The Course of Love

Irreconcilable Desires

He longs, firstly, for safety. Sunday nights in winter often feel particularly cozy somehow, with the four of them seated around the table eating Kirsten’s pasta, William giggling, Esther singing. It’s dark outside. Rabih has his favorite German pumpernickel bread. Afterwards there’s a game of Monopoly, a pillow fight, then a bath, a story, and bedtime for the children. Kirsten and Rabih climb into bed, too, to watch a film; they hold hands under the duvet, just as they did at the start, though now the rest is down to an almost embarrassed peck on the lips as the end credits roll, and both are asleep ten minutes later, secure and cocooned.

But he yearns, also, for adventure. Six thirty on those rare, perfect summer evenings in Edinburgh, when the streets smell of diesel, coffee, fried foods, hot tarmac, and sex. The pavements are crowded with people in cotton print dresses and loose-fitting jeans. Everyone sensible is heading home, but for those sticking around, the night promises warmth, intrigue and mischief. A young person in a tight top—perhaps a student or a tourist—passes by and confides the briefest of conspirational smiles, and in an instant everything seems within reach. In the coming hours, people will enter bars and discos, shout to make themselves heard over the throb of the music, and—buoyed by alcohol and adrenaline—end up entwined with strangers in the shadows. Rabih is expected back at the house to begin the children’s bath time in fifteen minutes.

Our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions. Yet what is worse is our utopian refusal to countenance the divergence, our naive hope that a cost-free synchronization might somehow be found: that the libertine might live for adventure while avoiding loneliness and chaos. Or that the married Romantic might unite sex with tenderness, and passion with routine.

Lauren texts Rabih to ask if they might speak online sometime. She would like to hear and ideally see him again: words just aren’t enough.

There’s a wait of ten days before Kirsten has something planned that will take her out of the house at night. The children keep him busy until it’s nearly time, and then, due to a weak Wi-Fi signal, he’s confined to the kitchen for the duration of the call. He has already checked to make sure, repeatedly, that neither Esther nor William is in need of a glass of water, but he turns to look at the door every few minutes anyway, just in case.

He’s never used FaceTime before, and it takes a while for him to get it set up. Two women are now in different ways relying on him. A few minutes and three passwords later, Lauren is suddenly there, as if she were waiting inside the computer all along.

“I miss you,” she says right away. It’s a sunny morning in Southern California.

She’s sitting in her kitchen—living room, wearing a casual blue striped top. She’s just washed her hair. Her eyes are playful and alive.

“I made coffee; do you want some?” she asks.

“Sure, and some toast.”

“You like it with butter, I seem to remember? Coming right up.”

The screen flickers for an instant. This is how love affairs will be conducted when we’ve colonized Mars, he thinks.

Infatuations aren’t delusions. That way they have of holding their head may truly indicate someone confident, wry, and sensitive; they really may have the humor and intelligence implied by their eyes and the tenderness suggested by their mouth. The error of the infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind the central truth of human nature: that everyone—not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts—but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings.

The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better.

When the image returns, he can just make out, in a far corner, what looks to be a drying rack with a few pairs of socks hung on it.

“By the way, where’s the reach-over-and-touch-your-lover button on this thing?” she wonders aloud.

He’s very much at her mercy. All she would need to do was look up his wife’s e-mail on the Edinburgh Council Web site and drop her a line.

“It’s right here on mine,” he replies.

In an instant his mind shoots forward to a possible future with Lauren. He imagines living with her in L.A. in that apartment, after the divorce. They would make love on the couch, he would cradle her in his arms, they’d stay up late talking about their vulnerabilities and longings and would drive over to Malibu to eat shrimp at a little place she’d know by the ocean. But they’d also need to put out the laundry, wonder who would fix the fuses, and get cross because the milk ran out.

It’s in part because he likes her a lot that he really doesn’t want this to go any further. He knows himself well enough to realize how unhappy he would ultimately make her. In light of all he understands about himself and the course of love, he can see that the kindest thing he can do to someone he truly likes is to get out of the way fast.

Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.

“I miss you,” she says again.

“Likewise. I’m also intently staring at your laundry back there over your shoulder. It’s very pretty.”

“You mean and perverted man!”

To develop this love story—one logical consequence of his enthusiasm—would in reality end up being the most self-centered and uncaring thing he could do to Lauren, not to mention his wife. Real generosity, he recognizes, means admiring, seeing through the urge for permanence, and walking away.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to say . . . ,” Rabih begins.

As he talks through his reservations, she is patient with his stumbles and what she calls his tendency towards “Middle Eastern sugarcoating,” throws in some humor about being fired as his mistress, but is gracious, decent, understanding, and, above all, kind.

“There aren’t many people like you on the earth,” he concludes, and he means it.

What guided him in Berlin was the sudden hope of bypassing some of the shortcomings of his marriage by means of a new but contained foray into someone else’s life. But as he perceives it now, such hope could only ever have been sentimental claptrap and a form of cruelty in which everyone involved would stand to lose and be hurt. There could be no tidy settlement possible in which nothing would be sacrificed. Adventure and security are irreconcilable, he sees. A loving marriage and children kill erotic spontaneity, and an affair kills a marriage. A person cannot be at once a libertine and a married Romantic, however compelling both paradigms might be. He doesn’t downplay the loss either way. Saying good-bye to Lauren means safeguarding his marriage but it also means denying himself a critical source of tenderness and elation. Neither the love rat nor the faithful spouse gets it right. There is no solution. He is in tears in the kitchen, sobbing more deeply than he has in years: about what he has lost, what he has endangered, and how punishing the choices have been. He has just about enough time to compose himself between the moment the key turns in the lock and Kirsten enters the kitchen.

The weeks that follow will prove a mixture of relief and sadness. His wife will ask him on a couple of occasions if anything is wrong, and the second time he will make a great effort to adjust his manner so that she won’t have to ask him again.

Melancholy isn’t always a disorder that needs to be cured. It can be a species of intelligent grief which arises when we come face-to-face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start.

We have not been singled out. Marrying anyone, even the most suitable of beings, comes down to a case of identifying which variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the altar, a couple would speak thus: “We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.”

After the solemn repetition of the last sentence by the congregation, the couple would continue: “We will endeavor to be faithful. At the same time, we are certain that never being allowed to sleep with anyone else is one of the tragedies of existence. We apologize that our jealousies have made this peculiar but sound and non-negotiable restriction very necessary. We promise to make each other the sole repository of our regrets rather than distribute them through a life of sexual Don Juanism. We have surveyed the different options for unhappiness, and it is to each other we have chosen to bind ourselves.”

Spouses who had been cheated upon would no longer be at liberty furiously to complain that they had expected their partner to be content with them alone. Instead they could more poignantly and justly cry, “I was relying on you to be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness which our hard-won marriage represents.”

Thereafter, an affair would be a betrayal not of intimate joy but of a reciprocal pledge to endure the disappointments of marriage with bravery and stoic reserve.