The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (36 page)

Jane Austen’s
Eight
Case Studies

 

 

 

SO WHAT DOES IT TAKE FOR A MAN TO STOP LIVING in the moment? Under what circumstances will a guy transcend his present-bound views, go outside his standard operating procedure—which is to enjoy what he shares with you only “for a time”—and shift into the mode where he’s ready to get serious? Ready to realize that one woman is a rich prize ... “an object” worth pursuing with all that restless male energy ... the only woman for him? How can he come to see that there’s something about her that requires him to step up his game? To reach the place where Darcy says to Elizabeth, “You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased”? Is it possible to define the conditions under which a man can really be in love?

If it can be done by process of elimination, we ought to be able to figure it out from Jane Austen, all right. She gives us at least eight case studies—that’s 1.3 per novel!—of men who are, in our modern catchphrase, “afraid of commitment.” In other words, eight different examples of men who pay
women the kind of attention that’s very likely to make her fall in love with him, without ever developing the serious intentions that are necessary for “permanent happiness.” Jane Austen’s men who aren’t ready to commit range from the deliberate heartbreaker Henry Crawford to one genuine Jane Austen hero who realizes his mistake just in time to keep from “endangering the happiness” of the woman in question or “impeaching his own honour.”

There’s so much in Jane Austen about men who just aren’t “that into” the women they’re paying attention to that you have to believe she thought it valuable for her readers to really understand the phenomenon. She gives us examples of all the various possible reasons a man might seem to be courting you, without really falling in love. At a minimum, it’s certainly useful for the preservation of our “tranquillity” (something Jane Austen heroines prize very highly
¹
) to be able to really understand what men are up to when they act this way.

Say a man’s been paying you attention and you, carefully discerning his intentions, figure out that he’s not serious. You’re going to want to know why. Is he a player, or a decent guy who’s just not ready to commit? Should you hope he’ll get over his “fear of commitment” or should you write him off as a guy who’s “just not that into” you, and never will be? Is there any point in continuing to see him, or is there “nothing to do but to keep away,” if you want to preserve your peace and keep pursuing happiness in love? Is the problem hopeless, or curable?

Jane Austen gives us a whole batch of samples that we can hold up for comparison with the men in our own lives—something like those color swatches you get at the paint store, each one all of the same color but ranging from light to dark, with all the various possible shades in between. Jane Austen’s case studies can save us from totally unnecessary heartbreak. But beyond that, they give us help in answering that central question: When
can
a man be in love like a woman? These unsuccessful scenarios contain key information about men who aren’t—and who almost are—really falling in love. And if we use our relationship-expertise to understand the psychological dynamics at work under the surface in each different sad case, we may be able to understand how it could have turned out differently.

Let’s start with the worst-case scenario. A guy can make love to you, obviously enjoy your company, apparently pursue you ... just because he deliberately gets his kicks out of making women fall in unrequited love with him. And if you think this phenomenon is a relic of the nineteenth century, with its rakes, cads, and villains, take a look at
www.seduction.com
, where you can see “Speed Seduction® Student” lessons in “How to Manage Her Commitment Expectations.”

 

We’ve already seen Henry Crawford in action, undertaking two separate campaigns to make women miserable about him. He plays both Maria and Julia Bertram, letting Julia off the hook only when his game with the already engaged Maria is becoming too absorbing for him to keep two fish on the line at once.
²
Henry says lots of things that lead Maria to believe she’s his object, but he shies away from saying anything that seals a commitment to her. Eventually he’s paying her enough attention that she feels it’s safe to quit soothing down the jealousy of Mr. Rushworth, her stupid fiancé.
³
But then—just when she’s almost sure of Henry—he leaves her flat. And when the broken-hearted Maria, in cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face mode, has married Mr. Rushworth and gone off on her honeymoon, Henry’s bored. So he announces to his sister that he means to “amuse” himself by the “wholesome” mental exercise of making Fanny Price fall in love with him.

 

Captain Frederick Tilney in
Northanger Abbey
is pretty much the same sort of heartless seducer. He lets Isabella Thorpe think that he’s got serious intentions, pays just enough attention to her to detach her from her fiancé—and then unceremoniously drops her. Henry Tilney puts up a half-hearted defense of his brother on the excuse that Isabella would have “to have been a very different creature” in order “to have had a heart to lose’” in the first
place. And we can see that if Isabella had cared more about real love and real quality in men, and less about money, she probably wouldn’t have been so susceptible to Captain Tilney’s glamour. The fiancé she dumps, James Morland, is a really great guy, and he sincerely loves her.

But unfortunately players don’t hurt only gold-diggers; they’re a danger to the rest of us too. You don’t have to become a cynic to understand that there are callous and cruel men out there. It’s just Jane Austen’s realism to notice the fact that the attention some men pay women is part of a game they play for their own amusement at our expense. It’s no insult to the men who are decent human beings to set your intelligence to the important task of distinguishing the upstanding guys from these disgusting parasites. There’s nothing to be done about them besides recognize them and avoid them like the nasty plague they are.

 

Marianne Dashwood, like Maria Bertram, finds herself in love with a man who somehow never gets around to making a commitment to her. “But he told you that he loved you?” Elinor asks. (Because in Jane Austen’s day, a “declaration” of love was tantamount to a “proposal” of marriage.) Marianne’s answer feels painfully familiar to any woman who has suffered from a man’s “fear of commitment”: “Yes—no—never absolutely. It was every day implied, but never professedly declared. Sometimes I thought it had been—but it never was.”

Willoughby isn’t a designing villain like Henry Crawford. He doesn’t set out to make Marianne miserable; he’s no deliberate connoisseur of broken female hearts. He just allows himself a lot of leeway in these matters. We’ve seen that when Willoughby first became emotionally “intimate” with Marianne, he intended nothing more than “to pass the time pleasantly.” Pleasantly for himself, that is, with total disregard for how the experience was likely to affect her. Up to a point, Willoughby is just doing what comes
naturally to any man. His very natural response to Marianne’s “lovely person and interesting manners” is frank enthusiasm. And Marianne, in turn, responds very naturally to his enthusiasm about her by falling for him, hard. “But at first,” Willoughby confesses when he’s telling Elinor the whole story, “my vanity only was elevated by it. Careless of her happiness, thinking only of my own amusement... I endeavoured, by every means in my power, to make myself pleasing to her, without any design of returning her affection.”

But Willoughby does fall for Marianne, after all: “Yes, I found myself, by insensible degrees, sincerely fond of her; and the happiest hours of my life were what I spent with her, when I felt my intentions were strictly honourable.” Notice, though, that Willoughby only
felt
himself to be committed to Marianne. He never got around to actually committing himself with words or actions. Why? He was still keeping his options open.

Here’s where he definitively crosses the line from just living in the present, the way even decent guys tend to do. In a strange way Willoughby
is
making a commitment. (But not to Marianne.) If he were just living in the moment, going with the flow, following his present feelings, those feelings would keep carrying him closer to Marianne. Sooner or later, he would find himself telling her he loved her. But Willoughby stops himself. He makes a commitment—to look after his own interests. He doesn’t want to become engaged while he’s in so much debt; he’s afraid to rule out the option of solving his financial problems by marrying an heiress. As Willoughby himself comes to see later, “The event has proved, that I was a cunning fool, providing with great circumspection for a possible opportunity of making myself contemptible and wretched forever.” Because Willoughby has carefully left his options open, when old Mrs. Smith suddenly finds out about how he seduced Eliza and threatens to disinherit him, he can still take advantage of his prudently preserved freedom to say good-bye to Marianne and marry a rich girl.

Does this happen today? All the time. (It’s not usually about money these days, though guys will put off committing if they think being tied down might interfere with their career ambitions. It can sometimes also be about sex.)
⁴
There are plenty of married men who will tell you that a sudden conviction that it was time to settle down emerged in their consciousness at some definite point—usually soon after the guy had gotten his act
together in regard to work and other adult responsibilities. A married male friend of mine claims it hit him just that way. He literally woke up one morning—possibly, he admits, a bit hung over—around his thirtieth birthday, after a decade of playing the field, to realize that it was time to get married.
⁵
That very morning, he made a mental list of women he already knew who might be good prospects, set about systematically asking them out, and was married within a few months. Sixteen years and six kids later, he still talks about his wife like she’s Wonder Woman and the Platonic ideal of the California Girl rolled into one.