The Course of Love

Sulks

For a good while, everyone else feels superfluous to them. They don’t want to see any of the friends on whom they each depended in the long years before their meeting. But then guilt and a renewed curiosity gradually get the better of them. In practice this means seeing more of Kirsten’s friends, as Rabih’s are scattered around the world. Kirsten’s Aberdeen University gang congregate in the Bow Bar on Fridays. It’s way across town from their flat but it offers a great range of whiskies and craft beers—although, on the night Kirsten persuades Rabih to visit, he settles for a sparkling water. It’s not because of his religion specifically, he has to explain (five times); he’s just not really in the mood for a drink.

“ ‘Husband and wife’! Wow!” says Catherine, a trace of mockery in her voice. She is against marriage and responds best to people who confirm her bias. Of course, the phrase husband and wife still sounds a bit odd to Rabih and Kirsten as well. They likewise often place the titles in ironic quotation marks to mitigate their weight and incongruity, for they don’t feel anything like the sort of people they tend to associate with the words, which evoke characters far older, more established, and more miserable than they take themselves to be. “Mrs. Khan is here!” Kirsten likes to call out when she comes home, playing with a concept that remains only distantly believable to either of them.

“So, Rabih, where do you work?” asks Murray, who is gruff, bearded, in the oil industry, and a onetime admirer of Kirsten’s at university.

“At an urban-design firm,” Rabih tells him, and feels distinctly like a girl, as he does sometimes in the presence of more solid males. “We do civic spaces and spatial zoning.”

“Hang on, mate,” says Murray, “you’ve lost me already.”

“He’s an architect,” Kirsten clarifies. “He’s done houses and offices as well. And hopefully he’ll do more when the economy picks up again.”

“I see: Sitting out the recession in these dark parts of the kingdom, are we, before bursting back into the limelight to put up the next Great Pyramid of Giza?”

Murray chortles a bit too loudly at his own unfunny jibe, but it’s not this that bothers Rabih; rather, it’s the way Kirsten joins in, cradling in her hand what remains of her pint, inclining her head towards her old college buddy and laughing heartily along with him, as though something quite amusing really has been said.

Rabih stays quiet on the way home, then claims he’s tired, answers with the famous “Nothing” when asked what’s wrong, and—once they are inside the flat, which still smells of fresh paint—heads into the den with the sofa bed in it and slams the door shut behind him.

“Oh, come on!” she says, raising her voice to be heard. “At least tell me what’s going on.”

To which he replies, “Fuck you, leave me alone.” Which is sometimes how fear can sound.

Kirsten brews herself some tea, then goes to the bedroom, insisting to herself—not entirely truthfully—that she has no idea what her new husband (who truly did look an odd sight in the Bow Bar) can possibly be so upset about.

At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.

Eventually she gets out of bed and knocks at the door of the den. Her mother always said one should never go to bed on an argument. She is still telling herself that she does not understand what’s up. “Darling, you’re behaving as if you were two years old. I’m on your side, remember? At least explain what’s wrong.”

And inside the narrow room crammed with books about architecture, the oversized toddler turns over on the sofa bed and can think of nothing beyond the fact that he will not relent—that and, irrelevantly, how strange seem the words stamped in silver foil along the spine of a book on a nearby shelf: MIES VAN DER ROHE.

It’s an unusual situation for him to be in. He always tried very hard, in past relationships, to be the one who cared a little less, but Kirsten’s buoyancy and steeliness have cast him in the opposite role. It’s his turn now to lie awake and fret. Why did all her friends hate him? What does she see in them? Why didn’t she step in to help and defend him?

Sulking pays homage to a beautiful, dangerous ideal that can be traced back to our earliest childhoods: the promise of wordless understanding. In the womb, we never had to explain. Our every requirement was catered to. The right sort of comfort simply happened. Some of this idyll continued in our first years. We didn’t have to make our every requirement known: large, kind people guessed for us. They saw past our tears, our inarticulacy, our confusions: they found the explanations for discomforts which we lacked the ability to verbalize.

That may be why, in relationships, even the most eloquent among us may instinctively prefer not to spell things out when our partners are at risk of failing to read us properly. Only wordless and accurate mind reading can feel like a true sign that our partner is someone to be trusted; only when we don’t have to explain can we feel certain that we are genuinely understood.

When he can’t bear it any longer, he tiptoes into their bedroom and sits on her side of the bed. He is planning to wake her up but thinks better of it when he sees her intelligent, kind face at rest. Her mouth is slightly open and he can hear the faintest sound of her breathing; the fine hairs on her arm are visible in the light from the street.

It’s cool but sunny the next morning. Kirsten gets up before Rabih and prepares two boiled eggs, one for each of them, along with a basket of neatly cut soldiers. She looks down at the willow tree in the garden and feels grateful for the dependable, modest, everyday things. When Rabih enters the kitchen, sheepish and disheveled, they start off in silence, then end up by smiling at each other. At lunchtime he sends her an e-mail: “I’m a bit mad, forgive me.” Although she’s waiting to go into a council meeting, she replies swiftly: “It would be v. boring if you weren’t. And lonely.” The sulk is not mentioned again.

We would ideally remain able to laugh, in the gentlest way, when we are made the special target of a sulker’s fury. We would recognize the touching paradox. The sulker may be six foot one and holding down adult employment, but the real message is poignantly retrogressive: “Deep inside, I remain an infant, and right now I need you to be my parent. I need you correctly to guess what is truly ailing me, as people did when I was a baby, when my ideas of love were first formed.”

We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favor when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea that it’s patronizing to be thought of as younger than we are; we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with—and forgive—the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within.