It is tempting to see romantic love as an answer to life’s difficulties. Many of us have been programmed to believe that love has the power to make us whole, mend our injuries, and give us the meaning of our existence. This is not to say that we are naïve or gullible. Undoubtedly most of us know that seeking our happiness through love is a treacherous affair. We recognize that the act of placing our well-being in the hands of another person can be terribly imprudent. And we understand that looking for a validation of our individuality through the grace and generosity of someone else can get us in trouble. After all, we cannot control how the person in question treats us. There is no guarantee that he or she will make us feel good about ourselves. In addition, when we lose this person’s love, we may end up feeling like we have lost a part of ourselves; we may end up feeling like we have lost the core of our identity, so that our lives suddenly seem strangely devoid of worth or direction.
Yet the idea that love holds the key to our salvation—that it possesses the power to complete us in ways that nothing else can—at times beckons us so compellingly that we end up pursuing a romantic alliance at all costs. We may feel that, without love, we will flounder in a limbo of self-definition, incapable of determining how we are supposed to proceed with our lives. We may even come to believe that life without love is intrinsically futile or uninspiring. At its most extreme, our quest for the rewards of love can cause us to neglect other avenues of personal development to the extent that we, over time, become incapable of nurturing the very capacities and characteristics that make us interesting to potential lovers in the first place. We gradually lose the distinctiveness, the alertness of being, that renders us appealing to others. As the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir observed in the context of warning women against becoming overinvested in love: “One of the loving woman’s misfortunes is to find that her very love disfigures her, destroys her.”
This may be an overstatement, at least in the contemporary context. Yet there is no question that the overvaluation of love can lead to an impoverishment of character that makes it difficult for us to sustain dynamic relationships in the long run. When we hope that love will banish our impression of being somehow lacking or inadequate, or when we expect from love the kind of unconditional satisfaction that we cannot attain in other realms of life, we may lose ourselves in love’s illusory hall of mirrors. When we see love as a shortcut to happiness or fulfillment, we may ignore other means of achieving these goals; we may come to spend our days searching for the special person who is “meant” for us in some cosmic sense. The main goal of this chapter is to illustrate that we are rarely as easily or disastrously mistaken as when we think that we have found the soul mate who completes us.
The notion that love leads to an idyllic union of souls has deep roots in Western thought. One of the most celebrated accounts is by the ancient Greek poet Aristophanes, who tells us an evocative story about the origins of love. He explains that a long time ago, in some mythical past, humans had two faces (looking in opposite directions), four arms, and four legs. They were so powerful—so vigorous and formidable—that they aspired to challenge the gods. The gods, understandably enough, became enraged at such a lack of humility. In the end, Zeus decided to punish humans by cutting them in half (“like eggs which are cut with hair”) in order to reinstall their sense of modesty.
As a result of this dissection, humans lost much of their strength. They now only had one face, two arms, and two legs. Their confidence vanished with their prowess. Most important, they were filled with a desperate longing to reunite with the half of themselves that they had lost. If the two halves happened to meet, Aristophanes tells us, they threw their arms around each other and embraced in a hopeless effort to grow together again. Their yearning to be merged was so inconsolable that they gradually perished of hunger and complete neglect of all their basic needs. For all his wrath, Zeus did not want humans to die (for this would have left the gods without worshippers). He consequently asked Apollo to move their genitals to the front of their bodies so as to make it possible for them to come together on a temporary (yet recurring) basis. In this way, according to the myth, humans lost their originary sense of wholeness but gained the capacity to reexperience it in fleeting moments of sexual union.
This is essentially a story about the birth of sexual desire. But it is also a fascinating portrayal of the sentiment of wanting to be welded together with another human being that we are taught to associate with “true” love. It gives us a mythological rendering of why it is that we tend to think that love will restore us to a state of self-completion that we imagine we once possessed. It is as if we secretly believed that, like the humans of Aristophanes’s story, we have been unfairly robbed of our strength and self-sufficiency and therefore need the compensations of romantic love to reclaim our full humanity. The story clarifies, in a figurative way, why love appears to answer to a yearning in us that we are keenly aware of yet often cannot name or fully express. It explains why love sometimes seems to heal a wound that we were not even entirely conscious of having prior to meeting the person we love.
However, we might as well admit that the idea of an originary wholeness that we have somehow lost in the process of living is exactly what Aristophanes depicts it to be: a myth. In other words, feeling lacking (incomplete and less than perfect) is an important part of what it means to be human. There is no cure for this lack, for the fact is that we never had two faces, four arms, or four legs. There was no wrath of the gods. And there was no primordial dissection at the vengeful hands of Zeus. We were born into this world in a state of vulnerability, and no matter how big a portion of our lives we devote to the attempt to build a personal fortress of safety and certainty, existential security is something that will always in the end elude us.
We might be somewhat consoled if we realized that it is exactly this lack of security that makes us the complex and captivating entities we are—that adds a tragic, poignant, and haunting kind of fragility to human life. Without our vulnerability, we would not be half as interesting as we are. We would, for instance, not be able to approach others with the same degree of empathy or understanding, for our capacity for compassion arises in part from our appreciation of our own acute woundability. Our frailty and existential terror allow us to respond to the frailties and terrors of others. And our moments of weakness make us more tolerant of the weaknesses of those we love. In this sense, our woundability is what lends our characters much of their emotional resonance. It grants us the kind of delicate discernment that enables us to relate to others in caring, thoughtful, and responsible ways. On this view, the attempt to heal ourselves by overcoming our sense of lack might be a largely misguided use of our energies. Such energies might be better spent in learning to value the interpersonal gifts that our brittleness bestows upon us.
Likewise, it might help us to recognize that it is exactly because we feel that we are somehow inherently lacking that we are driven to the kind of inventiveness that characterizes human life at its richest. More specifically, it is precisely because we judge something to be missing from our lives that we feel compelled to conjure up imaginary worlds of possibility. Such worlds, in turn, add vigor and weightiness to human existence on its various levels: the arts, the sciences, institutional structures, politics, religion, and relational arrangements, to name a few. In this sense, the innovative energy that propels human existence—that induces us, over and over again, to reach for the heights of achievement—emerges, in part at least, from our inconsolable awareness of our own deficiency.
One could then argue that much of what we find most worthwhile in the world comes to us from our sense of lack, for it is our repeated attempts to fill this lack that bring into being things of considerable beauty and magnificence. If we felt no lack, we might also not feel any need to compensate for it; we might not feel any urge to create anything new. We might in fact not even have much curiosity about the world and its offerings, for our self-sufficiency would render the world uninteresting. According to this account, it is our lack that not only encourages us to invent imaginary worlds, but also allows us to meet the existing world as a place that might have something of value to offer to us.
Unfortunately, most of us are not used to thinking about our lack as something that vitalizes our existence. Rather, we are prone to experience it as an aching wound in need of mending. And we tend to look to romantic love as our cure and deliverance. In so doing, we sometimes get caught in the web of one of love’s most powerful illusions, namely, the idea that another person can conjure away our lack. We in fact place an impossible burden on the person we love, for we ask him or her to grant us the kind of plenitude that is inherently forbidden to us. We ask him or her to accomplish what no one can for the simple reason that human beings are not designed to feel unassailable and entirely self-contained.
It is the very essence of the human condition to never be able to experience the kind of healing union that Aristophanes talks about. This does not mean that romantic love cannot make us feel more self-realized. Or that it cannot alleviate our feelings of alienation. Or that it cannot give us relief from past injuries, grievances, and disappointments. The tender solicitude of a beloved person can go a long way in compensating for the ordeals of life. And certainly, as we will see later, it brings us alive in ways that few other experiences do. However, to the extent that it is our existential assignment as human beings to feel lacking, even love—no matter how loving—cannot make us feel completely whole.
One of the most intriguing implications of Aristophanes’s account is that even though Western society holds individuality in high regard, many of us seem to find it quite difficult to bear. On one level, we value the idea of being singular creatures. We may even take pride in our quirks and peculiarities, asserting our right to carve a distinctive path through life. Yet, to the degree that we seek wholeness through those we love, we experience a separation from them as a gaping wound in need of repair. Our fantasies of being able to attain wholeness through a union with others can in fact be so powerful that they come to determine the entire direction of our love lives. At the same time, if we were ever to reach this wholeness, we would lose much of what makes us human—we would lose the raw edge of vulnerability that holds us open to others to begin with. We of course know this. Yet we often cannot help but to yearn for invulnerability.
Aristophanes’s myth also highlights another, closely related, aspect of love that often misleads us: the fact that our desire tends to be highly narcissistic. In the myth, each lover yearns to be reunited with the lost half of himself—the half that was severed due to Zeus’s dissection. Although on the surface it may appear that the lover is seeking to fuse with another individual, a deeper look reveals that he is merely aspiring to recover lost facets of his own being. This illustrates what many of us long for in romantic love, namely, the chance to discover dimensions of ourselves in the person we love. All too often we try to turn the other into a flattering mirror that reflects back to us a pleasing image of ourselves. The objective of this kind of love is less to bring two autonomous individuals into a loving alliance than to gratify our longing for narcissistic self-completion. The goal is less to revere the beloved than to fulfill our fantasy of self-actualization.
In real life, the narcissistic undertones of romantic love are usually less overt than in Aristophanes’s story. We are rarely literally or consciously seeking a lost half of ourselves. Yet few of us can deny that we are, on some level, hoping that our lover will reinforce our sense of self, and perhaps even make up for some of our deficiencies. We may look for a partner who complements us because he or she possesses characteristics that we do not have. Or we may be attracted to someone who is able to draw out and galvanize disavowed dimensions of our being. This is not necessarily inherently problematic. As a matter of fact, later in this book I will argue that a loving encounter between two people can enrich both precisely because it helps each bring to life repressed components of his or her personality. However, love that is primarily narcissistic is more or less fated to deplete both lover and beloved.
One of the most obvious problems with narcissistic love is that it does not respect the specificity of the beloved’s being. If the lover’s aim, however unconsciously, is to use the beloved as a gratifying mirror, then any aspect of her that obscures the clarity of the image he seeks becomes a nuisance—something to be overlooked, covered over, or pushed aside. The lover, in short, concentrates on certain of the beloved’s attributes at the expense of others that might complicate the picture. He is so focused on his own augmentation that only those of the beloved’s characteristics that directly prop up his self-regard are acceptable to him. Over time, he builds a one-dimensional image of her that does not reflect her self-understanding. She may feel admired and even raised on a pedestal, but she also senses that she is being deprived of her personhood—of what she, in the intricacy of her being, is or has the promise to become.
While such containment is at times blatant, more often it takes the form of a subtle and indirect (and therefore all the more insidious) denigration that makes the beloved feel oddly censured or disparaged for who she is. This can over time curb her self-expression to such an extent that she comes to feel suffocated within the relationship without knowing why this is the case. She gradually gets the impression that unless she embodies specific traits—unless she fits into the design of her lover’s life in precise ways that meet some predetermined (yet often unarticulated) ideal of his—she is worthless in his eyes. She may even attempt to locate the cause of her wretchedness within herself, for she does not necessarily understand that there is absolutely nothing wrong with her particular qualities, but that the problem is, rather, that these qualities do not meet the narcissistic fantasies of her lover. In such instances, there is next to nothing that the beloved can do to fix things, for no matter how she chooses to act, no matter how diligently she tries to improve herself, she will never be good enough for her lover. What he is looking for is an idealized image that coincides seamlessly with his wants and desires. This is something that she can never be.
I have here talked about the beloved as a woman because it is women who have traditionally—more often than men—been expected to impersonate the mirror. They have been taught to erase their personalities in order to provide a lucid and uncluttered surface for men’s narcissistic fantasies. They have been asked to conceal or downplay the particularities of their being so as to more accurately reflect men’s desire. It may in fact be that our culture associates women with mirrors—and with the vanity and narcissistic superficiality that mirrors imply—in part because women have had to stifle the idiosyncratic vitality of their personalities in order to turn themselves into the flat (safe and reassuring) mirror that is demanded of them. As Virginia Woolf once remarked: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
This may account for the stiff formality and self-consciousness of some feminine self-presentations, for the more a woman internalizes the role of a mirror, the less her individuality and characteristic spontaneity remain visible to others. The self as mirror is an artificial self, an empty and well-defended shell that is constructed to please the outside world, but that does not reflect the individual’s passions or deep personality. Indeed, such a contrived self is designed to conceal everything that is most eccentric about the woman so that nothing offends, nothing stands out of place or alarms. Like the softly lit mirrors of exclusive hotels and restaurants, such a woman reflects back to her lover an image of himself that he wishes to see: more flawless, more appealing, and considerably more charming than the one he meets in his own bathroom mirror on Monday morning.
In today’s society, where traditional gender roles and inequalities have thankfully eroded (even if they are far from being abolished), it might be misleading to analyze narcissism along gendered lines. It may well be that many women are, these days, as guilty of it as men are. Furthermore, narcissism penalizes both lover and beloved, albeit in different ways. If the beloved is drained of her inner complexity, the narcissistic lover also narrows his life-world because he tends to sideline those aspects of his personality that do not correspond to his idealized image of himself. He tends to overlook or actively spurn those of his characteristics that do not comfortably fit within the frame of his mirror. Over time, he becomes a drastically impoverished version of what he could be if only he allowed himself to disobey his own ideal. Although the unconscious goal of narcissistic love is to enhance the lover’s self-esteem, its actual result is frequently to fix him into an identity that leaves little room for improvisation.
What is more, such a lover tends to be so dedicated to locating a partner who meets his narcissistic needs that he may get utterly trapped in an unachievable fantasy. He may become attached to an overly specific image of desirability, looking for the kind of woman he will never find for the simple reason that she does not exist in the real world. She is a fantasy that has a viable life only in his mind. A man in this predicament finds that every woman disillusions, disappoints, or falls short in one way or another. Even a woman who initially seems to correspond to his specifications will in the final analysis prove herself undeserving and unremarkable.
Such a pattern of relating keeps the narcissistic lover from embracing the real-life options available to him. He is so focused on attaining his ideal that he forgets to live in the present, shunning the opportunities and possible loves that come his way because they do not live up to the precision of his expectations. Instead of relishing what he could in fact achieve—such as a loving connection that is rewarding without being perfect—he allows himself to be swept into mesmerizing delusions that prevent him from fully entering the stream of his existence. Because such delusions direct his attention to the hazy horizon of what might one day come to pass if only certain conditions were miraculously fulfilled, they hold him at a safe distance from having to actually live his life; they serve as a highly sophisticated defense against the tangible tumult of dwelling in the world. One could even say that they signify a peculiar kind of cowardice, for a person caught up in an unattainable ideal can convince himself that he never has to make a decision or commit to an action.
Making a decision or committing to an action is intrinsically hazardous. One could always be wrong. One’s decision or action could have disastrous consequences. Against this backdrop, nothing is more reassuring than ideals that cannot be achieved, that can forever be approached but never actually attained. Such ideals offer a paradoxical kind of protection against existential mistakes because they detach us from the (admittedly byzantine) task of living. But the flip side of this is that they also serve as a convoluted means of reducing the stakes of our existence. When only those encounters or amorous possibilities that resonate with our ideals register on our emotional radar, we miss out on a lot of pleasures that can only arise in the context of a more welcoming relationship to the world—one that embraces the world regardless of how imperfect or deficient it is. In this sense, a life built on ideals is intrinsically limiting—a tepid and tremulous shadow of what it could be.
Our narcissistic ideals, as well as our yearning to be rescued from our lack, operate on unconscious levels that can lend an astonishing specificity to our desire. We may have all sorts of conscious designs about the kind of lover we should be looking for, the kind of life we should aspire to create, and the kind of relationship we should aim to have. Yet we frequently discard these designs for the sake of some tiny detail that piques our interest in the appearance or demeanor of a complete stranger. We grow enthralled by the tone and timber of a person’s voice. We become fascinated by the graceful outline of her lashes, the calm confidence she exudes when put on a spot, her manner of touching her hair, or the way she turns her head to meet our gaze. We are captivated by the shape of someone’s collarbone, eyebrows, or fingernails. Or by the way in which the blue of his eyes sparkles in sunlight. The curve of a smile or the warmth of an arm that we accidentally brush against can momentarily become the focus of our entire being. In such cases, our rational understanding of whom we are meant to desire proves perplexingly powerless in the face of some minor characteristic of a person who inexplicably compels our attention.
We meet countless people in our lives. Of these, we like and befriend quite a few. And a small portion stimulate our desire. We may consider those who belong to this portion as romantic possibilities without feeling any particular urgency. We may even have a light-hearted affair with a few of them. But usually there are only a handful of people whom we desire with a burning intensity. Ironically, such people are extremely unlikely to enter our lives through our deliberate efforts. More often than not, they take us by surprise, awakening our desire in ways that are as startling as they are compelling. When this happens, when we all of a sudden feel that only this person will do, it is likely that we are being driven by unconscious torrents of narcissistic desire that connect us to the person in question. It is likely that our longing reflects the fact that something about this person corresponds to our most entrenched fantasies of self-completion. The person who fascinates us—who seems to accurately “answer” the requirements of our desire—does so because he or she in one way or another activates our unconscious hunger for wholeness; he or she manages to fill the gaps of our being in ways that we experience as deeply enlivening.
Once we get to know a person, we gain an appreciation for the intricacies of his or her character. But the detail that initially catches our eye and pulls us toward that person is often amazingly trivial, miniscule, superficial, or insignificant. Additionally, we are usually not able to name what it is that triggers our interest. We may be vaguely aware that there is something about a person’s “air,” “aura,” or “bearing” that charms us, but we cannot put our finger on it. We speak of “chemistry” to describe the curious allure that some people hold for us without having any clear idea of what we mean. Attraction, in this sense, is inscrutable and intangible. Part of the enchantment of love—and particularly of its delightful beginnings—arises from this impenetrable element.
The mysterious specificity of desire can add a dash of adventure to our love lives, for we tend to be excited by what we cannot fully understand. And it is not even necessarily the case that this type of desire is always mistaken. As I will illustrate in chapter 7, sometimes it can be an eerily accurate measure of romantic potential. Nevertheless, it is useful to remind ourselves that desire such as this can be profoundly ungenerous in exactly the manner I have described. Inasmuch as it arises from the lover’s unconscious fantasy life rather than from any real interest in the beloved’s needs, wants, interests, or personality, the beloved is not treasured for who she is. In fact, the minute she exhibits characteristics that do not coincide with the particularities of the lover’s desire, or that somehow mar the faultless image that she is expected to reflect back to him, he becomes annoyed or frustrated. His desire is self-interested in the sense that he is unwilling to respect parts of her being that appear superfluous or incomprehensible to him—that grate against the contours of his fantasy world. The moment the beloved ceases to stick to the glamorous persona that the lover wants from her—the moment the singularity of her being asserts itself—he finds his desire waning.
One of the main limitations of narcissistic desire, then, is that it tends to die a quick death the instant reality intrudes and the engrossing illusion crumbles. As the French theorist Roland Barthes explains, the death of desire begins the moment the lover detects in the beloved a small “speck of corruption”—a minor detail that tarnishes the beloved’s revered image. This detail (a gesture, an attitude, a tone of voice, a piece of clothing) is frequently something that unexpectedly renders the beloved banal in the eyes of the lover. Such a detail dilutes the beloved’s luster by connecting her to the commonplace routines and platitudes of the world. As a result, she comes to seem embarrassingly ordinary, a source of shame rather than of gratification.
When the magic mirror shatters, the beloved’s dazzling image swiftly yields to a paltry and hackneyed reality. Where the beloved once resonated evocatively, the lover now only hears the dreary notes of dull conventionality. Interestingly, the lover does not usually experience his beloved’s flawed image as devastating or threatening; he is not personally humiliated in any way. Rather, he grieves the failure of the world to meet his desire. As Barthes specifies, a lover who still believes in his dream aspires to protect the sanctity of his beloved against the corruptions of the world. However, this attitude of devotion falls apart the moment he discerns “on the skin of the relationship, a certain tiny stain, appearing there as the symptom of a certain death.”
The death of desire can thus be as mysterious as its inception. We usually do not know why desire awakens. And, similarly, we do not always know why it dies. When we think of the anguish of romantic love, we tend to focus on what it feels like to love a person who does not love us back, or who does not love us in the way that we would like to be loved. We tend to focus on the excess of our desire—on how mortifying it is to want more than to be wanted. Yet, if the intensity of our desire causes us distress, our inability to maintain it over time may be just as agonizing. Indeed, it is difficult to say what is more tragic: not being able to banish unrequited desire or not being able to sustain our desire for a person we love. As wounding as it can be to not have our desire reciprocated, it is equally distressing to not be capable of desire when we would sincerely like to feel it. There can in fact be a terrible sadness to the realization that our desire has waned. In this sense, sometimes the real calamity of love is not the loss of the beloved person through betrayal or abandonment, but rather the loss of the desire that made a connection between self and other possible in the first place.
The appearance of a tiny speck of corruption on the surface of our love is the moment of truth that either makes or breaks our relationship. It is a moment that every relationship will sooner or later face. However, the more our love has been based on illusory fantasies of rescue and redemption—and the more we have elevated our partner to a mirror that caresses our narcissistic self-conception—the more drastic the drop will be. It is not necessarily at all the case that the other has changed. It is just that over time we come to detect aspects of his or her being that we initially overlooked. As I have emphasized, whenever we hope that the other will meet our ideal of perfection, we are likely to ignore dimensions of his or her personality that diverge from this ideal. As a consequence, when the latter intrude, we feel cheated. Sometimes we even accuse the other of having misled us. Yet it was our fixation on our preconceived ideals that made us see only what we wanted to see and fail to notice the rest.
Lovers who manage to sustain a relationship beyond the inevitable moment when a stain or a speck of corruption disturbs the smooth façade of their love are able to love beyond ideals. Their love survives the splintering of the mirror not only because they realize that they will be unlikely to ever find a love that is completely devoid of such stains or specks, but also because they tolerate their mutual humanness. They appreciate, and actively seek to cultivate, the particularity that makes each of them a unique individual. They are willing to sacrifice the pristine flawlessness of their ideals for the messy reality of two people doing their best to relate to each other on the basis of what is inimitable about each. They do not attempt to change each other, or to fit each other into preexisting schemas of perfection. Each of them is able to accept the radical “otherness” of the other—the ways in which the other is nothing like the self—without being either bothered or intimidated by it. Each recognizes that it is precisely this otherness that makes their loved one the intriguing creature he or she is. And each knows that it is only through an honest encounter with this otherness that they—and the relationship itself—can evolve. For such lovers, the integrity of the person they love is more prized than even the most enticing of love’s illusions could ever be.