Last week, we discussed romantic love [A Valentine for those who dream, Viewpoints, Feb. 8]. This week, as we move past Valentine’s Day, let’s talk about the troubled relationship between romantic and pragmatic love. My inspiration was listening to On Being last Sunday morning (WBEZ-FM, 7 a.m., rebroadcast Tuesday, 9 p.m.) as Krista Tippett interviewed novelist Alain de Botton, founder of The School of Life, whose opinion piece, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” was the most-read New York Times article of 2016.
To give you some idea of how de Botton approaches the subject, he states in that article: “In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: ‘And how are you crazy?’
In other words, the realist is firmly in charge as de Botton regards the landscape of modern love.
“We are strangely obsessed by the run up to love,” he told Tippett. “And what we call a love story is really just the beginning of a love story. Most of us [are] interested in long-term relationships. We’re not just interested in the moment that gets us into love; we’re interested in the survival of love over time.” Agreed.
He also said, “We must fiercely resist the idea that true love must mean conflict-free love, that the course of true love is smooth. It’s not. The course of true love is rocky and bumpy at the best of times. That’s the best we can manage as the creatures we are. It’s no fault of mine or no fault of yours; it’s to do with being human. And the more generous we can be toward that flawed humanity, the better chance we’ll have of doing the true hard work of love.”
A lot of what he says makes sense — that is to say, it appeals to the realist inside.
“If you say to people, ‘Look, love is a painful, poignant, touching attempt by two flawed individuals to try and meet each other’s needs in situations of gross uncertainty and ignorance about who they are and who the other person is, but we’re going to do our best,’ that’s a much more generous starting point,” he said. “So the acceptance of ourselves as flawed creatures seems to me what love really is. Love is at its most necessary when we are weak, when we feel incomplete, and we must show love to one another at those points.”
He adds, “Compatibility is an achievement of love. It cannot be its precondition” and “however well-matched, every couple will encounter these problems, that love is something we have to learn, and we can make progress with, and that it’s not just an enthusiasm; it’s a skill.”
De Botton even praises the notion of a “good enough” relationship. “That’s really good,” he said. “For a human, that’s brilliant. And that’s the attitude I think we should have.”
The realist in me is loving this. The romantic? Not so much. It’s good as far as it goes. The problem is it doesn’t go far enough. Accepting ourselves and our significant others as flawed individuals and becoming more generous with one another is sound advice and might make marriages more functional, but it can also be a prescription for sustaining marital mediocrity. This kind of arrangement leaves little room for genuine passion and romance. In fact, such notions are looked at askance — delusions of grandeur that work against our modest hopes for happiness.
Romanticism certainly can be delusional, but so can a “well-adjusted” relationship be a euphemism for emotional dormancy.
Not everyone is meant to have or even want a “great love,” but some of us are and do, and de Botton’s view doesn’t include that possibility.
“Romanticism has been unhelpful to us,” he concluded in his popular N.Y. Times op-ed last May. “It is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not ‘normal.’ We should learn to accommodate ourselves to ‘wrongness,’ striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.”
The problem I have is that he defines romantic exceptionalism with the greatest put-down a realist can muster: It’s not realistic because it expects love to be conflict-free and the lovers perfect. But I’m betting few great loves expect or experience smooth sailing. Indeed they may go through many trials and come through them largely because of a remarkable quality that the two individuals can’t really explain — a mystery larger than both of them.
De Botton accuses traditional romanticism of believing it should transcend the mundane, that the lovers never have to do the laundry. But perhaps he has never experienced the transcendent moments that are possible simply standing next to one another in a kitchen preparing a meal — finding the sacredness in the ordinary, which a great love allows.
He does allow that in “good enough” relationships, “there are islands and moments of beautiful connection, but we have to be modest about how often they’re going to happen.” He doesn’t seem to believe that couples might be capable of experiencing such moments more often than they do now.
Why do we have to be modest? The romantic in me insists that the extraordinary is accessible by every couple — because true love makes the extraordinary possible. This isn’t theoretical. It’s real.
The question then is: How do “pragmatic” lovers get in touch with their respective romantics to feed a greater, more intense connection — not with the expectation that one can live in that state forever, but with a realistic expectation that we can experience it more often than we do now, however flawed and imperfect we are?
My realist says, pragmatic love can co-exist with romantic love.
My romantic says, it must.