I have talked about narcissistic fantasies of self-completion, the compulsion to repeat, the life-altering aspects of love, the enduring imprint of passion, as well as the edge of mystery that renders our love lives opaque and to some degree incomprehensible. I would now like to focus on a dimension of romance that has been implicit in everything that I have discussed this far, namely, our tendency to idealize the person we love. This tendency is almost inevitable, at least in the beginning of a new relationship. One might even say that romantic love without a dose of idealization is more or less impossible, for most of us like to think that what we love is precious beyond comparison. It is therefore normal for us to elevate our lover to a dazzling ideal, bestowing upon him or her a variety of refinements, and regarding him or her through the flattering prism of our fantasies. Moreover, there is no doubt that such processes of idealization can add considerable charm to our love lives.
However, as I have pointed out, idealizing the other can be ungenerous in the sense that it does not respect the integrity of his or her self-perception. If we are not careful, our ideals can transform the other into a lifeless object that reflects the specificity of our desire without having anything to do with the reality of his or her being. In placing upon the other embellishments that have no connection to who he is or aspires to become, our ideals can empty him of substance. Even when the other as ideal is so esteemed that he cannot do wrong in our eyes, our ideal suffocates him. This is because we fail to meet his particularity on its own terms. We treat him as an enticing mirage that embodies everything that we (self-servingly) seek in the world, with the result that we erase his distinctive identity.
Perhaps even more disturbing are the times when we hold the other up to an external ideal that he or she cannot possibly meet or even approximate. In such cases, we do injustice to the other by deeming him deficient for the simple reason that he fails to live up to the perfection of our ideal. Because we are excessively devoted to a narrow standard—one that might even predate the relationship in question—we come to be utterly impervious to the multifaceted spectrum of the other’s personality, eclipsing its diffuse glow by the entirely artificial brightness of our fantasies. In this way, we actively create a relational dynamic where the other is more or less predestined to disappoint us.
Ideals can therefore be extremely problematic. Yet it might be an oversimplification to assert that they are always and by definition ungenerous. Even though it is important to admit that our ideals can disfigure or denigrate the other, it is also worth noting that the belief that we could relate to him or her in a completely nonidealizing fashion is founded on the somewhat dubious assumption that we can easily tell the difference between the “reality” of the other’s being and our phantasmatic distortions of that reality. The opacities of love that I discussed in the previous chapter already blur the line between “reality” and “fantasy.” But our capacity to distinguish between the two might be compromised on an even more fundamental level.
Ever since the Enlightenment, Western culture has advocated the idea that science, reason, and our logical capacities empower us to relate to the world objectively, as “it really is.” According to this view, rationality frees us from the fantasies, illusions, mystifications, and superstitions of earlier worldviews. It represents an advancement over the narrow-minded and oppressive prejudices of premodern societies. And it dissolves imaginary webs of fancy that threaten to confuse our eagle-eyed perception of reality.
The advantages of this perspective are indisputable. However, recent developments in philosophy and science alike have called into question the principles of scientific objectivity, highlighting the ways in which our claims about the world (as well as about ourselves) always necessarily reflect the value systems within which we operate. More specifically, we now know that many of the things we assume to be commonsensical are merely social conventions that have become so thoroughly ingrained in our psyches that we have lost track of their conventional status and come to regard them as unquestionably true. As Nietzsche alleges, “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”
This way of looking at things reveals that truths are metaphors that have over time become so familiar to us that we no longer recognize them as such, but rather take them to express “reality” in its pure and unadulterated form. That is, more or less every “truth” of ours was once a metaphor: a representation (a symbol, a simile, a fiction, a fable, etc.) invented by the human mind. By this I do not mean to say that there exists no reality independently of human representations. I do not mean to imply that there are no truths in the world, or that we cannot approximate these truths. I am merely positing that many of our most deeply held and taken-for-granted beliefs about the world are habits of thought that arise from centuries of human attempts to sort through it. This implies that all-too-human passions and judgments are by definition woven into their very composition. Since we understand the world only through the conceptual frameworks, labels, and systems of thought that we impose on this world, there is no way for us to know what it might be like outside of our endeavors to understand it. In other words, since our efforts to represent the world influence the manner in which the world appears to us, there is no knowledge about the world that is not from the start shaped by human perceptions; there is no transparent window to the world that would reveal this world in all of its truthful glory.
The fact that the world and its meanings—not to mention our sense of ourselves—are metaphoric does not mean that they somehow lack actuality or that we do not experience them as compelling. Quite the contrary, fictions that have solidified into seemingly incontestable conventions are immensely powerful. As the German philosopher Martin Heidegger observes, our destiny as human beings is to be “thrown” into a world of preexisting meanings—beliefs, opinions, values, and perspectives that originate from past generations—and a large part of our existential task is to learn to make our way in this world. Most of us go about this task in fairly conformist ways. Even though we in principle possess the innovative power to bring new meanings (new metaphors) into existence, and thus to remake the world that we have inherited, much of the time we orient ourselves in relation to the world by internalizing a sizable portion of the time-honored meanings that surround us. As a consequence, fossilized metaphors come to live as integral parts of our private universe, in large measure determining how we go about our lives. Needless to say, this can make it difficult for us to differentiate between “truth” and “fiction,” “reality” and “fantasy.”
When reality is understood as a human convention rather than an objective fact, fantasy can no longer be thought of as what contaminates reality but must instead be seen as a means of contributing to it. While some of us may be disturbed, and even a bit threatened, by the idea that our beliefs and convictions are merely well-established fantasies, I would say that this can actually be quite liberating. After all, the realization that much of our world has been constructed for us by prior generations implies that we can begin to reconstruct it; we can begin to invent new beliefs and convictions, not to mention more egalitarian social structures. I would in fact argue that the more we embrace the world-shaping power of fantasies, the more appealing the world becomes for us. The more we recognize the ways in which fantasies—and by extension, our imagination—compose what we understand as our “reality,” the more we are able to offset the paucities of excessive rationalism.
A rational approach to life helps us negotiate the demands of everyday existence. However, rationality without any input from the imagination can become wearisome and anesthetizing. As the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald postulates, our lives tend to lose their meaningfulness the moment they get filtered through the uncompromising lens of rationalism. More specifically, Loewald posits that the jaded and disillusioned “realism” of the average adult—the ordinary attitude of those who have learned to discipline their imagination so as to gain a more dispassionate view of the world—devitalizes our existence. In the long run, it may even undermine our capacity to conceive new forms of life (new metaphors). In contrast, the innovative individual, according to Loewald, takes care to ensure that “communication and interplay between the world of fantasy and the world of objectivity, between imagination and rationality, remain alive.”
Loewald suggests that fantasies can counteract the relentless demands of our mundane obligations. Not only do they provide a momentary relief from such obligations, but, ideally at least, allow us to reach beyond these so that we once again come to see the world as an alluring place. While fantasies might sometimes derail us from the realities of life, they are valuable because they make the world come alive for us in a vibrant fashion. They light up aspects of the world that might otherwise remain concealed, with the consequence that we manage to see grace and beauty in places we might normally overlook. In short, to the extent that fantasies offer us an enriched version of “reality,” they render the world more desirable to us. From this point of view, fantasies represent a crucial ingredient of our capacity to enter into the midst of life. They make us receptive to the less utilitarian potentialities of existence by disclosing its emblematic and mythological (as opposed to merely literal and rational) dimensions.
The insight that a purely realistic approach to the world may not be the most inspired way to live has important repercussions for our understanding of romantic love. First, if it is the case that fantasies make the world more desirable to us, it might be a mistake to strive to conduct our love lives in an entirely levelheaded fashion; it might be a mistake to deprive ourselves of the world-enriching power of ideals. Second, if it in fact is the case that much of what we classify as our “reality” is a collection of fantasies that have over time congealed into convincing convictions, it becomes somewhat difficult to denounce idealization—and the play of fantasies that idealization entails—as something that robs the other of his or her integrity. It becomes hard to condemn idealization as something that distorts the other’s “authentic” personality.
What would this “authentic” personality consist of? How could we ever identify or reach it? Although it is possible to talk about more or less authentic modes of dwelling in the world, it would be difficult to name the coordinates of a given person’s “authenticity” in any definitive sense. In the same way that the Winnicottian true self cannot be said to consist of a static set of consistent characteristics, an individual’s “authenticity” cannot be aligned with any specific personality traits. In fact, if our identities are always in a process of becoming in the sense that I have described, then “authenticity” could be argued to be nothing more than our capacity to undertake this process with a degree of adventurousness. In the same way that the true self does not connote an essential core of individuality but merely expresses a person’s aptitude for creative living, “authenticity” consists of a mixture of spirit, imagination, audacity, and courage. But this does not get us very far in being able to tell ideals apart from reality.
We are used to thinking that love is only legitimate when it is divested of ideals—when we are able to consider our beloved objectively, outside the intoxicating trappings of illusion. We also tend to believe that even if we initially allow ourselves to be misled by the delusions of our overactive imagination, we will eventually be able to banish such delusions so as to get to know the other in a more realistic fashion. However, as soon as we recognize that an idealized version of the other is not necessarily any less “authentic” (or “accurate”) than any other version, we are asked to consider the possibility that idealization is simply a particularly indulgent manner of relating to him. As soon as we admit that idealization is merely one way, among others, of interpreting the other, we are invited to acknowledge that it is in fact a remarkably charitable means of illuminating what is most enchanting about the other.
How we see a person depends on what we look for, and therefore, ultimately, on who we are. What we cherish or reject in the other reflects our values, character, personal history, and hopes for the future. Some of us approach others with undemanding and straightforward generosity, focusing on features that are engaging, agreeable, or striking in the positive sense of the term. Others observe people with a degree of cold and critical detachment, choosing to perceive primarily what is defective or blemished. Against this backdrop, an adamant refusal to idealize might indicate not only a lack of kindness, but also a dearth of imagination. It might represent a somewhat insincere attempt to deny the fact that love gains its momentum from the elevation of an ordinary person into the dignity of someone extraordinary. After all, what sets the one we love apart from others is exactly the fact that he or she is not prosaic in our eyes. The beloved is, by definition, someone special—someone who inspires us because he connects us to the more lyrical aspects of life. We are enthralled in part precisely because he introduces a dash of otherworldly splendor to our existence.
The idea that we should meet the other in strictly nonidealizing ways thus devalues him in the sense that it replaces a lofty image of him as extraordinary by a less tolerant vision of him as uncompromisingly ordinary. Even though we are taught to think that we can elude the falsifications of fantasy by taking a pragmatic approach to our love lives, our conception of our lover as ordinary is in some ways no less drastic an infringement of his integrity than our fantasy of his extraordinariness. After all, if we can never know the other “as he really is,” why should we not highlight those aspects of him that thrill our imagination? Indeed, given that we can only approach the other obliquely, through a trellis of gestures and communications that offer us indirect glimpses of his ever-receding interiority, idealizations could be said to be well-meaning interpretations that we place on these glimpses in order to constitute a workable map of an actuality that we cannot entirely grasp. Idealizations, in sum, are a lenient means of drawing inferences in situations where we do not hold any hard facts.
Does this give us license to read the other in whichever way we please? Definitely not. The recognition that a down-to-earth approach to the other is not necessarily any more accurate than one based on idealizations should not be taken to mean that all forms of idealization are equally valid or ethically defensible. There are idealizations that are violating in the sense that I outlined in the beginning of this chapter because they rely on external criteria of attractiveness, measuring the other against a standard that is intrinsically foreign to him and that consequently makes him feel inadequate or defective. More generous idealizations, in contrast, manage to release marginalized dimensions of the other’s being, lovingly animating characteristics that do actually exist but that might ordinarily be muted. They might, for instance, play up an exquisite feature that has been neglected or undervalued in the past. In this way, they allow understated aspects of the other’s personality to sparkle and shine.
There are thus more or less productive, more or less benevolent, ways to idealize. There is an enormous difference between idealizations that are ignited by some (visible or invisible) detail of the other’s being that we find riveting, and ones that arise solely from our own narcissistic preferences. An adoring amplification of attributes that the other possesses—and enjoys possessing—is much less damaging than worshipping qualities that do not in the least correspond to how he views himself. As the psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell aptly asserts, whether the idealizations of love are enriching or depleting “depends on the way they are positioned in relation to actuality.” “Do they encourage an episodic selectivity and elaboration of the beauty of the partner?” Mitchell asks. “Or do they foster the illusion that there are other potential partners in the world who are only beautiful and never disappointing?” If the latter, they have no chance of making a positive contribution to our love lives.
Furthermore, even with idealizations that reflect the other’s self-image, it is vital to allow ample room for disappointment. An expectation of consistency—an expectation that the other will unfailingly meet our ideal—is disastrous in depriving him of the capacity to be less than perfect. A relational dynamic that does not tolerate the occasional crumbling of ideals cannot but be insufferably tyrannical, for it effectively shuts down the other’s aptitude for spontaneous self-expression. Whenever the other senses that his ability to meet our ideal is a precondition of our love, idealization ceases to be a gift of affection and becomes, rather, an insidious tool of blackmail whereby we strip the other of the right to show himself fallible. In this sense, idealization can be compatible with love only when it is clear to both parties that the relationship will survive the collapse of ideals.
We cannot, then, afford to forget that our idealized image of the other does not capture his entire character—that it is only one very particular way of perceiving him. The moment we equate our ideal with the “truth” of the other’s being, we desecrate his status as a creature of open-ended becoming; we immobilize him into an inert notion of what we want him to be. Ideals can consequently be generous only to the extent that we recognize the distinction between the fabrications of our imagination and the lived reality of the other—that we remind ourselves that our ideals do not arise from the other but rather from our attempts to make sense of him. Even though our ideals may not be wholly illusory—even though they may magnify a particular aspect of the other’s personality—they are still of our own making. They are still a phantasmatic configuration that, for one reason or another, fascinates us.
The minute we lose sight of the gap between the idealizing gesture (which is ours) and the lived complexity of the other (which is his), we risk sliding from tenderness to terror. We risk turning the magnificence that we bestow upon the other into a rigid archetype that he feels compelled to emulate. This means that, if we are to avoid the violence of ideals, we need to be able to meet the other on multiple levels at once so that our ideals are always merely one piece of the puzzle that comprises his being—a piece that we can safely lose without losing the overall picture. In other words, our ideals cannot consume the totality of the other’s reality but must, instead, remain insistently partial. And they must be evanescent enough to allow us to improvise in life-enhancing ways. To express the matter in Winnicottian terms, idealizations that are transient, that are able to lightly touch and accommodate the iridescent play of the other’s mobile reality without attempting to arrest that play, are conducive to creative living. In contrast, idealizations that expect the other to fit into a precise (and painstakingly conceived) cast cannot but smother the embers of life.
Ideals are therefore neither categorically bad nor invariably good. How they impact our love lives depends on how we employ them, on whether they enhance or enfeeble our lover’s sense of himself or herself as someone who is inherently lovable and capable of multiple self-enactments. Ideals only “work” when they take place within a relational dynamic that also—and at the same time—allows the other to thrive beyond them, that communicates to him that he is loved regardless of whether or not he meets our ideals. In such cases, the other is secure in the knowledge that his failure to reflect our ideals does not bring our love to an end—that how we feel about him does not depend on whether or not he lives up to our specific expectations.
Loving idealizations start from, and allow space for, the intricacies and burdens of the other’s existential struggle. We know that, like us, the other is an ordinary person with his own problems and insecurities. We admit that he has idiosyncratic habits, beliefs, and patterns of passion that can sometimes be tedious, or even slightly embarrassing. We recognize that he is prone to anxiety, agitation, tension, and worry in the same way that we are. And we accept that there are moments when he can be a bit absurd or ridiculous. Needless to say, he is weighted down by his past in difficult to imagine ways. He suffers from various forms of uncertainty and helplessness. And he defends against pain and disappointment as much as we do, albeit perhaps in ways that we do not entirely understand. Yet we doggedly foster our faith in his ability to glow like a precious gem.
Generous forms of love recognize the other’s irreducible humanness. They embrace his ordinariness. Yet they simultaneously remain aware of the myriad ways in which he is also always something other than ordinary—the ways in which he, in certain circumstances, and through a certain lens, becomes breathtakingly extraordinary. That is, while generous modes of relating resist the temptation to trap the other in an inflexible ideal, they do not demean the other by insisting that there is nothing about him that is worth revering. They appreciate the other’s regular human qualities, but they do not reduce him to these qualities; they admit that he can also embody transcendent potentialities. They in fact persistently look for opportunities to foreground what is most entrancing about him. At times, they overlook the commonplace in order to bring into better focus what is most scintillating. At other times, they find alluring what others might deem entirely commonplace.
All too often, love fades when idealization yields to the trite realities of a long-term partnership. For many of us, one of the biggest challenges of love is to keep desire alive in the face of the worn routines of life. From this perspective, the trouble with love is less that we idealize too much than that we fail to do so after a certain degree of familiarity has settled into the relationship. The trouble is that, after a while, we cease to see the inspiring qualities of our lover. We transform him into a banal object with no power to rouse our passion. There may even be times when we not only deny the other’s ideal attributes but actively seek to turn him into an abject or degraded object. Particularly in the final death throes of love, the ideal frequently becomes its very opposite.
True love—if I may risk such a sentimental expression—must withstand the shattering of ideals, for if we only accept the other as ideal, our “love” remains superficial. Yet, if we only see the other as uncompromisingly ordinary, we deny the fact that he is irreplaceable to us. As a result, we need to be careful that, in our eagerness to build a “realistic” connection, we do not end up sidelining everything that is uniquely luminous about the other. As the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič claims, the point of true love is not to forgive the other for his weaknesses, or to endure him when we no longer desire him, but rather to conserve a space for the transcendent within the mundane predictability of relating. In other words, one of the best ways to sustain love is to cultivate our capacity to idealize the other even after our familiarity with him has rendered him an ordinary object for us; one of the best ways to feed desire is to nurture our aptitude for idealization within the monotony of everyday life.
True love is not the kind of love that relies on the inaccessibility of the beloved—that generates endless obstacles and preliminaries to the consummation of love so as to ensure that it never becomes a concrete reality. But neither is true love a spruced-up version of friendship and comfortable companionship. As Zupančič points out, true love is not “the sum of desire and friendship, where friendship is supposed to provide a bridge between two awakenings of desire.” Rather, it entails the capacity to consider the other as someone who is simultaneously—at one and the same time—ordinary and out of the ordinary, banal (even slightly boring) and inspired (even radiant). Neither the banal nor the inspired dimensions of the other alone sum up his complexity. Instead, it is the dynamic interaction between them that generates this complexity in the first place: what makes the other incomparable is the manner in which the banal and inspired components of his being blend, intersect, and produce effects that make him interesting to us.
Ideals concoct a potent mixture of desire and fantasy. What I have sought to express in this book is that one of our main interpersonal and ethical obligations is to make sure that this mixture does not brutalize the other’s living reality. This is why it is important that our ideals do not merely reflect the desperation of our narcissistic desires but caress prized details of the other’s personality. Along related lines, we need to recognize that whenever we feel tempted to freeze the other into a static ideal that cannot be revised, or that has room for only one version of his or her identity, we may be looking to create a false sense of security in our relationship. We may be using ideals to neutralize unsettling elements of the other’s being because we suppose that, by so doing, we manage to stabilize our lives. Rather than allowing the other to direct us to previously unexplored life scenarios—rather than allowing him to touch us in unexpected ways—we hide behind idealizations that appear to guarantee the reliability of our life-worlds.
Static ideals can thus become an impediment to inner renewal: a roundabout means of thwarting our capacity to imagine lives different from the ones we are living. By distancing us from alternative modes of relating, such ideals hold us captive to recurring existential patterns. They may, for example, consistently cause us to pursue relational dynamics that are familiar to us, even when these have proven unsuccessful in the past. Or they may induce us to only court lovers who fit snugly into our preconceived notion of how our lives are meant to unfold. In this sense, they constrict the scope of our existence, limiting the relational options available to us, and depriving us of forms of personal augmentation that can ensue only from a courageous encounter with those who are radically different from us. Whenever our ideals are so stagnant that they exclude relationships that might contest our accustomed understanding of the world as well as what we, as individuals, are all about, we ourselves begin to stagnate. We slow down our evolution because we reject the very lovers who have the most to offer to us for the simple reason that they approach life from a stance that has nothing to do with our ideals.
A love that does not embrace the true (vulnerable) self of both lovers, or that does not tolerate the raw messiness of relating, is a contradiction in terms: it is by definition too stingy, too sterile, and too risk-averse. Even if it is the case that—as I have proposed—there are giving ways to idealize, love must in the final analysis endure the erosion of ideals. It must be able to facilitate the materialization of the beloved’s less-than-ideal singularity, including what is breakable, imperfect, inconsistent, or defenseless about him or her. Even as we seek to enhance our passion through loving idealizations, we must never lose track of the dangers of idolization. We must never lose sight of the fact that the kind of love that seeks to possess the other rather than to honor the complexity of his being can only diminish him and, therefore, indirectly, our relationship with him. In this sense, it is only to the extent that we manage to perceive the other as an incomparable creature absorbed in his own relentless and at times confusing process of becoming, rather than merely as someone who either meets or fails to meet our ideals, that we are able to access deeper levels of relational possibility.