The Course of Love

Secrets

No relationship could start without a commitment to wholehearted intimacy. But in order for love to keep going, it also seems impossible to imagine partners not learning to keep a great many of their thoughts to themselves.

We are so impressed by honesty that we forget the virtues of politeness; a desire not always to confront people we care about with the full, hurtful aspects of our nature.

Repression, a degree of restraint, and a little dedication to self-editing belong to love just as surely as a capacity for explicit confession. The person who can’t tolerate secrets, who in the name of “being honest” shares information so wounding to the other that it can never be forgotten—this person is no friend of love. And if we suspect (as we should regularly if our relationship is a worthy one) that our partner is also lying (about what she’s thinking of, how he judges our work, where she was last night, etc.), then we would do well not to act the sharp and relentless inquisitor. It may be kinder, wiser, and closer to the true spirit of love to pretend we simply didn’t notice.

For Rabih, there is no alternative but to lie forever about what happened in Berlin. He has to because he knows that telling the truth would beget an even greater order of falsehood: the profoundly mistaken belief that he no longer loves Kirsten or else that he is a man who can no longer be trusted in any area of life. The truth risks distorting the relationship far more than the untruth.

In the wake of the affair, Rabih adopts a different view of the purpose of marriage. As a younger man he thought of it as a consecration of a special set of feelings: tenderness, desire, enthusiasm, longing. However, he now understands that it is also, and just as importantly, an institution, one which is meant to stand fast from year to year without reference to every passing change in the emotions of its participants. It has its justification in stabler and more enduring phenomena than feelings: in an original act of commitment impervious to later revisions and, more notably, in children, a class of beings constitutionally uninterested in the daily satisfactions of those who created them.

For most of recorded history, people stayed married because they were keen to fit in with the expectations of society, had a few assets to protect, and wanted to maintain the unity of their families. Then gradually another, very different standard took hold: couples were to remain together, ran the thought, only so long as certain feelings still obtained between them—feelings of authentic enthusiasm, desire, and fulfillment. In this new Romantic order, spouses could be justified in parting ways if the marital routine had become deadening, if the children were getting on their nerves, if sex was no longer enticing, or if either party had lately been feeling a little unhappy.

The more Rabih appreciates how chaotic and directionless his feelings are, the more sympathetic he grows to the idea of marriage as an institution. At a conference, he might spy an attractive woman and want to throw away everything for her sake, only to recognize two days later that he would prefer to be dead than without Kirsten. Or, during protracted rainy weekends, he might wish that his children might grow up and leave him alone until the end of time so he could read his magazine in peace—and then a day later, at the office, his heart would tighten with grief because a meeting threatened to overrun and get him home an hour too late to put the kids to bed.

Against such a quicksilver backdrop, he recognizes the significance of the art of diplomacy, the discipline of not necessarily always saying what one thinks and not doing what one wants in the service of greater, more strategic ends.

Rabih keeps in mind the contradictory, sentimental, and hormonal forces which constantly pull him in a hundred crazed and inconclusive directions. To honor every one of these would be to annul any chance of leading a coherent life. He knows he will never make progress with the larger projects if he can’t stand to be, at least some of the time, inwardly dissatisfied and outwardly inauthentic—if only in relation to such passing sensations as the desire to give away his children or end his marriage over a one-night stand with an American urban planner with exceptionally attractive grey-green eyes.

For Rabih it is assigning too great a weight to his feelings to let them be the lodestars by which his life must always be guided. He is a chaotic chemical proposition in dire need of basic principles to which he can adhere during his brief rational spells. He knows to feel grateful for the fact that his external circumstances will sometimes be out of line with what he experiences in his heart. It is probably a sign that he is on the right track.