Alison Leslie Gold
LOVE IN THE SECOND ACT
274pp. Jeremy P. Tarcher. $26.95.
1 585 42466 8
Janet Reibstein
THE BEST KEPT SECRET
Men and women’s stories of lasting love
320pp. Bloomsbury. Paperback, £12.99.
0 747 57806 0
Yvonne Roberts
WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?
Reviving a marriage in twelve months
320pp. Short Books. £14.99.
1 904 97742 1
Marriage, in many texts, brings the story to a close. This stems in part from the delusion that something is settled, with the path ahead swept clean for contentment; but it also flags up marriage as a contract to forgo any further romantic plots. During the past fifty or so years, such closure has invited protest, first in the literature of angry young men that baulks at the stifling demands of the women in the home, and subsequently, in feminist literature that exposes the constraints of the housewife’s roles.
Three new books suggest a shift from weighing up the constraints of marriage towards renewed appreciation of its comforts. But this reappraisal takes place in a context in which love, rather than social or financial considerations, sustains a marriage, and in which love seems easily lost.
So we need to ask: is love available to us throughout our lives? Can a couple preserve love beyond the initial compelling attraction? Can we retrieve love from either the thunderous anger of clashing wills, or what Samuel Johnson chillingly described as “the dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint and too numerous for removal”?
Alison Leslie Gold is an eloquent, engaged writer, who grapples with the question of whether romantic love is possible for people who have reached or passed through “that juncture of midlife when the knack for self-deception has weakened and the face in the mirror is no longer quite our own”. In Love in the Second Act, Gold chases down stories of love beyond youth, and of love acts that express physical adoration for physiques that no one would call adorable. She listens to people aged fifty and over describe the puzzling and ridiculous power of sex, the acute vulnerability to rejection from someone they desire, the breath-taking sense of homecoming when happenstance presents them with a person they identify as “the one”. She eschews familiar tales of midlife crisis, with its subsequent ridicule and exposé, and instead listens for the ordinary repertoire of romance, with its excitement and self-consciousness.
Yet, for all the sensitivity of her writing, Gold continues to be bound by some of the old formulas. The real challenge of following love beyond midlife is to revolutionize our understanding of the sources of desire, pulling away from the increasingly dominant tropes of evolutionary psychology towards the enduring and mutable power of human attachment. She fails to challenge the assumption that for a woman to grow old is to disassociate herself from personal appeal. Gold catches sight of her own ageing face, and can accept this new persona only because she sees it as a variation on the face of the actress Helen Mirren. She misses the opportunity to explore how people learn to name themselves and their purpose and their power beyond youth and without beauty.
In Janet Reibstein’s The Best Kept Secret, preserving the love we already have takes precedence over its initial triggers. All happy families, according to the familiar opening sentence of Anna Karenina, may be alike, but the underpinning practices of that harmony have not been recorded. Reibstein insists that happy couples are neither a rare nor a dying breed; but, she argues, there is a general ignorance, exacerbated by the high profile of marital breakdown and discord, of “the insatiable, ongoing, time-honoured, and even animal need to be in a happy, secure, erotic and deepening union with one other person”.
Such needs are not passively met; couples in content, long-term relationships, whether married or unmarried, gay or straight, young or old, construct their love by little acts of will, sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious. These acts constitute the best-kept secret that Reibstein is intent on revealing. Like many revelations, the truths are ordinary and unsurprising, the sort we think we already know. In a happy couple, each will minimize the flaws and highlight the virtues of the other; each appreciates what he or she has, and rarely focuses on what may be missing; empathy, or the ability partners have to tune into each other emotionally, to take a protective stance one towards the other, and each to be equally vulnerable to the other is, Reibstein argues, “pivotal to successful relationships”.
This grounded, detailed approach has the advantage of demystifying lasting love which, Reibstein is careful to point out, is not merely a state of feeling but a quality of interaction; and how you behave is part of what keeps love alive or lets it die. She is not sanguine about the challenges: the tension between individual freedom and commitment, the task of regenerating mutual interest and desire in the teeth of ordinary routine, the need for stability and security against the push for novelty, and the sheer difficulty of offering appropriate time and energy to another person in one’s own complicated life; but she retains faith in the responsiveness of love to good behaviour.
It is the possibility of sustaining marital decency that is called into question by Yvonne Roberts in her book Where Did Our Love Go? Roberts’s subtitle, Reviving a marriage in twelve months, is a hopeful rather than an accurate account of the marriage portrayed. Tom, thirty-five, and Ingrid, forty, were once in love and are now bonded by mutual love for a son and a litany of lamentations and reproaches. They have been married for seven years, sex is a distant memory, and each holds a criminal file on the other: You never spend time at home / you always shout at me / you drink too much / you never do any housework / you never look after the child. Yet each expresses a hope that the marriage can be saved, and agrees to let Roberts, flanked by two therapists, have a go.
The couple are coached by the team to follow Reibstein-esque rules: show appreciation and gratitude for what the other does; give the positive side of the relationship more weight than the negative side; be empathetic, take the other’s perspective. Yet their disappointment in one another and in themselves issues in a whirlwind of self-justification; their anger gives everything a false clarity, and each negates the other’s efforts. They prove, Roberts admits, “adept at turning the tools of recovery into weapons to further emotionally disembowel each other”.
The feeling that each partner gives equally is, both Reibstein and Roberts argue, essential to a happy relationship. But the process of weighing up interpersonal gifts itself is informed by love and gratitude on the one hand, or a perverse grudging stance on the other. Just listening to Ingrid and Tom argue about who contributes more money to the family’s expenses induces a headache: and money is something you can quantify. In the compelling and tacky television drama Desperate Housewives, Annette discovers that her husband Tom does not want a vasectomy because he wants further options, should she die. Appalled at this ability to conceive of life after her, she argues that as a husband, he should respond to her irrational fears by getting a vasectomy; and he agrees, accepting the argument that that’s what partners do for one another. When it comes to the crunch, however, he flees the doctor’s office, and demands that his wife accommodate his irrational fear of being castrated, unmanned by a vasectomy. And she has to concede that that’s what partners do for one another. But a couple in which each harbours a heightened sense of what the other owes one could never shift ground by taking the other’s perspective. Virginia Woolf registered quintessential romantic gratitude when she mused, “my heart stood still with pride that he had ever married me”.
But it is hard to be generous when you are deeply hurt, or terrified that what you value and once thought permanent is slipping away. Gratitude, an essential form of intimate generosity, cannot be summoned by an act of will. A crux of romance is the wonder we have for another person, for being chosen, for being seen as significant and interesting, for being able to presume we have a companion, or just someone who is usually on our side. Love offers endless fascination, and we keep catching new instances of its gravity and comedy. It is good to be reminded by Alison Leslie Gold of enduring possibilities of gaining and receiving love; and to be coached in Janet Reibstein’s etiquette of intimacy, so as to be equipped to protect a relationship’s delicate edges. After all, in a happy marriage, people are likely to have different temperaments, diverse opinions and mismatched desires, so the consequent damage from differences should be minimized. At the same time, a long-lasting marriage feels robust, and often invites debate and challenge and sometimes even bad behaviour, with rules negotiated only by the two players.
