Ms. -----,
How’s life? I’m in Terra Haute, Indiana, doing who the hell knows what? Well, incidentally, I know what I’m doing and I have every intention of sharing this information with you. My father has business in the area and he likes having a travel-partner, who would be me. The value I saw in coming was to have a few days isolated from everyone where I would be able to start working on my thesis and do some various thinking I want to get out of the way. One example being this very letter being composed for your benefit (but, we both know its probably more for my benefit).
So, love? What’s up with this thing that gives people the crazies and forces unfortunate spectators to watch in uncensored horror and awe? For me, personally, love represents two contradictory sentiments that have not yet reconciled, and it appears will never sort out their apparent contradictions.
On the one hand, I feel that love is the one thing anyone can believe in, no matter what. Regardless of what your rugged individuality would have you believe, even he (or she) believes, to some extent in the possibility of a perfect compliment. Even if this person wants to deny this possibility he or she, if pressed, would be inclined to admit it possible that a perfect compliment exist. Given this possibility I would argue that a desire to locate this perfect compliment necessarily follows.
This is a matter of simple logic. It is not impossible that a perfect compliment exist thus it must be possible. As such, I think every person to some extent is a searcher or romanticist. We can imagine Billy Bad-ass who cares about no one and no thing. At some point it will occur to him that there could be a Bitchin’ Betty who would make everything he’s doing more fun. In this way I think we can see how love is a dream everyone has (with the stipulation that there are differing levels of desire for such a dream).
On the opposite pole, however, love is hell. At least, love can be hell. People do ridiculous things to themselves under the guise of love, the most relevant (this is to say dangerous) one being self-deception. In order to see what I mean, I want to look at how love functions.
As I see it, love is viewed as a complement to someone’s life. Let’s imagine Neil who falls in love with Sydney. In some fundamental way, I think Neil finds that there is some way that having Sydney in his life makes his life better. Thus we are inclined to say that Sydney adds something to Neil’s life. I think this is somehow inaccurate, however. In imagining your typical happy couple we are inclined to say that they complete each other, that they could not live without one another. This insinuates that Neil is not complete (as a person) until he’s fallen in love with Sydney. And we say this in such a way that Neil must “have Sydney in his life” in order to be a complete person.
However, here again, there is a problem. We can imagine that Neil is a complete person before meeting Sydney. In some way we want to maintain that Neil is both complete and ready to be made more complete.
What is it about someone that causes us to be in love with him/her? In an important sense each person lives in his or her own world. This is to say that there is, to a relevant extent, a way in which a person subjects reality to his or her own interpretation. This is necessary because of ambiguities which exist in language (see Wittgenstein for a more cogent view on this matter, though I’ll admit that this idea is based on an incomplete interpretation of W.). I think what allows two people to fall in love is that their worlds are linked in some way. This is to say that they way two people relate to the world must be related in some way in order for love to be possible at all. In most cases, I want to say that their worlds are going to be similar or almost exactly the same. However, I don’t think this is necessary. We know of two people with vastly different approached to reality who fall in love, and who seem to have lasting meaningful relationships.
I think the relationship between worlds has more to do with a way in which two worlds can add to one another. For, what are we inclined to say are strong characteristics of a strong love? I think one thing is having something to tell the other person at the end of the day that the other person is genuinely interested in. So Neil comes home and tells Sydney some anecdote or reflection from his day. Sydney is fascinated by this story. What is happening here? Neil is attempting to share his world with Sydney and Sydney wants Neil to share his world with her. Of course for a good relationship it will work both ways.
Going back to the idea of worlds, I think what happening in the above situation is an attempt of world-sharing with the appearance of success. I say attempt and appearance because I don’t think there’s any necessity that the sharing of worlds actually occur. If what I’ve said is true, then an important aspect of love is going to have to do with a desire to share one’s world with other people. Abandoning the language: an important aspect of love is a desire to be understood.
This reminds me of two examples. Plato wrote about how what we really want out of love is to create beautiful things, which for him meant having beautiful thoughts. On this conception of love, what we want is someone that we can develop with. This has worth, I think. Old couples often seem to derive strength from the fact that they have gone through a great deal of experiences together.
The other example that comes to mind is from a movie (Babbette’s Feast). At the end the main character remarks that what the artist wants is to be given a chance to do her (this was a female character) best. It seems to me what would make a good relationship is the chance to show one’s best-side and have it appreciated. In this sense we are all artists and what we want is a chance to do our best (at being ourselves). I can’t help but think of the Foo Fighters song with the line, “Is someone getting the best of you” (it might be “somebody” not “someone”).
On this conception, love will be a relationship in which Sydney appreciates that about Neil that he wants appreciated while Neil does the same for Sydney. And I think this helps to explain why many relationships fail. People cannot appreciate the “right” things about other people. What difference does it make to me if you think I look great, if I simply do not care about looks? However, how will I feel if you have no interest in my piano recital, which has been the central aim of my life for the last twelve months?
Here again we run into problems, though. There are plenty of relationships in which participants have no interest in one another’s careers (the husband of an engineer for instance probably has very little interest in the solution to the aerodynamics issue resolved on Tuesday). I think this can be accommodated. In situations where this is not an issue, careers are not a part of the “best” of a person, as the person wants to be appreciated in a relationship. Our engineer is only tangentially interested in her career. It is her day job, but it is not who she is. It is not an important part of her identity.
Finally, after playing around the issue for 4.5 pages, I think we’ve hit the central topic. What is important, what defines a love relationship is the interplay of identity between the two parties. In the best relationship I think we find that each person feels that the other is able to see and appreciate his/her identity.
In a bad relationship, there is going to be a misconstrual of identity. This is how people say things like, “I just felt like she never . This is how people say things like, “I just felt like she never saw me.” The other person failed to see my identity.
I think this also helps to explain why a relationship seems to go in a high-low-high-low pattern until it evens out. Neil constructs an identity he thinks Sydney has and falls in love with this identity. He gets to know her better and realizes his construction is wrong. Neil becomes disillusioned. However he reconstructs a conception of her identity and looks to see how accurate it is.
What happens in the fated relationships is the constructed identity becomes the actual identity (or close enough that there are no more significant surprises). He falls in love with Sydney’s actual identity. Meanwhile Sydney is going the same for Neil.
I think this explains why it is difficult to find a good relationship. In the above situation, Neil and Sydney are not changing. Neil is attempting to construct Sydney’s identity, however we have to take into account that Sydney is changing through this process. Furthermore, we’ve taken for granted that Neil and Sydney know what they want. The problem becomes that they are trying to determine if they want the other person (who is changing all the while) without knowing what they want.
I have more to say about this but this letter is already too long (for which I beg your apology, obviously this letter has been more of an exercise organizing my thoughts than an account of collected thoughts) and I’m suddenly fatigued by this whole thing. Problems which remain to be investigated include: whether it is possible that one’s construction of the other’s identity is correct on the first run; whether it is necessary to construct someone else’s identity; and how would this account accommodate long-term relationships (among other things). I hope this has at least been entertaining (though I know it probably hasn’t been).
Best regards,
Randy Fiedler
