The Summons of Love

Mari Ruti

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231527989
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicoanalisi

We are conditioned to think that love heals wounds, makes us happy, and gives our lives meaning. When the opposite occurs and love causes fracturing, disenchantment, and existential turmoil, we suffer deeply, especially if we feel that love has failed us or that we have failed to experience what others seem so effortlessly to enjoy.

In this eloquently argued, psychologically informed book, Mari Ruti portrays love as a much more complex, multifaceted phenomenon than we tend to appreciate—an experience that helps us encounter the depths of human existence. Love's ruptures are as important as its triumphs, and sometimes love succeeds because it fails. At the heart of Ruti's argument is a meditation on interpersonal ethics that acknowledges the inherent opacity of human interiority and the difficulty of taking responsibility for what we cannot fully understand.

Yet the fact that humans are often irrational in love does not absolve us of ethical accountability. In Ruti's view, we must work harder to map the unconscious patterns motivating our romantic behavior. As opposed to popular spiritual approaches urging us to live fully in the now, Ruti treats the past as a living component of the present. Only when we catch ourselves at those moments when the past speaks in the present can we keep ourselves from hurting the ones we love. Equally important, Ruti emphasizes transcending our individual histories of pain, an act that allows us to face the unconscious demons that dictate our relational choices. Written with substance and compassion, The Summons of Love restores the enlivening and transformative possibilities of romance.

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The Hall of Mirrors

It is tempting to see romantic love as an answer to life’s difficulties. Many of us have been programmed to believe that love has the power to make us whole, mend our injuries, and give us the meaning of our existence. This is not to say that we are naïve or gullible. Undoubtedly most of us know that seeking our happiness through love is a treacherous affair. We recognize that the act of placing our well-being in the hands of another person can be terribly imprudent. And we understand that looking for a validation of our individuality through the grace and generosity of someone else can get us in trouble. After all, we cannot control how the person in question treats us. There is no guarantee that he or she will make us feel good about ourselves. In addition, when we lose this person’s love, we may end up feeling like we have lost a part of ourselves; we may end up feeling like we have lost the core of our identity, so that our lives suddenly seem strangely devoid of worth or direction.

Yet the idea that love holds the key to our salvation—that it possesses the power to complete us in ways that nothing else can—at times beckons us so compellingly that we end up pursuing a romantic alliance at all costs. We may feel that, without love, we will flounder in a limbo of self-definition, incapable of determining how we are supposed to proceed with our lives. We may even come to believe that life without love is intrinsically futile or uninspiring. At its most extreme, our quest for the rewards of love can cause us to neglect other avenues of personal development to the extent that we, over time, become incapable of nurturing the very capacities and characteristics that make us interesting to potential lovers in the first place. We gradually lose the distinctiveness, the alertness of being, that renders us appealing to others. As the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir observed in the context of warning women against becoming overinvested in love: “One of the loving woman’s misfortunes is to find that her very love disfigures her, destroys her.”

This may be an overstatement, at least in the contemporary context. Yet there is no question that the overvaluation of love can lead to an impoverishment of character that makes it difficult for us to sustain dynamic relationships in the long run. When we hope that love will banish our impression of being somehow lacking or inadequate, or when we expect from love the kind of unconditional satisfaction that we cannot attain in other realms of life, we may lose ourselves in love’s illusory hall of mirrors. When we see love as a shortcut to happiness or fulfillment, we may ignore other means of achieving these goals; we may come to spend our days searching for the special person who is “meant” for us in some cosmic sense. The main goal of this chapter is to illustrate that we are rarely as easily or disastrously mistaken as when we think that we have found the soul mate who completes us.

The Quest for Wholeness

The notion that love leads to an idyllic union of souls has deep roots in Western thought. One of the most celebrated accounts is by the ancient Greek poet Aristophanes, who tells us an evocative story about the origins of love. He explains that a long time ago, in some mythical past, humans had two faces (looking in opposite directions), four arms, and four legs. They were so powerful—so vigorous and formidable—that they aspired to challenge the gods. The gods, understandably enough, became enraged at such a lack of humility. In the end, Zeus decided to punish humans by cutting them in half (“like eggs which are cut with hair”) in order to reinstall their sense of modesty.

As a result of this dissection, humans lost much of their strength. They now only had one face, two arms, and two legs. Their confidence vanished with their prowess. Most important, they were filled with a desperate longing to reunite with the half of themselves that they had lost. If the two halves happened to meet, Aristophanes tells us, they threw their arms around each other and embraced in a hopeless effort to grow together again. Their yearning to be merged was so inconsolable that they gradually perished of hunger and complete neglect of all their basic needs. For all his wrath, Zeus did not want humans to die (for this would have left the gods without worshippers). He consequently asked Apollo to move their genitals to the front of their bodies so as to make it possible for them to come together on a temporary (yet recurring) basis. In this way, according to the myth, humans lost their originary sense of wholeness but gained the capacity to reexperience it in fleeting moments of sexual union.

This is essentially a story about the birth of sexual desire. But it is also a fascinating portrayal of the sentiment of wanting to be welded together with another human being that we are taught to associate with “true” love. It gives us a mythological rendering of why it is that we tend to think that love will restore us to a state of self-completion that we imagine we once possessed. It is as if we secretly believed that, like the humans of Aristophanes’s story, we have been unfairly robbed of our strength and self-sufficiency and therefore need the compensations of romantic love to reclaim our full humanity. The story clarifies, in a figurative way, why love appears to answer to a yearning in us that we are keenly aware of yet often cannot name or fully express. It explains why love sometimes seems to heal a wound that we were not even entirely conscious of having prior to meeting the person we love.

However, we might as well admit that the idea of an originary wholeness that we have somehow lost in the process of living is exactly what Aristophanes depicts it to be: a myth. In other words, feeling lacking (incomplete and less than perfect) is an important part of what it means to be human. There is no cure for this lack, for the fact is that we never had two faces, four arms, or four legs. There was no wrath of the gods. And there was no primordial dissection at the vengeful hands of Zeus. We were born into this world in a state of vulnerability, and no matter how big a portion of our lives we devote to the attempt to build a personal fortress of safety and certainty, existential security is something that will always in the end elude us.

We might be somewhat consoled if we realized that it is exactly this lack of security that makes us the complex and captivating entities we are—that adds a tragic, poignant, and haunting kind of fragility to human life. Without our vulnerability, we would not be half as interesting as we are. We would, for instance, not be able to approach others with the same degree of empathy or understanding, for our capacity for compassion arises in part from our appreciation of our own acute woundability. Our frailty and existential terror allow us to respond to the frailties and terrors of others. And our moments of weakness make us more tolerant of the weaknesses of those we love. In this sense, our woundability is what lends our characters much of their emotional resonance. It grants us the kind of delicate discernment that enables us to relate to others in caring, thoughtful, and responsible ways. On this view, the attempt to heal ourselves by overcoming our sense of lack might be a largely misguided use of our energies. Such energies might be better spent in learning to value the interpersonal gifts that our brittleness bestows upon us.

Likewise, it might help us to recognize that it is exactly because we feel that we are somehow inherently lacking that we are driven to the kind of inventiveness that characterizes human life at its richest. More specifically, it is precisely because we judge something to be missing from our lives that we feel compelled to conjure up imaginary worlds of possibility. Such worlds, in turn, add vigor and weightiness to human existence on its various levels: the arts, the sciences, institutional structures, politics, religion, and relational arrangements, to name a few. In this sense, the innovative energy that propels human existence—that induces us, over and over again, to reach for the heights of achievement—emerges, in part at least, from our inconsolable awareness of our own deficiency.

One could then argue that much of what we find most worthwhile in the world comes to us from our sense of lack, for it is our repeated attempts to fill this lack that bring into being things of considerable beauty and magnificence. If we felt no lack, we might also not feel any need to compensate for it; we might not feel any urge to create anything new. We might in fact not even have much curiosity about the world and its offerings, for our self-sufficiency would render the world uninteresting. According to this account, it is our lack that not only encourages us to invent imaginary worlds, but also allows us to meet the existing world as a place that might have something of value to offer to us.

Unfortunately, most of us are not used to thinking about our lack as something that vitalizes our existence. Rather, we are prone to experience it as an aching wound in need of mending. And we tend to look to romantic love as our cure and deliverance. In so doing, we sometimes get caught in the web of one of love’s most powerful illusions, namely, the idea that another person can conjure away our lack. We in fact place an impossible burden on the person we love, for we ask him or her to grant us the kind of plenitude that is inherently forbidden to us. We ask him or her to accomplish what no one can for the simple reason that human beings are not designed to feel unassailable and entirely self-contained.

It is the very essence of the human condition to never be able to experience the kind of healing union that Aristophanes talks about. This does not mean that romantic love cannot make us feel more self-realized. Or that it cannot alleviate our feelings of alienation. Or that it cannot give us relief from past injuries, grievances, and disappointments. The tender solicitude of a beloved person can go a long way in compensating for the ordeals of life. And certainly, as we will see later, it brings us alive in ways that few other experiences do. However, to the extent that it is our existential assignment as human beings to feel lacking, even love—no matter how loving—cannot make us feel completely whole.

One of the most intriguing implications of Aristophanes’s account is that even though Western society holds individuality in high regard, many of us seem to find it quite difficult to bear. On one level, we value the idea of being singular creatures. We may even take pride in our quirks and peculiarities, asserting our right to carve a distinctive path through life. Yet, to the degree that we seek wholeness through those we love, we experience a separation from them as a gaping wound in need of repair. Our fantasies of being able to attain wholeness through a union with others can in fact be so powerful that they come to determine the entire direction of our love lives. At the same time, if we were ever to reach this wholeness, we would lose much of what makes us human—we would lose the raw edge of vulnerability that holds us open to others to begin with. We of course know this. Yet we often cannot help but to yearn for invulnerability.

The Beloved as Mirror

Aristophanes’s myth also highlights another, closely related, aspect of love that often misleads us: the fact that our desire tends to be highly narcissistic. In the myth, each lover yearns to be reunited with the lost half of himself—the half that was severed due to Zeus’s dissection. Although on the surface it may appear that the lover is seeking to fuse with another individual, a deeper look reveals that he is merely aspiring to recover lost facets of his own being. This illustrates what many of us long for in romantic love, namely, the chance to discover dimensions of ourselves in the person we love. All too often we try to turn the other into a flattering mirror that reflects back to us a pleasing image of ourselves. The objective of this kind of love is less to bring two autonomous individuals into a loving alliance than to gratify our longing for narcissistic self-completion. The goal is less to revere the beloved than to fulfill our fantasy of self-actualization.

In real life, the narcissistic undertones of romantic love are usually less overt than in Aristophanes’s story. We are rarely literally or consciously seeking a lost half of ourselves. Yet few of us can deny that we are, on some level, hoping that our lover will reinforce our sense of self, and perhaps even make up for some of our deficiencies. We may look for a partner who complements us because he or she possesses characteristics that we do not have. Or we may be attracted to someone who is able to draw out and galvanize disavowed dimensions of our being. This is not necessarily inherently problematic. As a matter of fact, later in this book I will argue that a loving encounter between two people can enrich both precisely because it helps each bring to life repressed components of his or her personality. However, love that is primarily narcissistic is more or less fated to deplete both lover and beloved.

One of the most obvious problems with narcissistic love is that it does not respect the specificity of the beloved’s being. If the lover’s aim, however unconsciously, is to use the beloved as a gratifying mirror, then any aspect of her that obscures the clarity of the image he seeks becomes a nuisance—something to be overlooked, covered over, or pushed aside. The lover, in short, concentrates on certain of the beloved’s attributes at the expense of others that might complicate the picture. He is so focused on his own augmentation that only those of the beloved’s characteristics that directly prop up his self-regard are acceptable to him. Over time, he builds a one-dimensional image of her that does not reflect her self-understanding. She may feel admired and even raised on a pedestal, but she also senses that she is being deprived of her personhood—of what she, in the intricacy of her being, is or has the promise to become.

While such containment is at times blatant, more often it takes the form of a subtle and indirect (and therefore all the more insidious) denigration that makes the beloved feel oddly censured or disparaged for who she is. This can over time curb her self-expression to such an extent that she comes to feel suffocated within the relationship without knowing why this is the case. She gradually gets the impression that unless she embodies specific traits—unless she fits into the design of her lover’s life in precise ways that meet some predetermined (yet often unarticulated) ideal of his—she is worthless in his eyes. She may even attempt to locate the cause of her wretchedness within herself, for she does not necessarily understand that there is absolutely nothing wrong with her particular qualities, but that the problem is, rather, that these qualities do not meet the narcissistic fantasies of her lover. In such instances, there is next to nothing that the beloved can do to fix things, for no matter how she chooses to act, no matter how diligently she tries to improve herself, she will never be good enough for her lover. What he is looking for is an idealized image that coincides seamlessly with his wants and desires. This is something that she can never be.

The Pitfalls of Narcissism

I have here talked about the beloved as a woman because it is women who have traditionally—more often than men—been expected to impersonate the mirror. They have been taught to erase their personalities in order to provide a lucid and uncluttered surface for men’s narcissistic fantasies. They have been asked to conceal or downplay the particularities of their being so as to more accurately reflect men’s desire. It may in fact be that our culture associates women with mirrors—and with the vanity and narcissistic superficiality that mirrors imply—in part because women have had to stifle the idiosyncratic vitality of their personalities in order to turn themselves into the flat (safe and reassuring) mirror that is demanded of them. As Virginia Woolf once remarked: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

This may account for the stiff formality and self-consciousness of some feminine self-presentations, for the more a woman internalizes the role of a mirror, the less her individuality and characteristic spontaneity remain visible to others. The self as mirror is an artificial self, an empty and well-defended shell that is constructed to please the outside world, but that does not reflect the individual’s passions or deep personality. Indeed, such a contrived self is designed to conceal everything that is most eccentric about the woman so that nothing offends, nothing stands out of place or alarms. Like the softly lit mirrors of exclusive hotels and restaurants, such a woman reflects back to her lover an image of himself that he wishes to see: more flawless, more appealing, and considerably more charming than the one he meets in his own bathroom mirror on Monday morning.

In today’s society, where traditional gender roles and inequalities have thankfully eroded (even if they are far from being abolished), it might be misleading to analyze narcissism along gendered lines. It may well be that many women are, these days, as guilty of it as men are. Furthermore, narcissism penalizes both lover and beloved, albeit in different ways. If the beloved is drained of her inner complexity, the narcissistic lover also narrows his life-world because he tends to sideline those aspects of his personality that do not correspond to his idealized image of himself. He tends to overlook or actively spurn those of his characteristics that do not comfortably fit within the frame of his mirror. Over time, he becomes a drastically impoverished version of what he could be if only he allowed himself to disobey his own ideal. Although the unconscious goal of narcissistic love is to enhance the lover’s self-esteem, its actual result is frequently to fix him into an identity that leaves little room for improvisation.

What is more, such a lover tends to be so dedicated to locating a partner who meets his narcissistic needs that he may get utterly trapped in an unachievable fantasy. He may become attached to an overly specific image of desirability, looking for the kind of woman he will never find for the simple reason that she does not exist in the real world. She is a fantasy that has a viable life only in his mind. A man in this predicament finds that every woman disillusions, disappoints, or falls short in one way or another. Even a woman who initially seems to correspond to his specifications will in the final analysis prove herself undeserving and unremarkable.

Such a pattern of relating keeps the narcissistic lover from embracing the real-life options available to him. He is so focused on attaining his ideal that he forgets to live in the present, shunning the opportunities and possible loves that come his way because they do not live up to the precision of his expectations. Instead of relishing what he could in fact achieve—such as a loving connection that is rewarding without being perfect—he allows himself to be swept into mesmerizing delusions that prevent him from fully entering the stream of his existence. Because such delusions direct his attention to the hazy horizon of what might one day come to pass if only certain conditions were miraculously fulfilled, they hold him at a safe distance from having to actually live his life; they serve as a highly sophisticated defense against the tangible tumult of dwelling in the world. One could even say that they signify a peculiar kind of cowardice, for a person caught up in an unattainable ideal can convince himself that he never has to make a decision or commit to an action.

Making a decision or committing to an action is intrinsically hazardous. One could always be wrong. One’s decision or action could have disastrous consequences. Against this backdrop, nothing is more reassuring than ideals that cannot be achieved, that can forever be approached but never actually attained. Such ideals offer a paradoxical kind of protection against existential mistakes because they detach us from the (admittedly byzantine) task of living. But the flip side of this is that they also serve as a convoluted means of reducing the stakes of our existence. When only those encounters or amorous possibilities that resonate with our ideals register on our emoti...