Whether love seizes us without warning or catches up with us with premeditated softness, it ruptures the ordinary rhythm of our lives. The thrill of love arises in part precisely from this rupture. We enjoy being jolted out of the complacency of our everyday existence. We are eager to explore the mysterious opportunities of the soul that love awakens within us. And we are enthralled by the promise of emotional revitalization that eros represents. At the same time, the closer we come to a genuine connection with a lover, the more likely we are to resist love’s summons. Sometimes we even reconcile ourselves to an uninspiring liaison because we are afraid that anything more fervent could get us irredeemably damaged; we give up some of our yearning for existential wonder in exchange for the relative security of tidy and lukewarm habits of intimacy. In this sense, one of the bitter paradoxes of life is that it is at times quite difficult for us to embrace the very passion that we crave; it is sometimes difficult for us to let the sliver of eternity enter our world.
One reason for this is that our culture emits a mixed message about love. On the one hand, we are taught that nothing in our lives can match the heady satisfaction of the kind of intimacy that melds two individuals into one—that creates an amorous alliance that surpasses the limitations of each of its participants. On the other, we are warned that the promises of love are deceptive at best, likely to mislead us in calamitous and heartbreaking ways; we are told to be on a vigilant lookout for the cruel snares of love. No wonder we are confused: we are advised to exercise caution toward the very thing that we are also most supposed to desire.
But our trepidation reaches beyond cultural conditioning. Few of us can say that love makes our lives less complicated. And many of us have been injured seemingly beyond repair. It is then hardly surprising that we often hesitate. Yet if we never risk ourselves—if we never take up the stirring call and reply of eros—we miss out on the furtive underworld of desire and ardency that comprises one of the most engaging riddles of human existence; we sidestep the enclave of spirit-rousing ambiguity that eros introduces to our lives. Sadly, the more we strive to curtail the daring flights of our romantic imagination, the more we deprive ourselves of emotional frequencies that confer an element of enchantment to our (otherwise often quite dreary) universe.
Romantic love invites us to live according to the momentum of our desire. I have already started to suggest that how we choose to respond to this invitation can, quite literally, determine our destiny. Whether we meet the challenges of love with courage, or whether we flee from them for fear of being devastated, our decision has far-reaching consequences for the rest of our lives. A premature retreat may render the world a more manageable place for us by removing a whole array of uncertainties. Yet, as we have seen, it also constricts the scope of our lives by shutting down emotional and existential pathways that only become available to us through love. A decisive step toward love, in contrast, might enable us to enter what the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas eloquently describes as “the midst of life.” It might allow us to step into the unstable current of our existence with a combination of ardor and dedication. And, under favorable conditions, it might even empower us to connect to the “truth” of our being.
One of the best ways to understand what it means to feel connected to the “truth” of our being might be through a distinction that the famous British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott draws between our “true” and “false” self. The true self, according to Winnicott, possesses an existential suppleness that allows it to approach the practice of living—what I have portrayed as an ongoing process of becoming—with a measure of resourcefulness. The false self, in contrast, is a defensive structure that relates to the world in stiff and largely artificial ways. While this distinction might lead us to assume that the true self represents some sort of an innate core of selfhood that becomes corrupted by the false self, the matter is actually a lot more complicated. First of all, the true self is not a compilation of fixed attributes that would somehow, once and for all, determine who we are, but rather what guarantees our continuous aptitude for inner renewal. And, second, the false self is less an enemy of the true self than a protective shield against external trauma.
Winnicott explains that our inner agility is threatened whenever we feel assaulted by the outside world—whenever we feel traumatized either by our intimate relationships or by a wounding social context. Predictably enough, our usual response to such situations is to set up psychological barriers to protect ourselves against being violated. Such defensive barriers over time congeal into false self-presentations that make us feel reassuringly self-contained even as they gradually deprive us of our existential elasticity; we feel impermeable, and sometimes even invincible, without necessarily being aware of the ways in which we have relinquished our claim on a full bodied life. As our true self slips into hiding behind the false one, we become more and more unyielding, more and more uncompromising, often alienating the people we most care about. Yet, ironically enough, the ultimate goal of the false self is to safeguard the continued viability of the true self in the face of external challenges. In this paradoxical fashion, the false self, though itself utterly incapable of emotional complexity, sustains our latent capacity for such complexity by ensuring that our true self does not get exploited to the point of total suffocation.
The purpose of the false self, then, is to assemble an impenetrable wall between the true self and the world so as to defend the dignity of the true self. In practice this means that we form an outer layer of personality—a “thick skin” or a “hardened shell”—that appears almost inanimate. We allow the part of ourselves that we present to the world to die, or at least to become so unresponsive as to give the impression of callous disregard for its surroundings. Our true self can in fact become so thoroughly masked by the defensive postures of the false self that others can no longer detect it at all. Instead, they relate to the false self, imagining this to be who we really “are.” Indeed, because the false self functions effectively enough on many levels of daily life, it can sometimes deceive even the most intimate of companions. However, it fails to convince others in situations that presuppose a versatility of being. This is because it has lost its capacity to be at ease with itself; it has lost the openness to the adventure of loving and relating that allows us to maintain an adroit sense of self.
The tragedy of the false self, therefore, is that even if its solid armor of self-reliance manages to shelter the deeper layers of our being from injury, this armor simultaneously keeps us from forming a meaningful connection to the outside world. Sadly, the desperate exertions of the false self can make us feel even more false: shallow and devoid of purpose. Because the false self—sometimes for very good reasons—experiences the world as inherently hostile or impinging, it can become so fixated on sheer survival that we end up feeling that we have been drained of every drop of our humanity. Sometimes we may even become so inundated by fear that we find it impossible to relax our restless hypervigilance even when we are not confronted by any immediate danger; we may remain on the defensive simply because we have learned to anticipate, as well as to brace ourselves against, trauma.
One of the most insidious components of trauma is that it makes it difficult for us to meet the world as a generous space of possibility. It damages not only the present (the moment when it is first inflicted), but also the future, in the sense that it robs us of our capacity for what Winnicott calls “creative living.” However, Winnicott specifies that our aptitude for creative living can never be entirely destroyed—that although it can be compromised, it cannot ever be completely extinguished. Winnicott in fact insists that the distinction between creative and noncreative living is not categorical, but that we tend to vacillate between these two modalities. In other words, even when we fail to live creatively, we retain the intuition that we might be able to do so at some future point. As Winnicott observes, “In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively.” Interestingly, then, the very fact that we often feel disconnected from our capacity for creative living—that we are aware that something is amiss in our lives—is a sign that we are still psychologically alive, that some untamed or unbroken part of us is still crying for recognition.
We do not need to have a false self in the sense that Winnicott portrays it to profit from his analysis, for most of us resort to false self-presentations from time to time. One reason that falling in love can feel so healing and life-affirming is that it counters this tendency. It restores our capacity for inner spontaneity and creative living, thereby releasing the true self from its hiding place. It thus makes sense that many of us see love as a means of touching and being touched in ways that resonate with the “truth” of our being. As I have implied, this does not mean that love resurrects some sort of an immutable essence of personality that makes us who we are. Quite the contrary, being able to access the true self—in Winnicott’s sense at least - enables us to better embrace the inconsistencies and sudden reversals of our lives. It ushers us into the midst of life precisely because it allows us to sustain the process of continual transformation that constitutes human existence.
In the previous chapter, I described the surrender to tenderness that is made possible by a lover’s caress. This is one way in which we manage to create space for the true self in the midst of our daily existence. A lover’s peaceful caress magically (albeit momentarily) erases forms of intrusive, vindictive, or overstimulating external reality, offering us a much-coveted respite from the myriad demands of the world. Through it, we fall into a state of repose where we do not need to exert ourselves in any way and where we do not need to uphold a polished or confident image. We allow our shield and armor (let alone our sword) to roll out of reach. In this manner, with the unspoken “permission” of our lover, we feel free to let our false self liquefy so that the true one can claim an existential foothold. This is one example of how a loving dynamic can revive our ability to connect with ourselves, and hence, over time, with others.
More generally speaking, there can be something uniquely rewarding about being liberated from the oppressive idea that we are only lovable to the degree that we manage to conceal the raw and defenseless dimensions of our being. Many of us yearn to be accepted despite, and perhaps even because of, the less than perfect inner universe that we inhabit. Because we do not want to discover one day that our lover does not know us at all—because we do not wish to be appreciated solely on the basis of the front we present to the world—we long to disclose what we usually hold back from others. It is therefore not surprising that we tend to feel a special connection to those who manage to animate the deepest creases of our being. Lovers who treat us with suitable sensitivity and thoughtfulness electrify our most compelling mythologies of self-actualization, with the result that we feel revitalized, as if tingling with new forms of life. This is an indication that whatever has been dead or subdued in us is gasping for air.
The flip side of this is that, in relating to our partner, we need to be prepared for the sharp points of personality that stick out of, and refuse to be disciplined into, smooth social enactments. We need to be prepared for the rough edges of his or her anxiety, disquiet, sorrow, or distress. As the contemporary critic Eric Santner posits, being able to connect to the uncanny singularity of another person’s character means exposure not only to his thoughts, values, hopes, life history, and memories, but also to his unique “touch of madness.” That is, we are asked to tolerate those aspects of the other that are somehow disquieting or disturbing to us—that might at times even cause us to wince and recoil. We are asked to honor the fact that, like us, our lover may occasionally find himself disoriented in the world. In the same way that our own singularity—the deepest “truth” of our being—conveys what cannot be fully domesticated by the protocols of sociality, the singularity of the person we love expresses something about the characteristic ways in which he finds himself bewildered, forlorn, or out of kilter.
Many of us yearn for the kind of intimacy that inspires our true self. Yet, as I proposed in the beginning of this chapter, we sometimes end up fleeing from our most promising love affairs. We know that dropping our guard can be dangerous—that our longing for an authentic connection can sometimes lead to the mortification of the very part of ourselves that aspires to authenticity in the first place. And we also recognize that reclaiming traumatized dimensions of our interiority can take us within a striking distance of everything that we are doing our best to forget and foreclose. We understand that whenever we allow our true self to be penetrated, we risk shedding light into the cavern of our most hurtful secrets; we risk reviving unprocessed deposits of pain and grief. And so, in our panic, we can convince ourselves that the person we most love is not that important to us. We may even play power games in an attempt to reassure ourselves that he or she is more or less disposable, that we do not really care whether the relationship continues or not. In this way, we may end up being careless with the person who most merits our care.
This explains in part why we at times walk away from relationships that have the potential to be life-altering. Or why, if we choose to stick around, we frequently end up holding back or stringing our lover along without being able to make up our mind. What is colloquially called “commitment phobia” may on occasion have to do with the fact that our courage falters in the face of a profound connection. We tiptoe to the verge of the abyss but pull back because we are terrified of the uncertainties that meet us there. In such cases, the person who most consistently manages to defuse our defenses, and who would therefore most challenge and change us in the long run, is the one we push away because the stakes of awakening the true self seem too high. Sometimes we may even opt for another lover who seems safe and sensible, but who does not have the capacity to puncture the well-monitored borders of our false self. We end up settling for the “reasonable” comforts of a reliable relationship with someone with whom we are more or less compatible, but for whom we feel no real passion. We eliminate lovers who resonate with our most fundamental yearnings because these yearnings disturb us.
It does not help that we live in a culture that does its best to convince us of the naiveté of strong passions. On the one hand, we are encouraged to feel strongly about fairly superficial things such as designer clothes, flashy cars, the right vacations, speedy career advancement, or coloring the gray out of our hair. We in fact live amidst what the cultural critic Slavoj Žižek characterizes as the “injunction to enjoy,” namely, the idea that we fail to lead fulfilling lives unless we manage to devour the various fruits of our advanced consumer culture. That is, we are driven to look for satisfaction and excitement from the countless products that flash across our television screens on a nightly basis. We become convinced that wearing the right perfume, the correct shade of lipstick, the perfect pair of cuff links, the prestigious label of shirts, the high-powered tie, or the adorable handbag we bought on sale will give us some of the zest we are looking for. The commercial offerings of our world are in fact so abundant that we can at times feel slightly overwhelmed by them, with the result that we spend precious hours, days, and weeks of our time looking for just the right products. What is more, because there are countless sleek and shiny things to entice our attention, and thus countless invitations to gluttony, we sometimes become desperate to find ways to control our consumption. We go on strict diets and—to borrow some of Žižek’s examples—drink coffee without caffeine, eat sweets without sugar, smoke cigarettes without nicotine, and gulp beer without alcohol. Often enough, we end up alternating between overstimulation and exhaustion so that, in the evening, we take sleeping pills to calm ourselves down, and in the morning, we purchase a double latté to nudge ourselves awake.
On the other hand, we are taught to believe that having deep passions is foolish at best and dangerous at worst. We live in a cultural moment that is suspicious of ardent desires and strong commitments, propagating the idea that few things in life matter, that we have outlived ideals and ethical principles, and that comprehensive cultural change is impossible. Many of us have adopted the view that because we cannot remedy the enormous inequalities of the social world, we should not even bother to try. We have resigned ourselves to the idea that in the long haul nothing we do has any real impact and that caring too much is consequently a waste of our energies. By the same token, our (postmodern and sophisticated) recognition that meaning is inherently relative at times causes us to stop looking for meaning altogether. Though we are surrounded by a multitude of objects, artifacts, cultural icons, and shimmering images, few of these items manage to affect us on a deep level. In some ways, we are increasingly reconciled to the idea that the best we can do is to avoid the more crushing disillusionments of life—that the less we invest ourselves, the more inoculated we are against the misfortunes of the world.
When it comes to romantic love, this nihilistic attitude leads to the conviction that lovers are more or less replaceable. Popular self-help treatises are, these days, full of advice on how to engage in casual affairs without getting hurt, how to stay emotionally detached so as to stay in control, how to manipulate our lovers by withholding sex or affection, how to play the marriage game so that we end up with a ring on our finger, how to learn to read the (more or less superficial) signs of commitment correctly, how to jumpstart a flagging relationship by making ourselves unavailable, and how to bounce back from a breakup by moving on as quickly as we possibly can. Similarly, whenever we experience a heartbreak, well-meaning people around us are likely to tell us that “there are other fish in the sea.” We are, as it were, expected to process the pain of losing a person by replacing him or her with another who is somehow supposed to be equivalent or even superior.
The intuition behind such advice is correct in the sense that by far the most effective way to overcome an old passion is to find a new, equally engaging one: it is to the degree that we become absorbed in a fresh emotional reality that we are able to surmount (and sometimes even to forget) the past. However, what this advice overlooks is that some of our love losses by definition demand a lengthy period of mourning; it ignores the fact that the kind of love that touches the “truth” of our being calls for a high level of dedication—that we cannot really be in love without being fully invested. This is why I think that those self-help approaches that focus on the right “strategies” for securing our romantic success are more than a little bizarre. Such approaches are usually so keen to teach us how to trick our partner into giving us what we want that they deem any sign of relational devotion—of the kind of unqualified loyalty that prompts us to act without consideration of costs and benefits—as a failure to follow the “plan” correctly. That is, they contribute to our culture’s increasing emotional anemia by painting any great passion, any acute romantic entanglement, as an ill-advised and reckless nose-dive into the shallow end of the pool.
Besides drastically misjudging the character and purpose of love, the problem with such approaches is that the more they endeavor to ensure that we do not get injured, the more they feed precisely the kinds of artificial self-presentations that Winnicott captures by the notion of the false self. Because their ethos is primarily defensive—designed to fend off pain rather than to augment interpersonal honesty—they have very little chance of engaging our true self; they have little chance of steering us into the midst of life. Furthermore, they tend to view any sadness or disappointment that we might experience in the context of romance as a malfunction of our capacity to abide by the rules of the game, particularly the rule of emotional detachment. Because they refuse to see pain as a legitimate part of romance, they try to pretend that we can divest love of the last remnants of irrationality. As a result, rather than speaking to our desire for the more sublime dimensions of romance, they reinforce the idea that the most important part of relationality is to keep ourselves from getting wounded.
Yet, ironically, all the rules of popular psychology cannot protect us from love’s wounds. They cannot prevent the breakdowns, contradictions, sudden changes of heart, and acrimonious endings of romance. A more constructive approach, therefore, might be to figure out how to handle the inevitable upheavals of romance without breaking our spirit. A more sincere approach might be to admit that not everyone is replaceable—that there are people in our lives who cannot be exchanged for others without considerable cost. Some times we meet a person who, for reasons that may remain enigmatic, resonates on a frequency that we find precious beyond calculation. In such cases, there is no possibility of replacement; we cannot ever find another such person. He is absolutely inimitable and, therefore, beyond the economy of barter and exchange. When we lose this person, we cannot simply go shopping for substitutes.
This of course does not mean that we cannot love again—that we cannot find someone else equally compelling. There may in fact be plenty of other lovers worth pursuing. And there may even be some who are more suited for us than the person we have lost. We may in the long run decide that our loss was for the best. Many of us are able to look back at lost loves with the recognition that we are better off without the person we once mourned with a heart-wrenching intensity. Nonetheless, this does not alter the fact that some of our losses are irredeemable; it does not change the fact that there are times when we need to learn to live with the reality of having lost something that can never be replaced. Much of contemporary popular psychology attempts to deny this state of affairs because most of us do not wish to confront it. Yet the more we resist it, the less we are able to love in ways that meet the needs of the true self.
Whenever a person feels irreplaceable to us, we love him not because he possesses specific attributes, but because of who he is in the confusing complexity of his being. We may of course appreciate some of his qualities. But our love for him does not depend on these. Rather, we love the whole of him, flaws and imperfections included. We accept him for what he is as an ever-evolving conglomerate of characteristics. Our affection is consequently not shaken by the inevitable mutations that he undergoes during the course of his life. We love him unconditionally, now and always, in ways that elude all rationalizations, and in ways that, miraculously, survive even bouts of anger, frustration, and disappointment. In the words of the contemporary theorist Joan Copjec, “love is what renders the other lovable” so that we love him “as he is, the way he comes.” Even if we get hurt, even if we are abandoned or betrayed, we may find it difficult to say that a relationship that made us love in this deep manner was a mistake. We sense, however mutedly, that there was a good reason for our passion. We may never know exactly what this reason is, but we intuit that we have gained something even when we have been devastated.
The imprint of this kind of passion lingers on long after we have lost the person in question. It may in fact never entirely fade. The fact that the relationship does not endure does not in the least alter its power to stir us. Our sense that this specific love, this specific person, forms a part of our destiny does not dissipate even though that destiny turns out to be different from what we had hoped for. To the extent that our lost lover continues to live on within our inner world well after his or her departure, we may even feel that our loss signifies less an obliteration of the relationship than a modification of its form. We can, in effect, maintain a relationship to our lost lover that is as weighty, as important to us, as our original connection. And sometimes our bond with the one we have lost is stronger than the bonds that we subsequently forge with other lovers. We may do our best to move on with our lives and to create space for new loves. Yet a part of us—the most defenseless reaches of our true self—remains engaged in our past passion.
The opposite of this are moments when we realize that our allegiance to a past lover has been built upon erroneous foundations. We may, for instance, have lived years, even decades, in the melancholy shadow cast by the reminiscence of someone we once cherished, only to one day bump into him or her on the street and realize that little of the person we once knew remains. Given that all of us are engaged in the process of becoming that I have described, it is entirely possible for our past lover to grow into someone more or less unrecognizable. Indeed, this process is antithetical to memory’s attempts to sustain a reliable recollection of what once was for the simple reason that it makes it impossible for us to keep up with the evolving reality of the person we grieve, over time negating the image we have privately idolized. As a consequence, when we chance upon our ex-lover and realize that he is no longer the same, our emotional imprisonment is suddenly nullified. We finally feel his ghost rise out of our being and permanently evaporate. Such moments can feel liberating. But there may also be a profound sadness to them, for they, so to speak, ask us to mourn the end of our mourning.
Such definitive endings notwithstanding, a person we have truly loved usually wields an influence over us that far exceeds his or her tangible presence in our lives. Insofar as he feels irreplaceable to us, he holds a unique place in the design of our existence. There is, as it were, a peculiar kind of immortality to him in the sense that the slot he holds in our world does not disappear even if he does. Neither the progress of time, nor the practical concerns of our lives, nor the exertions of our rational mind, can erase it. In such cases, we no longer love in “real” time, but rather entertain a mythological conception of a loving connection that transcends the boundaries of actual experience. And we may not even be entirely mistaken in doing so, for it is possible that whenever we cannot surpass a lost love, it is because it carries a vital message about the direction we need to pursue in order to gain a higher existential plane. It may well be that we are not ready to give up this love because it, in some oblique fashion, speaks to aspects of our personality that remain unnecessarily weak or immature. According to this account, if we stubbornly adhere to the memory of a particular individual, it may be because our continued rapport with him will, at some distant horizon, prove indispensable for the development of our emotional topography.
Those we love most ardently leave behind a lasting legacy—an enduring trace that indicates that we will never again be the same. Our inner universe will forever be populated by the spirits of those we have lost. These specters of past loves will remain a faint yet palpable presence that recedes and advances depending on what is taking place on the exterior of our lives. We are dimly aware that they accompany our motions through the world like a silent companion we cannot banish. We may of course try to pretend that they are not there. We may even go for long stretches without giving them more than a passing consideration. Yet when they resurface—prompted perhaps by some trivial incident, a familiar scent, or a detail we perceive from the corner of our eye—they often do so with unmitigated intensity. They take us by surprise and force us to acknowledge that the passion we have sought to suppress lives on within the remote regions of our interiority.
We may create new lives for ourselves, we may make significant contributions to the world, and we may love again (and again). Yet we never really leave our most meaningful passions behind. At random moments, and usually without the slightest warning, they catch up with us, conveying us to a place that has little to do with our ordinary concerns. Such moments represent a bittersweet clash of two different worlds: the one we dwell in and the one we hold within. They mark a nostalgic intersection between our “real” life and a passion that draws us to an alternative and more fiery-colored reality. We understand that we have no choice but to pursue the pathway of our real life. Yet the other life—the one we could have lived, the one we should have lived?—never quite recedes into oblivion. It runs a parallel course to the path we are on, at times disappearing into the background, at other times coming precariously close to where we are traveling.
This parallel life can feel as tangible as our actual life. Because it grazes the most clandestine parts of our being, because it reverberates through the echo chamber of our true self, it can trigger immense feelings of fragility and sorrow. Yet it can also seem so alive, so vibrant and substantial, that we end up feeling that it is here, in this invisible realm, that what most matters to us takes place. We can end up feeling that it is within this elusive “other life”—one that can only be glimpsed periodically and from a safe distance—that we most reliably attain the midst of life. A passion that is powerful enough to bring such a parallel world into existence does not easily yield to the passage to time. Even when we describe it long after we have lost it, it often holds the freshness of a recent recollection. Our memory of it can be so vivid that we feel that we are able to reach back into the past and unfailingly conjure up the outline of what once moved us. It is precisely because this kind of passion is not diluted by time, because it feels ageless and undying, that it can feel like our destiny. And from the standpoint of the true self—the part of the self that asks for inspiration and hungers for the sliver of eternity—this may in fact be an accurate assessment.