The Course of Love (20 page)

So long as we have been the unconscious beneficiaries of the loyalty of others, sangfroid around adultery comes easily. Never having been betrayed sets up poor preconditions for remaining faithful. Evolving into genuinely more loyal people requires us to suffer through some properly inoculative episodes, in which we feel for a time limitlessly panicked, violated and on the edge of collapse. Only then can the injunction not to betray our spouses evolve from a bland bromide into a permanently vivid moral
imperative.

He longs, firstly, for safety. Sunday nights in winter often feel particularly cozy somehow, with the four of them seated around the table eating Kirsten's pasta, William giggling, Esther singing. It's dark outside. Rabih has his favorite German pumpernickel bread. Afterwards there's a game of Monopoly, a pillow fight, then a bath, a story, and bedtime for the children. Kirsten and Rabih climb into bed, too, to watch a film; they hold hands under the duvet, just as they did at the start, though now the rest is down to an almost embarrassed peck on the lips as the end credits roll, and both are asleep ten minutes later, secure and cocooned.

But he yearns, also, for adventure. Six thirty on those rare, perfect summer evenings in Edinburgh, when the streets smell of diesel, coffee, fried foods, hot tarmac, and sex. The pavements are crowded with people in cotton print dresses and loose-fitting jeans. Everyone sensible is heading home, but for those sticking around, the night promises warmth, intrigue and mischief. A young person in a tight top—perhaps a student or a tourist—passes
by and confides the briefest of conspirational smiles, and in an instant everything seems within reach. In the coming hours, people will enter bars and discos, shout to make themselves heard over the throb of the music, and—buoyed by alcohol and adrenaline—end up entwined with strangers in the shadows. Rabih is expected back at the house to begin the children's bath time in fifteen minutes.

Our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions. Yet what is worse is our utopian refusal to countenance the divergence, our naive hope that a cost-free synchronization might somehow be found: that the libertine might live for adventure while avoiding loneliness and chaos. Or that the married Romantic might unite sex with tenderness, and passion with routine.

Lauren texts Rabih to ask if they might speak online sometime. She would like to hear and ideally see him again: words just aren't enough.

There's a wait of ten days before Kirsten has something planned that will take her out of the house at night. The children keep him busy until it's nearly time, and then, due to a weak Wi-Fi signal, he's confined to the kitchen for the duration of the call. He has already checked to make sure, repeatedly, that neither Esther nor William is in need of a glass of water, but he turns to look at the door every few minutes anyway, just in case.

He's never used FaceTime before, and it takes a while for him to get it set up. Two women are now in different ways relying on him. A few minutes and three passwords later, Lauren is suddenly there, as if she were waiting inside the computer all along.

“I miss you,” she says right away. It's a sunny morning in Southern
California.

She's sitting in her kitchen—living room, wearing a casual blue striped top. She's just washed her hair. Her eyes are playful and alive.

“I made coffee; do you want some?” she asks.

“Sure, and some toast.”

“You like it with butter, I seem to remember? Coming right up.”

The screen flickers for an instant. This is how love affairs will be conducted when we've colonized Mars, he thinks.

Infatuations aren't delusions. That way they have of holding their head may truly indicate someone confident, wry, and sensitive; they really may have the humor and intelligence implied by their eyes and the tenderness suggested by their mouth. The error of the infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind the central truth of human nature: that everyone—not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts—but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings.

The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don't yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better.

When the image returns, he can just make out, in a far corner, what looks to be a drying rack with a few pairs of socks hung on it.

“By the way, where's the reach-over-and-touch-your-lover button on this thing?” she wonders aloud.

He's very much at her mercy. All she would need to do was look up his wife's e-mail on the Edinburgh Council Web site and drop her a line.

“It's right here on mine,” he replies.

In an instant his mind shoots forward to a possible future with Lauren. He imagines living with her in L.A. in
that apartment, after the divorce. They would make love on the couch, he would cradle her in his arms, they'd stay up late talking about their vulnerabilities and longings and would drive over to Malibu to eat shrimp at a little place she'd know by the ocean. But they'd also need to put out the laundry, wonder who would fix the fuses, and get cross because the milk ran out.

It's in part because he likes her a lot that he really doesn't want this to go any further. He knows himself well enough to realize how unhappy he would ultimately make her. In light of all he understands about himself and the course of love, he can see that the kindest thing he can do to someone he truly likes is to get out of the way fast.

Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.

“I miss you,” she says again.

“Likewise. I'm also intently staring at your laundry back there over your shoulder. It's very pretty.”

“You mean and perverted man!”

To develop this love story—one logical consequence of his enthusiasm—would in reality end up being the most self-centered and uncaring thing he could do to Lauren, not to mention his wife. Real generosity, he recognizes, means admiring, seeing through the urge for permanence, and walking away.

“There's something I've been meaning to say . . . ,” Rabih begins.

As he talks through his reservations, she is patient with his stumbles and what she calls his tendency towards “Middle Eastern sugarcoating,” throws in some humor about being fired as his mistress, but is gracious, decent, understanding, and, above all, kind.

“There aren't many people like you on the earth,” he concludes, and he means it.

What guided him in Berlin was the sudden hope of bypassing some of the shortcomings of his marriage by means of a new but contained foray into someone else's life. But as he perceives it now, such hope could only ever have been sentimental claptrap and a form of cruelty in which everyone involved would stand to lose and be hurt. There could be no tidy settlement possible in which nothing would be sacrificed. Adventure and security are irreconcilable, he sees. A loving marriage and children kill erotic spontaneity, and an affair kills a marriage. A person cannot be at once a libertine and a married Romantic, however compelling both paradigms might be. He doesn't downplay the loss either way. Saying good-bye to Lauren means safeguarding his marriage but it also means denying himself a critical source of tenderness and elation. Neither the love rat nor the faithful spouse gets it right. There is no solution. He is in tears in the kitchen, sobbing more deeply than he has in years: about what he has lost, what he has endangered, and how punishing the choices have been. He has just about enough time to compose himself between the moment the key turns in the lock and Kirsten enters the kitchen.

The weeks that follow will prove a mixture of relief and sadness. His wife will ask him on a couple of occasions if anything is wrong, and the second time he will make a great effort to adjust his manner so that she won't have to ask him again.

Melancholy isn't always a disorder that needs to be cured. It can be a species of intelligent grief which arises when we come face-to-face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start.

We have not been singled out. Marrying anyone, even the most suitable
of beings, comes down to a case of identifying which variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the altar, a couple would speak thus: “We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.”

After the solemn repetition of the last sentence by the congregation, the couple would continue: “We will endeavor to be faithful. At the same time, we are certain that never being allowed to sleep with anyone else is one of the tragedies of existence. We apologize that our jealousies have made this peculiar but sound and non-negotiable restriction very necessary. We promise to make each other the sole repository of our regrets rather than distribute them through a life of sexual Don Juanism. We have surveyed the different options for unhappiness, and it is to each other we have chosen to bind ourselves.”

Spouses who had been cheated upon would no longer be at liberty furiously to complain that they had expected their partner to be content with them alone. Instead they could more poignantly and justly cry, “I was relying on you to be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness which our hard-won marriage represents.”

Thereafter, an affair would be a betrayal not of intimate joy but of a reciprocal pledge to endure the disappointments of marriage with bravery
and stoic reserve.

No relationship could start without a commitment to wholehearted intimacy. But in order for love to keep going, it also seems impossible to imagine partners not learning to keep a great many of their thoughts to themselves.

We are so impressed by honesty that we forget the virtues of politeness; a desire not always to confront people we care about with the full, hurtful aspects of our nature.

Repression, a degree of restraint, and a little dedication to self-editing belong to love just as surely as a capacity for explicit confession. The person who can't tolerate secrets, who in the name of
“being honest”
shares information so wounding to the other that it can never be forgotten—this person is no friend of love.
And if we suspect (as we should regularly if our relationship is a worthy one) that our partner is also lying (about what she's thinking of, how he judges our work, where she was last night, etc.), then we would do well not to act the sharp and relentless inquisitor. It may be kinder, wiser, and closer to the true spirit of love to pretend we simply
didn't notice.

For Rabih, there is no alternative but to lie forever about what happened in Berlin. He has to because he knows that telling the truth would beget an even greater order of falsehood: the profoundly mistaken belief that he no longer loves Kirsten or else that he is a man who can no longer be trusted in any area of life. The truth risks distorting the relationship far more than the untruth.

In the wake of the affair, Rabih adopts a different view of the purpose of marriage. As a younger man he thought of it as a consecration of a special set of feelings: tenderness, desire, enthusiasm, longing. However, he now understands that it is also, and just as importantly, an institution, one which is meant to stand fast from year to year without reference to every passing change in the emotions of its participants. It has its justification in stabler and more enduring phenomena than feelings: in an original act of commitment impervious to later revisions and, more notably, in children, a class of beings constitutionally uninterested in the daily satisfactions of those who created them.

For most of recorded history, people stayed married because they were keen to fit in with the expectations of society, had a few assets to protect, and wanted to maintain the unity of their families. Then gradually another, very different standard took hold: couples were to remain together, ran the thought, only so long as certain feelings still obtained between them—feelings of authentic enthusiasm, desire, and fulfillment. In this new Romantic order, spouses could be justified in parting ways if the marital routine had become deadening, if the children were getting on their nerves, if sex was no longer enticing, or if either party had lately been feeling a little unhappy.

The more Rabih appreciates how chaotic and directionless his feelings are, the more sympathetic he grows to the idea of marriage as
an institution. At a conference, he might spy an attractive woman and want to throw away everything for her sake, only to recognize two days later that he would prefer to be dead than without Kirsten. Or, during protracted rainy weekends, he might wish that his children might grow up and leave him alone until the end of time so he could read his magazine in peace—and then a day later, at the office, his heart would tighten with grief because a meeting threatened to overrun and get him home an hour too late to put the kids to bed.

Against such a quicksilver backdrop, he recognizes the significance of the art of diplomacy, the discipline of not necessarily always saying what one thinks and not doing what one wants in the service of greater, more strategic ends.

Rabih keeps in mind the contradictory, sentimental, and hormonal forces which constantly pull him in a hundred crazed and inconclusive directions. To honor every one of these would be to annul any chance of leading a coherent life. He knows he will never make progress with the larger projects if he can't stand to be, at least some of the time, inwardly dissatisfied and outwardly inauthentic—if only in relation to such passing sensations as the desire to give away his children or end his marriage over a one-night stand with an American urban planner with exceptionally attractive grey-green eyes.