The Course of Love

Transference

Two years into their marriage, Rabih’s job remains precarious, vulnerable to an unsteady workflow and clients’ sudden changes of mind. So he feels especially pleased when, at the start of January, the firm wins a large and long-term contract across the border in England, in South Shields, a struggling town two and a half hours southeast of Edinburgh by train. The task is to redevelop the quayside and a derelict hodgepodge of industrial sheds into a park, a café, and a museum to house a local maritime artifact, the Tyne, the second-oldest lifeboat in Britain. Ewen asks Rabih if he will head up the project—a distinct honor, yet one which also means that for half a year he will have to spend three nights a month away from Kirsten. The budget is tight, so he makes his base in South Shields’s Premier Inn, a modestly priced establishment sandwiched between a women’s prison and a goods yard. In the evenings he has supper by himself at the hotel restaurant, Taybarns, where a side of mutton sweats under the lamps of a carving station.

During his second visit there, the local officials prevaricate on assorted issues. Everyone is too terrified to make big decisions and blames delays on a range of incomprehensible regulations; it’s a miracle they have even managed to get this far. There’s a vein in Rabih’s neck that throbs at such moments. Shortly after nine, pacing the plastic carpet in his socks, he calls Kirsten from his maroon and purple room. “Teckle,” he greets her. “Another day of mind-numbing meetings and idiots from the council causing trouble for no good reason. I miss you so much. I’d pay a lot for a hug from you right now.” There’s a pause—he feels as if he could hear the miles that separate them—then she replies in a flat voice that he has to get his name put on the car insurance before the first of February, adding that the landlord also wants to speak to them about the drain, the one on the garden side—at which point Rabih repeats, gently but firmly, that he misses her and wishes they could be together. In Edinburgh, Kirsten is curled up at one end—“his” end—of the sofa, wearing his jumper, with a bowl of tuna and a slice of toast on her lap. She pauses again, but when she responds to Rabih, it is with a curt and administrative-sounding “Yes.” It’s a pity he can’t see that she is fighting back tears.

It isn’t the first such instance. Something similarly frosty happened the last time he was here, and once when he was in Denmark for a conference. That time he accused her of being odd on the phone. Now he is simply hurt. He only made a reasonable plea for warmth, and suddenly they seem to be in a stalemate. He looks out at the prison windows opposite. Whenever he’s away, he feels as if she were trying to put an even greater distance between them than that of land or water. He wishes he could find a way to reach her and wonders what could have caused her to become so remote and unavailable. Kirsten isn’t quite sure herself. She is looking with watery eyes at the bark of an old weathered tree just beyond the window, thinking with particular concentration about a file she’ll have to remember to take to work tomorrow.

The structure looks something like this: an apparently ordinary situation or remark elicits from one member of a couple a reaction that doesn’t seem quite warranted, being unusually full of annoyance or anxiety, irritability or coldness, panic or recrimination. The person on the receiving end is puzzled: after all, it was just a simple request for a loving good-bye, a plate or two left unwashed in the sink, a small joke at the other’s expense or a few minutes’ delay. Why, then, the peculiar and somehow outsized response?

The behavior makes little sense when one tries to understand it according to the current facts. It’s as if some aspect of the present scenario were drawing energy from another source, as if it were unwittingly triggering a pattern of behavior that the other person originally developed long ago in order to meet a particular threat which has now somehow been subconsciously re-evoked. The overreactor is responsible, as the psychological term puts it, for the “transference” of an emotion from the past onto someone in the present—who perhaps doesn’t entirely deserve it.

Our minds are, oddly, not always good at knowing what era they are in. They jump a little too easily, like an erstwhile victim of burglary who keeps a gun by the bed and is startled awake by every rustle.

What’s worse for the loved ones standing in the vicinity is that people in the throes of a transference have no easy way of knowing, let alone calmly explaining, what they are up to; they simply feel that their response is entirely appropriate to the occasion. Their partners on the other hand may reach a rather different and rather less flattering conclusion: that they are distinctly odd—and maybe even a little mad.

Kirsten’s father leaves her when she is seven. He walks out of the house without warning or explanation. On the very day before he goes, he plays at being a camel on the living room floor and carries her on his back around the sofa and armchairs. At bedtime he reads to her from a book of German folktales, those stories of lonely children and wicked stepmothers, of magic and of loss. He tells her they are only stories. And then he disappears.

There could have been many responses. Hers is not to feel. She can’t afford to. She is doing so well; that’s what everyone says—the teachers, her two aunts, the counselor she sees for a time. Her schoolwork actually improves. But she’s not even remotely coping inside: it takes a certain strength to cry, the confidence that one will eventually be able to staunch the tears. She doesn’t have the luxury of feeling just a little sad. The danger is that she might fall apart and never know how to put the pieces back together. To prevent the possibility, she cauterizes her wounds as best she can, aged seven.

She can now love (in her own way), but what she really can’t countenance is missing someone too much, not even if the person is only in a town a couple of hours to the southeast and is most definitely going to be returning home in a few days on the 18:22 train.

But of course she can’t explain or even quite grasp this habit of hers. It doesn’t make her popular at home. She would ideally have in her employ a guardian spirit with magical powers to pause the action just as Rabih begins to get annoyed, in order then to whisk him out of his budget hotel and bear him aloft, through the dense clouds of the lower atmosphere, to the Inverness of a quarter century before, where he could peer through the window of a little house and into the narrow bedroom in which a small girl in bear pajamas is sitting at her desk, coloring in squares on a large piece of paper with methodical precision, trying to hold on to her sanity, her mind blank from a sadness too overwhelming to admit.

If Rabih were presented with this picture of Kirsten’s stoic endurance, compassion would come naturally to him. He would understand the touching reasons for her reserve and would immediately quell his own hurt so as to offer her tender reassurance and sympathy.

But as there is no spirit waiting in the wings, and therefore no stirring sensory narrative cued up to illuminate Kirsten’s past, Rabih has only her affectless response to try to make sense of—a challenge that inspires in him a predictably irresistible temptation to judge and to take offense.

We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we’ve all but consciously forgotten. We behave according to an archaic logic which now escapes us, following a meaning we can’t properly lay bare to those we depend on most. We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in, with whom we are truly dealing, and what sort of behavior the person before us is rightfully owed. We can be a little tricky to be around.

Rabih is not so different from his wife. He, too, constantly interprets the present through the distortions of his past and is moved by obsolete and eccentric impulses which he cannot explain to himself or Kirsten.

What does it mean, for example, to come home from the office in Edinburgh and find in the hall a big pile of clothes which Kirsten planned to take to the dry cleaner’s but then forgot about and says she will get around to sometime in the next few days?

There’s one swift and leading answer for Rabih: that this is the onset of the chaos he fears and that Kirsten may have done this specifically to unnerve and wound him. Unable to follow her advice to leave the pile until the next day, he takes the clothes out himself (it’s seven at night) and then, on his return, spends half an hour noisily cleaning up the rest of the flat, paying particular attention to the muddle in the cutlery drawer.

The “chaos” is no small matter in Rabih’s mind. All too quickly his unconscious draws a connection between minor things that are out of place in the present and very major things that were once out of place in the past, such as the scarred hulk of the InterContinental Phoenicia Beirut hotel that he used to see from his bedroom; the bombed-out American embassy that he walked past every morning; the murderous graffiti that routinely appeared on the wall of his school and the late-night shouting he would hear between his mother and father. With complete clarity, he still sees today the black outline of the Cypriot refugee ship that finally took him and his parents out of the city on a dark January night, and the apartment that they later heard had been looted and now housed a family of Druze fighters, his room reportedly serving as an ammunition dump. There is a good deal of history in his hysteria.

In the present, Rabih may be living in one of the safer, quieter corners of the globe, with a wife who is fundamentally kind and committedly on his side, but in his mind Beirut, war, and the cruelest sides of human nature remain threats forever just out of his line of sight, always ready to color his interpretation of the meaning of a pile of clothes or an organizational erosion in the cutlery drawer.

When our minds are involved in transference, we lose the ability to give people and things the benefit of the doubt; we swiftly and anxiously move towards the worst conclusions that the past once mandated.

Unfortunately, to admit that we may be drawing on the confusions of the past to force an interpretation onto what’s happening now seems humbling and not a little humiliating: Surely we know the difference between our partner and a disappointing parent, between a husband’s short delay and a father’s permanent abandonment; between some dirty laundry and a civil war?

The business of repatriating emotions emerges as one of the most delicate and necessary tasks of love. To accept the risks of transference is to prioritize sympathy and understanding over irritation and judgment. Two people can come to see that sudden bursts of anxiety or hostility may not always be directly caused by them, and so should not always be met with fury or wounded pride. Bristling and condemnation can give way to compassion.

By the time Rabih gets back from his trip to England, Kirsten has reverted to some of the habits she indulged in when she lived on her own. She’s drunk a beer while having a bath and eaten cereal from a mug in bed. But soon enough their mutual desire and capacity for closeness reasserts itself. The reconciliation starts, as it often does, with a little joke which puts its finger on the underlying anxiety.

“Sorry to have interrupted you, Mrs. Khan. But I think I used to live here,” says Rabih.

“Definitely not. You must be looking for 34A, and this is 34B, you see. . . .”

“I think we once got married. Do you remember? That’s our child, Dobbie, over there in the corner. He’s very silent. Kind of like his mum.”

“I’m sorry, Rabih,” says Kirsten, turning serious. “I’m a bit of a bitch when you go away. I seem to be trying to punish you for leaving me, which is ridiculous, because you’re only trying to pay off our mortgage. Forgive me. I’m a bit of a nut job sometimes.”

Kirsten’s words act like an immediate balm. Rabih is flooded with love for his slightly inarticulate and very unself-righteous wife. Her insight is the best welcome-home present she could have given him, and the greatest guarantee of the solidity of their love. Neither he nor she have to be perfect, he reflects; they only need to give each other the odd sign they know they can sometimes be quite hard to live with.

We don’t need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.