and they won’t scare off the other person. But the act involves probing down to the root of the error, offering a confession more complete than expected. It involves an act of pure submission.
Then it is the moment for judgment. A wrong is an occasion to reevaluate. What is the character of the person in question? Should a moment of stupidity eclipse an overall record of decency? Or is this a permanent character trait? Both partners ask these questions together—and then bend toward each other.
As King said, trust doesn’t return immediately. The sin doesn’t have to be ignored. But the wrong act is no longer a barrier to a relationship. The offender endures his season of shame and is better for it. The offended, when she offers grace, is freed from emotions such as vengeance and is uplifted. The relationship is made stronger by reunion.
“Suffering makes immature love grow into mature love,” Walter Trobisch writes. “Immature unlearned love is egotistic. It’s the kind of love children have, demanding and wanting—and wanting instantaneously.” But the love that comes after forgiveness is marked by empathy, compassion, understanding, and inexplicable care. As Thornton Wilder once put it, “In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.”
FUSION
We now come to the thing itself. To “love” full-bore, the climactic phase on the path to intimacy. We’ve seen so many movies about love and heard so many songs, sometimes we forget how strange a phenomenon it is. It is both a selfish desire and a selfless gift. It fills us up and reminds us of our own incompleteness. Love plows open the hard crust of our personality and exposes the fertile soil below. Love decenters the self. It teaches us that our riches are in another. It teaches us that we can’t give ourselves what we truly need, which is somebody else’s love. It smashes the walls of ego and leaves a pile of jagged stones.
At the end of his book Love & Friendship, Allan Bloom has a beautiful paragraph on the paradoxical nature of love—it is everything and its opposite. Love, Bloom writes,
is a self-forgetting that makes man self-aware, an unreason that is the condition of his reasoning about himself. The pain it produces is linked to the most ecstatic of pleasures, and it provides the primary experiences of beauty and of life’s sweetness. It contains powerful elements of illusion, it may be thought to be entirely illusion, but its effects are not illusory. Love can produce the most prodigious deeds in the most immediate way, without guidance by principle or command of duty. The lover knows the value of beauty and also knows that he cannot live well, or perhaps at all, alone. He knows that he is not self-sufficient. The lover is the clearest expression of man’s natural imperfection and his quest for perfection.
When love strikes, it becomes clear that under the influence of our own egos we have been sleepwalking through life. Love wakes us up. It exposes the fact that the chasms within us cannot be filled by the food the ego hungers for. “The unrelated human being lacks wholeness,” Carl Jung wrote, “for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a ‘you.’ ” Every lover in the throes of love knows this.
Passionate love is the only force strong enough to overthrow the ego. People describe it as a madness, a fever, a flood or a fire or a strong emotion. In fact, it is not an emotion, though it contains a lot of emotions. It is actually a drive, an extreme motivational state. It is a fervent longing for eternal union with someone else. It pushes people to do ridiculous things, to drive five hundred miles so you can have dinner with her, to get the car washed before every time you pick her up because you want her to feel special, to alter your running route so you can go by her building and gaze at her window.
Once, while I was engaged, I found myself around a conference table with about fifteen people, including my fiancée. We’d been through many of the phases of intimacy by that point, the furtive getting to know each other, the crises, and the forgiving. I sat at that table marveling at the fact that of all the people around it, only she was special to me. Why should that be? Everybody else seemed bright and kind, too.