by
Natasha Lunn
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What do you think the couples who are able to move past an affair have in common?
There are many things that make them succeed. But, in the reverse, I can tell you one ingredient that you know will prevent the success: when the person who betrayed and lied and deceived has very little empathy. That is a real giveaway of something that can’t heal. And the same thing is true on the other end: if the person who was betrayed has no ability to engage with the curiosity to understand what the affair was about. When the only way they can think about the affair was how it hurt them, it’s a challenging dynamic. The curiosity of the betrayed is secondary, but it’s equally important. Basically, to succeed you need each person to bring a degree of empathy and interest and deep desire to understand about the experience of the other.
the one and only esther perel <3
It’s true, of course, that we need friends who we live life closely alongside. But I think there is a case to be made for keeping the more distant friendships ticking along too, even when they remind us of the everyday intimacies that have been lost. Because life takes people from us all the time. The husband or wife we share everything with might leave the world before we do. The friends we see every week could relocate to new cities, maybe even new countries. Colleagues move on to new jobs. Kids leave home. Parents die too young. When any – or all – of these things happen, we might be grateful that we tolerated the mundanity of a WhatsApp group and diary dates; all the little gestures that sustained our friendships when we needed them less, so they survive to hold us when we need them more. That shouldn’t be the only motivation to make an effort – after all, it’s a selfish one – but it’s useful to remember, every now and again, when we’re sleep-deprived or overworked and the easier option is to let friendships fade. Because one day, when we’re walking in a park with a friend who can access an older version of us, and we find something silly to laugh about together in the April sunlight, it might save us, or them, in some small way.
Iris Murdoch once said that ‘love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.’ She’s right – we achieve love by overcoming our narcissism. When, as teens, we begin having relationships, we tend to do so from within our own point of view; we experience our own feelings as authentic, while the feelings of the beloved have little reality. The capacity to love – the opposite of narcissism – is the capacity to see other people, their lives and feelings, as real; the capacity to love is the ability to separate this more objective picture of the beloved from the picture that is produced by our fears and desires.
Recently, a patient of mine described to me how, in the middle of an argument with his wife, he had the thought: good Lord, she’s awful! But this thought was followed by the idea: wait a minute, I’m pretty awful too – I’m being horrid to her. She really has to put up with a lot from me. This moment of realization was an instance of him tolerating his ambivalence – and accepting her ambivalent feelings towards him – seeing her point of view. We have to hear, see, feel the beloved’s reality. I think if we can endure these moments of ambivalence, hear what matters to the other person, we can begin to move towards a more loving relationship.
stephen grosz
When did you begin to see the unexpected gifts that came with your loss?
The next year of university was a struggle and I didn’t think that losing her had taught me anything. It hadn’t yet, because her death didn’t come with instant knowledge; I only knew that it was the most devastating event of my life. Its lessons came slowly and gradually, through experience. The most important was an acute awareness of my mortality. The understanding that no one’s going to find a good life for you, you have to find it for yourself. You have to live it to the best of your ability, to the best of your knowledge. It’s finite. And it can either be full of your joy, or there can be no joy at all – that’s up to you.
That awareness was different from thinking you can die at any time in an anxious way; I never felt that. It’s true, you can die at any time, but I’ve never felt my life was in immediate danger, just that it was always in danger, so I had better get on with living it. That attitude meant I refused to take a boring job, or make a decision I really didn’t want to, just because it might give me enough money to do something interesting in the future. I had no time for deferred gratification. That wasted time in the present suddenly seemed too harsh a payment. It wasn’t about thinking ‘live fast, die young’, it was more that I knew what I wanted – to be happy, fulfilled and free – and I wasn’t willing to do things that weren’t in pursuit of that. I became ambitious on my own terms. Obviously we all have to do things that we don’t want to, but the notion that you should take a job you hate because it will make your life better years from now? It no longer made sense to me.
gary younge!
It never left me. It is in the small things – like the decision to order the lobster – and the big things – like leaving my job as a columnist at the Guardian after twenty-six years to become an academic. That was entirely informed by that lesson. I thought, I don’t want to die doing this, I want to die somewhere else. People still ask why I left, and my answer to them would be: well, if I don’t want to do it, it doesn’t make sense to waste any remaining years of my life on it, does it? That attitude has worked out well for me, an unlikely class-shifting dude who went from the working class into the middle class. I would often say to myself, ‘What’s the worst thing that can happen?’ I said it so many times until I no longer needed to. Because the worst thing that could happen to me already had – my mum had died – and so that left me with a calculated sense of fearlessness. It gave me a yardstick I would use to make decisions. A lot of the time when you are making a decision you know what the answer is, you just need the courage to follow through on what you already know to be right. My mum gave me that courage, in both her life and her death.
How did that early loss change the way you approached love and relationships?
I think sometimes you look for the parts of yourself you’ve lost in a relationship. I was twenty-three when my father died, and it was almost impossible for me to think about anything else. I would wake up in the night screaming. Then when I went back to work, I started flirting with a guy in another office cubicle over GChat. At the time I had a boyfriend of seven years, who I had neglected in the wake of my father’s death. Although nothing happened with the guy at work, the excitement and newness of that was an escape.
At first I was in so much pain that I wanted to keep someone around, a human body I could count on. But eventually, that little crush at work made me think, I don’t want to do this any more, and I broke up with my boyfriend. Being interested in someone new made me realize how fake the other relationship was. It saved me, in a way. In the wake of tragedy, sometimes desire is a bomb that can’t be denied. Fresh loss is like defogging your eyeglasses.
i think this is true more generally tbh
lisa taddeo!!
[...] Tolstoy said that the purpose of art was to communicate the idea of Christian brotherhood from man to man and to pass along some sort of message. [...] what fiction and poetry are doing is what they've been trying to do for two thousand years: affect somebody, make somebody feel a certain way, allow them to enter into relationships with ideas and with characters that are not permitted within the cinctures of the ordinary verbal intercourse we're having here, you know: you don't see me, I don't see you. But every two of three generations the world gets vastly different, and the context in which you have to learn how to be a human being, or to have good relationships, or decide whether or not there is a God, or decide whether there's such a thing as love, and whether it's redemptive, becomes vastly different. And the struggles with which you can communicate those dilemmas or have characters struggle with them seem to become appropriate and then inappropriate again and so on. Nothing that's changed right now seems to me to be fundamentally important, and yet a whole lot of stuff is very, very different. [...] I'm the only "postmodernist" you'll ever meet who absolutely worships Leo Tolstoy.
[...] I think it's impossible to spend that many slack-jawed, spittlechinned, formative hours in front of commercial art without internalizing the idea that one of the main goals of art is simply to entertain, give people sheer pleasure. Except to what end, this pleasure-giving? Because, of course, TV's real agenda is to be liked, because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison. And sometimes when I look at my own stuff I feel like I absorbed too much of this raison. I'll catch myself thinking up gags or trying formal stunt-pilotry and see that none of this stuff is really in the service of the story itself; it's serving the rather darker purpose of communicating to the reader "Hey! Look at me! Have a look at what a good writer I am! Like me!"
Now, to an extent there's no way to escape this altogether, because an author needs to demonstrate some sort of skill or merit so that the reader will trust her. There's some weird, delicate, I-trust-you-not-to-fuck-upon-me relationship between the reader and the writer, and both have to sustain it. But there's an unignorable line between demonstrating skill and charm to gain trust for the story vs. simple showing off. It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art. I thik TV promulgates the idea that good art is just that art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. This seems like a poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with. And one consequence is that if the artist is excessively dependent on simply being liked, so that her true end isn't in the work but in a certain audience's good opinion, she is going to develop a terrific hostility to that audience, simply because she has given all her power away to them. It's the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: "I don't really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it. But since your good opinion is the sole arbiter of my success and worth, you have tremendous power over me, and I fear you and hate you for it." This dynamic isn't exclusive to art. But I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
the TV commentary seems even more true now with the advent of streaming services that are making their own shows ... the shareholder justification for that is to keep people subscribed, keep them paying $10 a month
some of the ways this manifests (that he lists later on):
- sentences that are syntactically fine but a bitch to read
- bludgeoning the reader with data
- creating expectations then disappointing them
[...] Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative World that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world, If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this dark world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend Psycho as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it's no more than that.
[...] Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be. This isn't that it's fiction's duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans. I'm not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isnt exploring what it means to be human today isn't good art. We've got all this "literary" fiction that simply monotones that we're all becoming less and less human, that presents characters with souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like "Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!" But we already all know U.S. culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody. What's engaging and artistically real, is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn't have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not, why not?
[...] My idea in "Westward" was to do with metafiction what Moore's poetry or like DeLillo's Libra had done with other mediated myths. I wanted to get the Armageddon-explosion, the goal metafiction's always been about, I wanted to get it over with, and then out of the rubble reaffirm the idea of art being a living transaction between humans, whether the transaction was erotic or altruistic or sadistic. [...]
the famous justification for Westward