They all had heads and torsos, arms and legs. And yet I was connected by magical life-altering chords to just this one, magical chords that no one else in the room could see but which shaped the whole room and made it revolve around her.
They say love is blind, but, as G. K. Chesterton noted, love is definitely not blind. Love is the opposite of blind. It is supremely attentive. You probably can’t know a person down to the core of his soul unless you love that person.
All those passionate stares over each other’s laptop in the coffee shop where you are inconveniently working together because you can’t bear to be apart, all that giddy rolling around in and falling out of hammocks. Lovers spend a lot of the time laughing at each other, C. S. Lewis notices, until they have a baby, which gives them something new to laugh at. “People who are sensible about love are incapable of it,” the poet Donald Yates writes. Dignity is not part of love’s equation; in fact, dignity is probably a thing that could kill love.
People who have made it to this stage feel like they are flying. In the first place, the love is always changing. Sheldon Vanauken fell in love with Davy in the wintertime. “We said, ‘If we aren’t more in love in lilactime, we shall be finished.’ But we were more in love: for love must grow or die. Every year on our anniversary we said, ‘If we are not more deeply in love next year, we shall have failed.’ But we were: a deeper inloveness, more close, more dear.”
Love is hunting for bigger game than happiness. Love is a union of souls. When one member of a couple suffers from Alzheimer’s, the other doesn’t just go away. Instead, as Lewis puts it, love says, “Better this than parting. Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together.”
Wuthering Heights is perhaps the most famous rendering of what happens when somebody squelches such a love. It’s a kind of homicide. When they part, Heathcliff cries out, “Kiss me again; and don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?” They hold each other tight, as if in the face of death, “their faces hid against each other, and washed by each other’s tears.”
The tragedy in that scene is not only in the sorrow but in the hiding, the inability of two people who are destroying love to even look into each other’s eyes.
Montaigne captured this fusion in his description of his friendship with La Boétie, a friendship so deep it can only be called love: “Our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again. If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.”
The ego has been defeated. You find yourself in more pain when your partner is suffering than when you are suffering, more angry when the one you love has been insulted than when you are insulted. You notice it in lovers who are slowly dying from cancer or some lingering illness. The dying are strong while their partners fall apart. It seems to be weirdly easier to be the victim of the disease than the one who has to watch the beloved suffer.
The poets have had a field day with this condition. Milton’s Adam to Eve in Paradise Lost: “We are one / One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.” Iain Thomas: “This is my skin and it’s thick. This is not your skin, yet you are under it.” Roman poet Paulus Silentiarius, 1,500 years ago: “And there lay the lovers, lip-locked / delirious, infinitely thirsting / each wanting to go completely inside the other.” Mallarmé: “In the wave, you become / Your naked ecstasy.”
SEVENTEEN
The Marriage Decision
Love wants to be forever, of course. Therefore, we must marry. In this way the heart demands resoluteness. You’ve been flying in circles for long enough. The aircraft carrier is below. It’s time to stick the landing.
But this is the time to step back again, to make an appraisal. This is a moment to give reason its due. I’ve put a lot of emphasis on the heart and soul in this book,