All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (5 page)

Proust, that acute and agonized observer of human foibles, remarks on this common enough phenomenon. His adolescent namesake hero is infatuated with Gilberte, whom he meets regularly in the tree-lined parklands of the Champs Élysées. Yet the actual face of his first love, while he is embroiled in passion, continually eludes him. Proust offers this explanation:

The ‘activity of all the senses at once’–which Clio described in her falling-in-love moment as ‘everything grew vibrant, as if a light had been switched on’–blurs sight. Love, it seems, is blind in more ways than the conventional one, that is, of choosing an object for our passions who may be far from socially convenient: it also blinds one to the very face our fantasies have singled out as the only possible object for our love. Even if we carry on thinking that the ‘look’ of the other is crucial to our love, it may be difficult to recapture the face of the beloved in memory. Here, too, one could speculate, is an echo from buried childhood perceptions of parental figures.

The simultaneous ‘activity of all the senses’, the vertigo of ‘falling’ in love, may also be what introduces the sensation of ‘for ever’ into such heady passion, whatever reason may simultaneously tell us. When the senses are all so keenly in play, the present is all, and it seems to stretch into infinity.

For a week, Clio and her boy teased and ribbed each other, listened to Billy Joel songs, stole outside to smoke secretly. Then inexplicably he ‘dumped’ her, didn’t speak to her for a month or more. When they finally met up again at a party, he invited her outside and kissed her. That was it.

Misunderstandings and hurdles in the path of love–a common trope in fictional treatments as in life–like prohibitions, can increase the desirability of union. Breaking the boundaries of the self is a difficult and sometimes frightening business. Fear walks hand in hand with a sense of adventure. Sensitivities are high, vulnerabilities in play, the slightest rejections are magnified. Fantasies and anticipation inevitably collide with a ‘real,’ who has through the very process of imaginative elaboration been idealized. The other may feel intimately familiar and yet is a stranger. Excitement, a sense of risk and hope are inevitably tinged with anxiety and blundering steps. Then, too, in the obsessiveness that love releases, family and often friends are cast aside, sometimes with fractious effect. So the path to love is rarely altogether easy.

For Clio and her boyfriend, the coming together after the period of estrangement was sheer joy. A group of friends had congregated at one of their houses for a week: they told the other parents, mostly abroad, that term was finishing a week later. Sex was ‘steamy’ and ‘wonderful’ from the start. For a whole year, they were blissful together, utterly wrapped up in one another.

Then the school authorities discovered them in flagrante. They were both summarily expelled, sent down like a teenage Adam and Eve from the garden of their delights. The term ‘falling in love’ seems already to hold a ‘fall’ in itself: a fall away from the quotidian, reasonable self, and a falling out, during which that mundane self is slowly and at least partially restored. For Clio, the vertigo of the falling out, the dislocation it entailed, was terrible. Her parents had recently moved to North Africa and didn’t yet have an address. The school kept her in quarantine, as if she were diseased, until they could be reached. On top of the ostracization came the headmistress’s threat of ‘virginity tests’ and warnings that she would contract cervical cancer. In the eighties, and indeed even today, the age-old mantra that sex is a dirty business, polluting girls in particular, is still in play side by side with a more permissive culture. When at last Clio’s mother was contacted, she grasped the situation instantly. But the terror of confronting her father remained: white lies, reasons and excuses had to be fabulated. In the midst of all this worry and displacement, Clio completely lost touch with her boyfriend.

She didn’t see him again until fifteen years later. Through the interim period, despite a series of other encounters and affairs, the experience of this first love stayed with her, never to be equalled in either intensity or ‘rightness’.

The pain of sudden separation inevitably played a part in the powerful hold of this first passion–a word which in its Christian resonances already entails suffering. Indeed, this kind of heightened love wraps pain into itself. As Simone de Beauvoir has so saliently noted: ‘pain is normally a part of the erotic frenzy: bodies that delight to be bodies for the joy they give each other, seek to find each other, to unite, to confront each other in every possible manner. There is in erotic love a tearing away from the self, transport, ecstasy; suffering also tears through the limits of the ego, it is transcendence, a paroxysm… the exquisite and the painful intermesh.’

Clio traced her first love again when she was working in Southeast Asia. Now a successful executive in her early thirties, adept at Web searches, she recognized him from a review he had posted, despite the fact that thousands bore the same name as his. She sent him an email: he didn’t respond until three months later. She was then on the point of returning to England for a Christmas holiday. They met in a north London park: after fifteen minutes they were kissing and madly in love again, as if ‘time had folded in on itself’. Suddenly everything made sense for her; everything ‘fitted’. She thought, ‘This was it. This was happiness.’ It would never go away. She felt he was a part of her, no matter who or what he might have become.

He told her he had broken up with his wife just at the time that she had emailed him. (The little miracles of timing attend all accounts of romantic love, as do many other kinds of magical thinking that in the cold light of day, like horoscopes, are labelled ‘superstitious’.) He told her that she would meet his children: everything in their conversation was to do with a future in which they would be together. In that ‘for ever’ which heightened senses make of the present, she felt secure. They saw each other every day and when she had to return to her post abroad, she gave him an airline ticket to come and visit her in his Easter holiday. Meanwhile, they spoke daily across the distance and wrote passionate letters.

Then, three days before he was intended to fly, he rang to say he wouldn’t be coming. She was utterly devastated. She continued for years to gnaw away at explanations for his behaviour, for the split. Nor has she ever altogether recovered from the powerful emotions of this first love or found another to equal it.

What does Clio’s story tell us?

The very force of the emotions and sexual cravings attending first love, the risks it runs, the meanings it gathers into itself and finds in the world, mark it out as a unique experience amongst the many that life will offer. Its inevitable attendant anguish deepens our sense of inwardness and enriches our experience, in the process making us more aware of others and their fragility. Filled with ‘deep devotion’ and the ‘heavenly touch’ of an embrace that sings of ‘only you’ and ‘for ever’, it sweeps time past and future away, rolls up the world ‘into one ball’, and sites its centre in the here and now of rapturous embrace. ‘Many-splendored thing’ that it is, it even overwhelms our ironies. Yvaine, that heavenly emanation in that most romantic of modern tales, the film made from writer Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel
Stardust
, puts it admirably as she addresses her sleeping earthly beloved, Tristan:

The sense of young lovers being destined eternally for one another walks arm in arm with a generalized knowledge that the word ‘first’ inevitably marks the first of a series. Statistics, never altogether accurate in this area, suggest that at the very most, 25 per cent of people actually marry their first loves–though other statistics suggest it is only 3 per cent. The lower figure may, indeed, be a good: experience teaches us to temper our hopes and desires of the other, to live with inevitable frustration and still love. But it also means that passion and loss are powerfully bound up with one another. The very power of first love, imprinted in us, can serve as a template for later loves. The lover may seek a new incarnation of the first beloved or a replay of that first intensity. An attempt to repair what went awry may also feed the search for later editions. So, too, may an obsessional need to repeat the precise experience, which reality, ever obstinate and in flux, impedes.

Lost or dead loves, enshrined in an aura of imaginary perfection, seem to hover over all our loves. This may be why yearning, that longing forwards as well as backwards, is such a potent emotion and shadows our lives, as well as enlarging them. Sometimes that yearning can be stronger than lived love itself: humans are nothing if not perverse creatures, ever alert to the lacks of their present–compelled to look back, like Orpheus on Eurydice, even if it brings down the gates of hell and those sufferings propelled by absence.

Many feel the anguish of anticipated loss with each parting. Indeed, absence in love often looms as potently as presence. This may be because it is absence that in part ignites the capacity for worship: we worship our dead, our distant gods, our ancestors, our lost loves, sometimes, by a romantic slippage, even our present ones. Within the imagination, they take on a magical and healing power. We idealize their attributes, make them the bearers of all our good and wholeness, the healers of our wounds. Sometimes we reinvest these emotions in our children, making them the vehicles of our hopes, our aspirations, all our losses and failings, the carriers of both our dented narcissism and our ego ideals, our transcendent dreams. Buried in our passionate love is a redemptive structure borrowed from Christian theology (or perhaps it was the other way round): love, anguish and salvation are bound into one. ‘Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place,’ as the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston once put it.

In Love Again…

Why is it that passionate love and loss seem to be so bound up with one another?

Psychoanalysts, our contemporary experts on the inner life alongside novelists, poets and the occasional philosopher or priest, might tell us that first love is never altogether first. It is but the first and conscious reawakening of earlier forgotten loves: that utterly dependent yet omnipotent love, blissful in its plenitude, of the avid child at mother’s breast, an early symbiosis which, willy-nilly, must end, leaving in its trail a bodily sense of lack for an enchanting object ever after slightly out of reach. The sheer intensity of the infant’s initial encounter with a world that isn’t yet conceived as ‘other’ may have not a little to do with the fact that the babe inhabits a preverbal and pre-narrative state, in which a thinking being, an ‘I’ who defines and delimits, hasn’t yet been constituted. Freud’s famous ‘oceanic feeling’–‘a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded’–springs from this early state and is re-enacted in love, as it can be in faith. Here the boundaries between I and you, self and world, inner time and clock time melt away. We enter that other dimension to which some have given the name, ‘spiritual’.

But earthly time moves us on. The babe hurtles onward from that first symbiotic love. Rupture is built into our raptures. The pain of loss, torments of grief are already written into our passions. Learning to love seems also to be about learning how to accommodate the passage away from that brief, excited, blissful glimpse of plenitude.

The incestuous bundle of contradictory feelings the child has for its godlike parents or carers, and indeed its siblings, as it grows, also powerfully finds its way into first love outside the family. These early experiences mark first love with a particular sense of transgression and extremes of both attraction and vulnerability. All the psychological positions that love takes on find their crucible in our childhood relations. Gender is no necessary determinant. Male or female can be devoted, serving, self-abnegating, worshipping or possessively allconsuming, like a possible mother. Either can also be distant, unapproachable, a height to be scaled, or calling out for rescue… and so on in countless permutations.

Through these early moments, a barely grasped, some would say unconscious, narrative of love is shaped within us. It takes on accretions from the stories that circulate in our culture–romantic tales of transfiguration, worldly tales of pleasure, conflict-laden tales of power and submission, spiritual tales of ecstasy and self-abnegation. We reinvent these and they’re reignited as we move through life. If shades of the past may be put to rest, they also recur in unexpected moments. Each time we fall in love, even when we’re old, the experience feels new, freshly transfigurative. It both is and isn’t. There can be an uncanny familiarity in our love choices. They feel like soulmates, twins, as if we’ve known them all our lives. The structure of our relational story is there, too, within us. And our initial loves, like revenants, continue to lend their contours to later ones, while later ones take up the tune composed by earlier ones–and fill in all the necessary notes in our repertoire.