Throughout this book, I have highlighted the mysterious specificity of desire: the fact that we are frequently drawn to particular lovers for intangible reasons that we cannot rationally comprehend. I have shown that there are times when love causes a torrent of disarray, forcing us to rethink our accustomed manner of living. Other times, it infiltrates our daily routine so gradually that it takes us a while to realize that this routine has been restructured in ways that we would have never been able to anticipate. Often, we have no idea why we are willing to put up with such upheaval. We have no idea why a given person has such power over us. Or why we feel that he or she would be difficult to leave behind or replace. We do not know why the person in question elicits the kind of emotional wakefulness that others do not. Yet we intuitively understand that it would be foolish not to honor the call of that wakefulness.
But romantic love is mysterious for another reason as well, namely, that it asks us to relate to a partner who is not only partially unknown to us, but ultimately unknowable. If we think about it for a moment, we will recognize that we cannot even know ourselves fully, that it is one of the main attributes of human interiority to be essentially opaque. Fortunately, when it comes to our own psychology, we are more or less used to this opacity. We know that we may at times do or say things we never thought we would. We know that we may discover attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, and dreams that we did not realize we possess. And we know that we may occasionally startle ourselves by a rapid and unexpected change of sentiment. So, emotional opacity is in principle nothing new to us. Yet when it comes to encountering the opacity of another human being, things can quickly become complicated.
The fact that we cannot know our loved ones in a transparent sense can lead to painful misunderstandings. Needless to say, such misunderstandings are what many of the dramas of romance consist of. For instance, whenever we attempt to reduce the other’s opacity by assuming that he or she is just like us, we run the risk of misreading a situation, an action, a statement, or an emotional tone. Likewise, whenever we are too quick to interpret what the other means from our own perspective, we can arrive at a reading that has little to do with what he or she is actually trying to convey. In fact, the other’s “unreadability” can sometimes drive us to distraction for the simple reason that we fail to find a way to integrate it into the emotional frameworks and interpersonal paradigms that are familiar to us. On the flip side, we cannot always comprehend why our lover does not immediately understand what we mean. Our statement may seem obvious to us, yet come across as obscure to the other. Over time, we may learn to decode the communicative cues of our lover. And he or she may learn to read, and perhaps even to appreciate, some of our idiosyncrasies. But our interpretative powers are never infallible.
It is worth emphasizing right away that, generally speaking, the fundamentals of our identity in some ways come into existence in response to the mysterious opacity of others. The French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche explains that from our earliest childhood, we are surrounded by enigmatic messages from the outside world. We are exposed to inscrutable communications from our caretakers and from other adults who enter our domain. Some of these communications are verbal. But others are nonverbal, having to do with body language, quality of touch, manner of looking, tone of voice, and the overall attitude of those around us. What is so interesting about this is that even when we are not able to decipher the meaning of these communications, we feel compelled to respond to them in one way or another: we know that we are being addressed by messages that await our reply. We consequently spend a great deal of energy attempting to translate them into unambiguous meanings that we can process. We strive, with varying degrees of desperation, to understand what it is that adults want from us. But our exertions are to some extent doomed to falter, not only because of the conceptual gap that separates the adult world from childhood, but also because human communication is, by definition, somewhat opaque.
The frustration of not always understanding what others need or want from us is therefore in some ways an inexorable constituent of being human. However, there are degrees of this frustration, and these degrees have a direct impact on who we, over the years, become. I have already explained that human subjectivity is inherently social in the sense that we need the presence of others to attain an identity. Personality, in short, is never something that develops in a vacuum. Rather, the outline of our interpersonal interactions conditions the outline of our psychic lives. When these interactions are too opaque, too inscrutable, they can make us feel helpless; they can cause a degree of anxiety and surplus agitation that becomes a permanent attribute of our interiority. When we cannot accurately read the desires of those who surround us, we may come to feel overwhelmed, even despondent; our characters may become inundated by the persistent residue of our repeated attempts to make sense of the enigmatic messages that besiege us.
One of the easiest ways to understand the power of enigmatic social messages is to think about the aggravation that we often feel in relation to impersonal, bureaucratic structures. Whether it is a question of facing the administrative apparatus of a government agency, filing for permanent residency in a foreign country, or trying to figure out the reason for the holdup at the post office, we are constantly struggling to make sense of the external world. Furthermore, the racial, sexual, gendered, religious, age-related, and other inequalities of our society exasperate the issue so that there are times when we may feel that our ability to correctly read our surroundings is a precondition of our survival. When we are trying to decide whether it is safe to cross a national border, walk in a specific neighborhood, hold hands with our lover in public, or wear a tell-tale symbol of religious affiliation, the stakes of our interpretive acumen can be extremely high. The anxiety we feel during such moments is not the same thing as the anxiety we felt as little children when we could not make out the (verbal or nonverbal) communications of our parents. But it does contain an echo of this primordial anxiety.
The more we fail to decode the enigmatic messages that encircle us, the less secure we feel. The more elusive, the more mystifying, such messages, the more potentially traumatic they are. We can in fact end up living in a constant state of disorienting mental arousal in relation to messages that leave us feeling vulnerable precisely because we cannot convert them into any consistent meaning. In this sense, our perpetual efforts to translate the ambiguities of the social realm into networks of meaning with which we can reason and negotiate can over time deplete our energies. When this happens, we feel beleaguered by the riddles of the outside world without necessarily knowing what the problem is; we feel chronically ill at ease without being able to name the cause of that unease. Sometimes we even become so entangled in enervating webs of alien meaning that we gradually lose track of our own wishes and desires; we become numb to our own needs because we are too intently focused on trying to interpret the needs of others.
The impenetrable messages that originate from others can thus paralyze us. But there are also circumstances where they have the opposite effect—as when, for instance, the hard-to-read wishes of a charismatic mentor motivate us to strive for success or the furtive vulnerability of a friend elicits our compassion. In cases such as these, the other’s enigmatic desire rouses our curiosity in a manner that, far from exhausting us, draws out what is most noble within us. This is because such instances of unreadability are coupled with benevolence. In other words, though our personal relationships may sometimes be characterized by power imbalances, and though we can certainly feel impoverished by them in the same way that we can feel diminished by the larger social world, we do not usually experience those closest to us as potential adversaries. Therefore, we are likely to experience their ambiguities as vitalizing rather than enervating. Instead of feeling demoralized by these ambiguities, we may feel eager to devise ever-new ways of rendering them meaningful. And, what is more, our perseverance is often further inflamed by the impossibility of the task.
When it comes to such interpretative efforts, there is probably nothing that incites our desire to crack the other’s code more than romantic love. It awakens us to devoted and at times somewhat over-enthusiastic attentiveness that is prone to intensify in the face of the beloved’s resistance to being known. We of course understand that we inevitably approach others from a biased and selective viewpoint, and that we can therefore never accurately capture the other’s inner reality. We understand that we cannot assume that what we think we know about the other is a faithful representation of who he or she actually is. And we even understand that the very idea that we could ever fully know the other is a fairly preposterous assumption. Yet we are rarely deterred in our efforts to solve the other’s mystery. Why?
One reason is that we tend to equate intimacy with knowledge, believing that the better we understand the other, the deeper our connection with him. But it might also be the case that we are sometimes motivated to interpret the other’s mystery for the simple reason that—as I argued above—we tend to experience whatever is unknown as threatening and anxiety inducing. As the American critic Bruce Fink remarks, whenever we are confronted by the other’s enigmatic desire, we are tempted to jump to conclusions about what he wants from us. The impenetrability of his desire can in fact be so unbearable to us that we “prefer to assign it an attribute, any attribute, rather than let it remain an enigma.” Even when our interpretation is absolutely mistaken, the act of arriving at a definition that makes sense to us abates our unease. Unfortunately, whenever we do this, we prematurely step into the space of the other’s desire, stifling his ability to designate what he wants.
The dynamic I am describing is thorny because there is a continuum between our various interpretative efforts. If we are used to experiencing the external world as a potentially hostile entity—if we are used to constantly looking over our shoulder to ensure our safety—it can be difficult for us to suspend this habit within our intimate relationships. If we have learned that the murkiness of our surroundings can be perilous, we may feel fairly terrorized by the murkiness of those we love. This is something to keep in mind when we confront collective stereotypes about communication, such as the idea that women can get obsessive about interpreting men’s every word. If this is (sometimes) true, perhaps it is because women, for culturally specific reasons, find the enigmatic signifiers of our society more traumatizing than many (not all, but many) men do; perhaps it is because women have gotten accustomed to regularly having to watch their step. Likewise, those with abusive personal histories may be driven to interpretative frenzy for the simple reason that they are trying to preempt further abuse; they may equate understanding their partner with the idea that they can keep this partner from hurting them. From this point of view, it may well be that the freedom of not having to worry about what goes on in the minds of our loved ones is, to some extent at least, a result of social or personal privilege.
However, this does not change the fact that when our interpretative efforts impose a confining reading on the other, they become intrinsically ungenerous, and sometimes even violent. For example, to the degree that we associate knowing things with having control over them, our insistence that we “know” the other can serve as a defensive screen against having to confront aspects of his or her being that we find disconcerting. It can act as a way to deny the alarming realization that the other’s enigmas can never be definitively resolved. In a sense, we ravage the other’s inner complexity so as to minimize our own sense of insecurity. We strive to make the other safely dependable by imposing an imaginary sense of intelligibility on an intrinsically unstable interpersonal dynamic. In fact, the more afraid we are of the volatility of love, the more prone we are to impose a false veneer of certainty, continuity, and permanence on our alliance. Our pursuit of an alliance that we can “count on” can sometimes even cause us to resort to poisonous conjectures and projections that are so inaccurate that they in the long run destroy our relationship.
One way to avoid hounding our lover with excessive demands for clarity is to acknowledge that he is not necessarily any more transparent, any more comprehensible, to himself than he is to us. Even if he were entirely willing to give us the reassuring answers that we are looking for, he might not be able to; he might not be able to produce a coherent account of himself. As Eric Santner notes, the other is impenetrate to us not only because he inhabits a foreign emotional world, but also because he is a bearer of “an enigmatic density of desire” that may be as strange and unintelligible to him as it is to us. In other words, in the same way that I am a mystery to myself, the other is a mystery, a bit of a conundrum, to himself. In the same way that I get agitated—split, torn, or divided—by the tension between my (more or less) composed public persona and my private inner turmoil, the other is caught up in the tension between his various self-incarnations. What the other “wants” from me may therefore be less my rational comprehension than my ability to meet his existential confusion with an open and unflinching attitude.
The other who claims my attention with a passionate kind of intensity—the other who elicits my concern and care—is thus someone who is likely to be as mystified with respect to himself as I am with respect to myself. One reason for this is that, like me, the other partakes in the continuous process of becoming that I have sought to elucidate in this book. He is a living and ever-transforming entity who does not have a fixed identity that I (or even he) could one day learn to interpret correctly. He is a loose nexus of characteristics that evolve in relation to countless outside influences, including his relationship with me. This suggests that the version of the other that I see at any particular moment is a version that I myself have helped bring to life. And it also suggests that, insofar as I wish to respect the radical otherness of the other, I need to reconcile myself to the idea that he possesses an untouchable kernel of interiority that will always remain slightly out of my reach.
When it comes to romantic relationships, the most profound form of “knowing” the other may well be to accept that we will never fully know him or her. By this I do not wish to say that we should not try to understand our lovers. As I have already remarked, we usually possess enough emotional intelligence to be able to arrive at a fairly accurate estimate of what others might be feeling. To insist otherwise is frequently merely a means of sidestepping the exertion required to make sense of the convoluted (or uncomfortable) sentiments of those with whom we interact. That is, the unreadability of others can come to function as a questionable justification for interpersonal lassitude. After all, we rarely require an entirely precise reading of an emotional situation to be able to formulate an adequate response. In many instances, all we need is a decent approximation—an educated guess—that will allow us to meet the other with the requisite degree of empathy, forbearance, or attentiveness.
Yet there is also a lot to be said for the idea that protecting an interval of mystery—a clearing of unknowability, if you will—between self and other is an effective means to sustain a relationship. Again, I do not mean to argue that our efforts to comprehend the other are somehow antithetical to love. Obviously there are deep forms of knowing that only become accessible to us through intimate exchanges. However, love is not the same thing as knowing everything there is to know about our lover. If anything, our coercive attempts to interpret him can over time extinguish our passion for him by reducing the multiplicity of his being to a predictable arrangement of characteristics that, ironically, makes him less interesting to us. Instead of honoring the dignity of our lover’s process of becoming, such attempts destroy what is most alive (and hence most engaging) about him. They immobilize him into an inert icon that grows stale from over-familiarity even as it offers us an illusion of stability.
In addition, when we confuse love with knowledge, we can end up ignoring the less tangible dimensions of togetherness—dimensions that may have more to do with touch, energy, intuition, and unspoken meaning than with verbal communication. Even worse, we can become so engrossed in the task of interpreting the other that we, paradoxically enough, lose our capacity for genuine empathy, for the latter implies the ability to identify with feelings that we might not ourselves experience in a similar situation and that we might therefore not entirely understand. Particularly when we are dealing with a relational rift, it is easy for us to assume that gaining more knowledge about our lover will allow us to repair the situation. And clearly we are right in the sense that an appreciation of our lover’s point of view can help us dissolve disagreements. However, whenever our interpretative efforts become a defense against the pandemonium of the other’s bewildering emotions, they signify an empathetic failure. For instance, when we are so focused on trying to convince the other of the judiciousness of our reasoning that we forget to respond to his hurt feelings, we lose track of the fact that we do not need to comprehend him in order to be able to empathize with him. We lose track of the fact that we can respect the integrity of the other’s sentiments without first translating them into our own vocabulary—that we, in other words, do not need to know why he feels this or that way, but merely that he does.
Honoring a clearing—a gap, space, or distance—of unknowability between self and other preempts this kind of interpretive violence. It creates an opening between lovers that neither can enter without the other, but that can be shared in ways that augment the lives of both. By bringing each partner in contact with alien affective densities—with unfamiliar frequencies of feeling that radiate from the other—this clearing deepens their respective emotional capacities. It demands each to expand the boundaries of his or her psychic space in order to accommodate the enigmatic stimuli arising from the other. Yet neither is asked to compromise on his or her singularity. Each is allowed to cultivate his or her distinctiveness even as they increasingly grow into each other. Indeed, if one face of transcendence is to reach beyond the self’s current state toward an unfamiliar way of being, then the fact that we interact with loved ones who always to some degree remain unknowable to us increases our aptitude for it by compelling us to assimilate emotional energies that are foreign to us. From this perspective, the other’s unknowability is less a threat to be subdued than a fount of existential potentiality to be revered.
Luce Irigaray expresses the matter perfectly when she proposes that it is only insofar as we respect the inviolable mystery of the other—that we admit that the other is irreducibly different from us—that we manage to love without trying to possess, control, or dominate the other; it is only insofar as we safeguard the separateness of self and other that we manage to relate in ways that promote the sovereignty of both. “Is it not this unknown which allows us to remain two?” Irigaray asks. “Is it not because I do not know you that I know that you are?” In other words, it is exactly because I cannot fully know my lover that I understand that he exists as an independent and self-governing entity. It is precisely because there exists a clearing of mystery between us that we remain “two” instead of being subsumed into one homogenous unit. In this sense, the integrity of each of us is protected by the fact that we can never definitively close the gap between us.
Irigaray goes on to suggest that the best way to uphold an autonomous sense of identity and self-worth is to defend the singularity of the other. As she states, “What makes me one, and perhaps unique, is the fact that you are and I am not you.” My ability to esteem the singularity of the other thus assists the emergence of my own. The fact that I allow the other to remain an individual in his own right—that I respect the unbreachable gulf between him and myself—guarantees that neither of us is consumed by the interests and concerns of the other. The fact that I allow the other to rest in the sanctity of his being, that I resist the temptation to lure him into a cosmos of my own making, ensures that he is never demoted to a denigrated object. And it offers me the opportunity to come to my own as a similarly singular entity.
The clearing of unknowability between self and other therefore facilitates the actualization of both. According to this account, it is important not only to respect the mystery of the other, but also to care for the more reserved and reticent layers of our own personality. As a matter of fact, it is when we choose to smother the riddles of our own interiority in the name of a transparent identity that we end up generating inflexible self-definitions—that we risk becoming boring not only to others but even to ourselves. In this sense, our impulse to know ourselves, or to make ourselves fully known, might sometimes do as much harm as our quest to divest the other of his or her enigmas. Counterintuitively enough, holding back a part of ourselves might under certain circumstances be an intriguing way of offering ourselves to the other. Granted, it might be difficult to tell the difference between a parsimonious plot to manipulate the other through the clichéd decoy of unavailability on the one hand and a sincere effort to protect the privacy of our inner world on the other. Yet there is a difference in that the former strategy can only debilitate the relationship, whereas the latter has the potential to invigorate it, provided a degree of ambiguity is acceptable to both parties involved.
One way to promote the irreducible difference between self and other is to recognize the significance of silence—of those moments when nothing fills the void. We are used to hearing about the importance of communication in relationships, and obviously it is vital. But silence may be equally indispensable for relational aliveness. This is because cultivating a reserve of silence is one of the finest ways of protecting the space of mystery between self and other. Forms of communication that are interwoven with silence are breezier, less overbearing, than those that are driven by an urgent need to verbalize every movement of our interiority. The latter can overwhelm our lover by leaving no space for him or her to speak from. Our words can become so all-encompassing and encroaching that they close the clearing that makes relating possible in the first place. In contrast, the softness of silence may enable us to remain more genuinely attentive to the other. It may allow the relationship to develop in directions that constant communication might impede.
I am by no means arguing that there should be no communication between lovers. And I am aware that silence can be used aggressively, or more specifically, passive-aggressively, as a way to resist being pulled into an intersubjective exchange that we would prefer to avoid. I am merely pointing out that communication tends to work better when it is interspersed with welcoming sanctuaries of silence. Silence enhances our ability to accurately listen to the other’s concerns because we are less focused on what we are going to say in return; the fact that we do not feel the need to respond right away means that we are better able to hear what the other is actually saying. In this sense, our silence accommodates the more hesitant of our lover’s sentiments. By being silent, we gently receive him into our inner world. We make it known that he may enter this world on his own terms—that he is free to move in and out of our emotional universe without being ambushed, ensnared, obliterated, or disparaged. We convey that we are willing to consider, and to mull over, what he presents, even when it is something difficult to hear.
Silence is a means of containing our desire so as to forge an opening for the other’s fragile and flickering desire. There may in fact be situations in which the other feels safe to express himself only to the extent that we are willing to curtail the ardor of our own feelings so as to create room for his inner states and words. If we are too quick to overload the space between him and ourselves with unremitting chatter, we effectively deprive him of the capacity to enter that space. If we crowd him with the insistence of our rejoinders, we make it difficult for him to say anything in return. In this manner, we may startle him into a hasty retreat by a mode of communication that appears to give him no platform to speak from. A considerate silence, in contrast, generates a fertile entryway for what might otherwise not be communicated. It allows us to gain access to aspects of the other’s interiority that shut down whenever he feels too rushed or pressured.
Offering a hospitable respite of silence for the other’s tentative communications does not mean that we suppress our own needs and desires. And it definitely does not mean that we yield in the face of abusive, insensitive, and inappropriate communications. Creating space for our lover’s sentiments does not mean that we brush our own under the rug. I am not talking about a one-sided pattern of relating that accommodates the other’s passions or opinions at the expense of our own. Rather, I am talking about the kind of interpersonal dynamic that is able to move fluidly between silence and verbalization—that is able to receive as well as to assert. In such a dynamic, each individual gets to express his or her views while simultaneously embracing those of the other.
In this context, it is also useful to recall that romantic love by definition mobilizes emotional frequencies that resist verbalization and that may appear diluted as soon as they are put into words. This is why we are sometimes reluctant to analyze our most intimate experiences. These possess an unspoken resonance that seems to be compromised in the act of telling. In such cases, we feel that we are able to fashion a silent connection that is more exquisite than what could be expressed in language. If, as I mentioned in the beginning of this book, love can give us the impression that we are speaking for the first time—that we are at long last able to convey something about the deep “truth” of our being—it can also, and sometimes even simultaneously, make us feel that there is no need to speak at all, that, amazingly, we understand and are understood without the obligation to verbalize. Like the caress, such moments transport us to a place beyond symbolization and the intentionalities of rational thought.
There are of course times when silence does not directly enhance communication, but rather signifies our need to momentarily withdraw from our lover. Even then, however, it does not necessarily imply emotional disengagement. We may, for instance, crave solitude as a way to restore our waning conception of who we are. We may wish to protect our capacity to remain connected to ourselves against the soul-numbing inauthenticity that is sometimes the price of our constant immersion in the norms, demands, and enticements of the social world. Because solitude allows our usual public defenses to disintegrate—because it enables us to drop the various masks that we wield for the purposes of social conformity—it may empower us to experience ourselves on a more immediate (or unmediated) level; it offers us a tiny but delicious morsel of personal distinctiveness in the midst of the myriad pressures of collective life, giving rise to a sense of self-belonging that allows us (fleetingly, at least) to feel “real.” According to this view, solitude is a way to tend the needs of the true self.
On our own, we come to rest within the calming confines of our inner experience. In the slow rhythm of solitary moments, we are able to suspend the preoccupations that normally drive our everyday actions and thought processes. As a result, we suddenly have space for the kind of self-reflexivity that helps us better process the challenges of our lives, including the confounding opacity of our relationships. In this sense, solitude renders us more insightful, and hence more able to love, than we would be if we never allowed ourselves to leave the world behind. States of aloneness may, for instance, allow us to focus on relational complexities that we habitually overlook. Facets of relating that we ordinarily suppress may surface to the forefront of our awareness. We may contemplate what we do not usually have time to think about, perhaps even addressing issues that we have neglected in the past. On this account, solitude is less a matter of detaching ourselves from our lover than of cultivating a different relationship with him—one that thrives on distance rather than proximity. It is, potentially at least, a breeding ground for fresh relational possibilities in the sense that when we return from it, we may have something new to contribute; we may have something innovative and interesting to offer.
Solitude can thus be a means of sustaining love and, at times, even of reigniting passion that has lost its luster. Yet many of us are deeply suspicious of our need for it, often reading it as a lapse of affection. Similarly, we tend to experience our lover’s hunger for it as intimidating, rarely interpreting it as a strategy for love’s recovery. This is in part because it is hard for two individuals to negotiate their different wishes and fears regarding the matter. One partner may construe his lover’s desire for periods of separation as a painful rejection and a sure sign that the relationship is falling apart. The other may, in turn, feel depleted by constant closeness, needing intervals of independence to feel capable of intimacy to begin with. Individuals in the latter category may distance themselves more or less automatically whenever they sense that their ability to stay attuned to their lover’s needs is declining because of exhaustion or overexposure. They understand that solitude recharges their capacity to meet the demands of relationality. But it is sometimes difficult for their partner to interpret the situation in the same way.
Such discrepancies are an inescapable part of the sharp and serrated edge of mystery that cuts into all romantic relationships, introducing a measure of capriciousness even to the most established of alliances. It may, then, help to remind ourselves that, as disorienting as the other’s mystery may be, it also has the power to spur us to the kind of dedicated discernment that we are not necessarily otherwise capable of. In other words, if it arouses our anxiety in the way that I described in the beginning of this chapter, it also arouses our inquisitiveness. It prods us out of our complacency and motivates us to look for signs of devotion so that even the smallest of our lover’s gestures comes to seem consequential to us. Such interpretative endeavors do not need to become the coercive efforts to know the other that I have been criticizing, for they do not need to impose a narrow reading on him or her. At their best, they do not seek to stabilize the relationship but merely to respond to its profound mystery. They revere the stirring power of eros by weaving ever more intricate webs of meaning between self and other. Such webs do not imprison either the self or the other, but rather add layers of magnificence to the lives of both. From this viewpoint, the fact that the opacities of love force us to operate within a universe of partial understandings and tenuous inferences is not an obstacle to enduring passion, but instead, in many cases, one of its numerous prerequisites.