband on holiday the competition for a computer slot is pretty intense at times. I say all this to apologise for my somewhat erratic presence in the blogworld this week and next. I will be posting now and then, and doing the rounds of my blogroll when I can. Normal service will resume around the 27th.

In between making lists of local cards to be delivered, and food to be bought, my books are talking to each other again. I’m reading a beautifully written morality tale of adultery by Stephanie Merritt, entitled Real. It’s a painfully elegant choreography of hellish behaviour amongst a group of profoundly unsympathetic characters. It might be too awful to read if it didn’t ring so tragically true, and if it wasn’t so accurately and intensely written. I’m really impressed by this author’s prose, which is gorgeous, but the story she tells is one of selfishness, stupidity and moral collapse. Greg, a middle-aged actor, lands a lead role in a West End play written by Sally, one of a new breed of women (the novel suggests) who drink and party and sleep around just like a certain breed of men. Greg is apathetically married to Caroline, who has substituted territorial aggression where her sexuality used to be, and they have a ten year old daughter called Daisy. I’ve found the portrait of the marriage more interesting than that of the affair, as the partners in it are bound together by negative love; Greg is comfortable with his incarceration and loyal to Caroline out of the guilt borne of many one-night stands, even though he takes no active pleasure in her company. Caroline doesn’t seem to like Greg, but he’s hers, and the image of her family is what she has decided to fight for now, rather than a significant relationship with her partner. It’s all very ugly and lazy, and both parents are determined to stay well within the marital concentric circles of hell for the sake of Daisy, who is at the mercy of their chronic unhappiness. Sally, by contrast, is a good time girl, proud of her capacity for transgression, and defined against the old-fashioned notion of the martyred woman. Except of course that’s where she ends up, having inadvertantly fallen pregnant. Greg finally admits this to Caroline who decides that their marriage can continue so long as Sally and her baby are made the enemy, and Greg in his infinite weakness agrees. This is the point of the novel I’ve reached, with Sally alone and having to grow up too fast, and Greg happy to stay in the trenches, where the bombing is at least familiar. Having designed for herself a life of regressive, if adult pleasure, Sally is struggling to deal with her pain:

‘In company she could hold conversations, and make jokes, but they came from somewhere outside herself; words plucked from a ready stash that she had shored up for just such an emergency, but how long would it last? She had read somewhere that third-degree burns hurt less than first-degree burns, although the wound was graver; often didn’t hurt at all because the nerve endings were seared away. This was how Greg had left her; the blow was such that she didn’t even feel the pain, yet. She was ashamed of her own vulnerability: to being perceived as a victim, abandoned, which in turn meant she could no longer distinguish between acts of friendship and acts of pity. A lifetime of learning to protect herself had made her afraid of showing weakness, with the result that she needlessly pushed her friends away when they tried to offer help.’

What’s becoming very clear is that Sally’s supposed autonomy is a fake, or at least, one still unable to survive the onslaught of male desire. Underneath all that gender-crossing bravado, Sally is still a romantic, which is to say, someone who will make foolish choices in order to chase idyllic dreams of love. Now I said my books were talking, and the other voice in my head at the moment is the fantastic Oliver James, who has moved on from social comparisons as a source of discontent in modern society, to the over-emphasis we now place on love relationships. James talks about

‘the huge expectation now placed on relationships as an almost religious salvation. The ideal of exclusive, intense, long-lasting relationships which many parents strive for with their children and with each other today may be a relatively new development in the history of humanity. Most of us take for granted the material conditions which make our unprecedented focus on relationships as a source of fulfillment possible… Until very recently, life was not only a great deal more nasty and brutish for all but a tiny elite, it was also a great deal shorter for everyone. A person born in England and Wales in 1841, for example, could expect on average to live to the age of 41. This had only risen to 45 by the turn of the century, climbing sharply to the 60s by 1950 and to its present average in the mid-70s.’

So, in the absence of war, crime, plague, poor hygene, insufficient nourishment, bad medical care, poverty and unhealthy working conditions, saying I’ll love you forever means double the committment it did a century ago. I find historical arguments like this fascinating, and evolutionary ones intriguing, but equally both strike me as completely unhelpful. They make the human race perpetually in transition between a status quo we apparently got used to, and an unknowable future; we’re always running to catch up, without knowing where we’re going. This may be absolutely true, but we have to get on with the business of living in the here and now somehow, and in the current climate, it’s undoubtedly the case that we do seek security and intensity (mutually contradictory, I think) within relationships, and we do foster the belief that we can make that security and intensity last. What I think Real is brilliant at showing, is how huge expectations are channelled in the beginning of a relationship into love and then, frustrated by love’s nebulous and transitory nature, end up in resentment, displaced aggression and bitterness. I think that, ideally, relationships ought to be managed like the environment, that’s to say ordered around issues of sustainability and minimum damage, but I wonder whether that’s impossible too, given that we are creatures of excess, impulse and emotion. Whatever the outcome may be, we’ve all got, on average, a great deal longer to think about it than we used to… for better or for worse.