John Quinn loved his wife. And on the night of Wednesday, September 21, 1960, the twenty-three-year-old English literature major at Humboldt State College brought his sweetheart to Trinity Hospital in Arcata, California, to give birth to their first child.
As she went into labor, the doctor told him he’d have to leave. Many of us know that fathers didn’t used to be present in the delivery room during a birth, but what many of us don’t know was that it was actually discouraged—if not outright illegal. (And if a man wasn’t married to the mother, it remained against the law right up until the 1980s in some jurisdictions.)
But John Quinn wasn’t having it. He told the obstetrician, “I love my wife. I feel it’s my moral right as a husband and father to be there.” But the doctor was just as stubborn as John.
This was getting heated. Hospital management came and backed the obstetrician. It wasn’t safe. Having John there would be “impossible.”
John Quinn loved his wife. He was a solid dude. He wasn’t going anywhere. And that’s when they threatened to call the cops.
But John had expected it to come to this. In fact, he’d prepared for it. So that’s when he took out the chain . . .
And in a courageous deed that would make national news, he took his wife’s hand, wound the chain around their arms, and padlocked the two of them together. Obviously, I wasn’t there at the time, but I see a How ya like them apples, Doc? look on his face.
Hospital staff called the police. But the doctor wasn’t going to wheel them both out of the delivery room, and with no acetylene torch nearby, he proceeded with the delivery.
And John Quinn watched his little boy enter the world. When the delivery was over, mother and son both fine, John unlocked himself and walked out, passing right by Officer Don Mann, who was noted to be scratching his head at the whole incident.
Sometimes love requires more of us than we expect. But if you’re devoted, if you’re prepared—and maybe if you’ve got a chain and padlock—sometimes love can conquer all.
* * *
Everyone asks how you got together; nobody asks how you stayed together. And it’s the latter that is often the real achievement to be proud of. Let’s round up what we’ve learned.
The long era of the “help-me-not-die” marriage is over. Love won, and the self-expressive marriage reigns. But this is also the “all-or-nothing” marriage. These days more than ever, marital happiness = life happiness. We’re all-in. Doing love right is very, very good. Doing it wrong can be very, very bad.
Love is a mental illness. It’s a crazy addiction that even clouded the mind of the callous Casanova. But it turns out we need the crazy. That wild-eyed idealization, that positive bias, is the magic of love. Life is hard, so we need its drive not only to fulfill our genes’ goals to make more genes but to fulfill our hopes, dreams, and hearts.
We need the rational thought of the Enlightenment era to help us understand the process just like the science of medicine can heal the body. But in the end, our goal isn’t to be not-sick, it’s to be happy. So, in the end, we must jump headlong into the bias and madness of Romanticism.
There’s a bit of an emotional bait-and-switch involved when the force of early romantic love fades. We have an inaccurate paradigm of assuming the initial high of romantic love will continue indefinitely on its own, while it’s much more likely entropy will cause that force to wane. Fairy tales are passive and won’t help over the long haul. It will take work. As poet Carroll Bryant said, “Love is a two-way street constantly under construction.”
To prevent NSO from transforming your beloved into your personal piñata, we must talk, we must fight. To deal with the 69 percent of ongoing relationship problems that will never be solved, we must reduce the deadly negatives in communication, Gottman’s Four Horsemen of criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt. Avoiding a harsh startup and showing our partner the compassion and generosity we would give a child are key.
But, in the end, reducing the negative is not enough. We must increase the positive and achieve PSO, the angel to NSO’s devil. To be positively biased as we were in the early days of romantic love, we need the four Rs. To rekindle feelings with self-expansion (and have more sex!). To remind ourselves and go deeper into intimacy toward a unique culture of two. To renew and make each other better with the Michelangelo effect. And, finally, to continually rewrite a shared story of love that glorifies its inevitable struggles.
As Milan Kundera wrote, “A single metaphor can give birth to love.” Love is a story. And stories are never perfect renditions of the facts. But we don’t want realism. We want an always renewing idealization. And with time, that lie can become greater than the truth. When people buy into benevolent stories, humans form nations, religions, and communities that allow us to survive and thrive. Just as the falsehood that a friend is “another self” binds us together and improves the world, so does the mutually agreed-on delusion of love. The fake becomes real if we both believe. It’s the wonderful insanity of folie à deux. And that shared story can be summed up in a single, deceptively powerful word: we.
It’s a lot. It will be a challenge. (Did you really think it was going to be easy?) But with effort, today we have the ability to build the best marriages that have ever existed. It’s a tall order, but you have a partner to help.
And the verdict on this maxim? No, love doesn’t conquer all. But your love can. And it can be among the greatest humanity has known if you have the right story. And that story will continually be rewritten. This draft might not “conquer all,” but the next draft could.
With the responsibilities of adulthood there’s a desire to turn everything into a stable routine, but this turns love a shade of stultifying monochrome. In the end, we don’t want to conquer love’s challenges and mystery. In being vague, there is uncertainty and in uncertainty tension, serendipity, and surprise. Just enough harsh Enlightenment science to keep the fragile Romantic era fire burning. Irrational, yes. But so is life. And, as we saw with signaling, sometimes irrationality is the highest form of rationality.
Whew, time to take a deep breath. So what’s next in our “Consumer Reports” for social maxims?
Now we need to broaden it a bit and look at community. Lots going on lately in that department. The world is more connected than ever, yet we’re all more individualistic than we’ve ever been. Makes you wonder how much we actually need others. And in what ways.
This is the part where I’m supposed to say other people are essential and wonderful and the death of community is horrible, blah blah blah . . . But then why do we all keep choosing this increasingly individualistic path, huh? So rather than flood you with platitudes, let’s start with the question you’re not supposed to ask, the complete opposite of what you’re supposed to say in a book about relationships: Do you even need other people at all?
Is “No Man an Island”? Or could you be really happy as an awesome island like, say, Maui?
Time for you and me to find out . . .