The Secret Stead is the pen name of a UK-based writer and
When we take a look at love as the subject in books, we often realise that the romanticised view in literature fails to tell us the whole story, and that sometimes we confuse its metaphors with the real thing. No where is it more clear than in a love story that art is a perception that approximates, but does not replace, what we experience as reality.Romantic literature is a solace for the lovesick, and although it has the advantage of creating positive associations, few novels are really an insightful anatomy into the workings of love, suggests Alain de Botton in his weekly column for BBC News Magazine's A Point of View. Rather than the practicalities of love, the classic love story is more about the hindrance of two lovers struggling through obstacles to a union of the heart, the very axis on which love turns in such fantasies.
I'll put my hand up to confess that in my writings I'm guilty of the same folly in letting the heart dictate its own reality, too, because sometimes I can't help the way I feel; and I write about the way I feel. But just where exactly do our feelings come from?
The Heart of the Matter
Despite the cold, hard hand of conventional science wishing to shake us awake from this dream, when we converse with the language of love, we still believe we speak from the (slightly off-centre) muscle in our chests that ceaselessly pumps the blood around our bodies.
Sure, if you think with your head, a heart is just an organ that pumps blood. But if you think with your heart, you want to know that a heart is the core of human existence. There is a body of philosophy that argues a heart feels, emotes, and expresses. With a heart you can perceive, understand, and judge. Often, a heart is accorded more importance than the brain.
For centuries we have acquainted the heart with the start and the end of all life, and have preferred to heap all the different varieties of love at the feet of this symbolic icon of feeling. Many classical philosophers and scientists, including the white knight of reason Aristotle, considered the heart the seat of thought or emotion, often rejecting the value of the brain.
Surprisingly Shakespeare seems to choose the brain over the heart, in an explanation how of love can blinds us, at least in his play A Midsummer Night's Dream to express that, "Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind". However, the playwright has often been misquoted as having said, "Love sees with the heart, not with the mind", indicating that, on at least this point, the majority of us may not see eye to eye with the Bard.
The shape of the heart ♥ is also iconic of love, but again ironically it doesn't originate from the real shape of the organ beating in us. The shape we use today is suggested to have come from the seed of an extinct plant widely used throughout the Mediterranean as a herbal contraceptive in ancient times. It is thought attempts at domesticating a plant that only grew in the wild might have ultimately caused its end.
The irony of that resonates with me as a free spirit who has always feared domestication (aided in part by a diet of Western literature committed to the idea that love is killed by routine and stability). I once dated a girl from Paris who in our heated arguments would compare me to Mehmed II. He was an Ottoman ruler historians have labelled as heralding in the end of the Dark Ages, by conquering the Byzantine capital of the Holy Roman Empire, but, unfortunately for my ego, that wasn't what she had in mind when referring to me in her comparison with the Sultan.
She would remind me (with great delight as I recall) how I'd told her about French novelist Marcel Proust expounding the story of Mehmed the Conqueror, as he came to be known, who sensing that he was falling in love with one of his wives in his harem immediately had her killed, because he had no wish to live in spiritual bondage to another. According to her theory, like that Turkish conqueror of old, I kill my relationships before I let them enslave me.
An exquisite, fiery French woman with a flair for the melodramatic is fine for the purple prose of love, but it has been my own personal experience that when love takes on the form of a relationship, it gets weighted down by the shackles of reality and theatrical expectation. Love survives if a difference can be defused, and therefore passed over, without the need for melodrama. A sense of humour and a wish to compromise helps, but also the wisdom not to always question a loved one's judgement - because after all they did choose you. But then again, maybe I'm thinking with my head instead of my heart.
In the greatest love stories ever written, no one told us staying in love would be hard work, only falling in love, and changing the fortunes of unrequited love, required effort. This (heart) broken version of love taught by much of literature can leave us unprepared for real love, because what should happen after the happily ever after? Serving up a seed-shaped heart on a plate for Valentine's Day to the one we love is all well and good, but what are we meant to do if the plate is left empty?
Love Means Knowing When to Say Sorry
Real love is hard work. Sometimes there are profound lessons to learn, but sometimes love just hurts and you have to learn to live with it. People rarely die from a broken heart these days, and it is neither poetic nor exotic all the time. It's not just men that snore in their sleep, women snore, too. It's about compromise, about discussion, about how much to put under a child's pillow from the tooth fairy. It's wondering what to cook for that evening, and every other evening.
But is it being with someone for a certain amount of time that runs the risk of making love bland, or is it the attempt to live up to the expectations of the stories on love that make our real efforts seem less than real? Romance writers may feel it's dull, but real love is about the quest for everyday happiness. And the problem isn't just the danger of love becoming routine, but that we've been conditioned to believe that the person we fall in love with should be our other half of some metaphysical whole.
Literature and philosophy often focus on how we may be filled with the curious sense that we know already know a loved one soon after meeting them. We need to feel as though we've met them somewhere before, in a previous life perhaps, or in our dreams.
Botton's BBC column on the subject reminds us that this feeling of familiarity was discussed in a philosophical text by Plato, as our loved one being a long lost "other half" originally stuck together in one body. In Plato's Symposium, dialogue (suitably) from the comic relief suggests that Zeus severed human beings into two genders from the warring halves of one whole - with each man and woman yearning to rejoin the half from which he or she has been severed since that day.
However, how many of us feel as though we are in one mind and body with our loved one? It does happen; I feel lucky enough to say I have experienced that kind of spiritual mind sync with another, but usually love is frustrated because neither person in the relationship is a mind-reader or an expert mentalist. Achieving a mind sync isn't a guarantee to a happy forever after, either.
Relationships are messy, and love doesn't mean you won't differ on small matters of taste and opinion, or just because you love someone it doesn't mean you won't hurt them or blame them when things go wrong. Another of the most pervasive and unhelpful of all literary romantic myths is the idea that happy love must mean conflict-free love, especially when the author ends the story. In life, however, that is when the real story begins.
Shakespeare's Romeo might not have had much of a sense of humour, but, if our relationships are going to last longer than that of the star-crossed young lovers, we sure need one. The ability to laugh is the ability to accept your loved one for who they are, and to give them freedom to be who they are. And despite what a classic 1970s cinematic tale of love has told us, we should all know how to apologise in a relationship when necessary.
Love isn't Blind so Much as Blinkered
Ultimately though, we become so preoccupied with making our relationships work, we fail to understand that even if love doesn't completely blind us, it can blinker us to its real nature, which the best of us believe is an innate part of being human. We believe in love because we believe it's what makes us human. What can be more symbolic of our humanity than a muscle that controls the very pulse of us, which races in time to the emotions love invokes?
Science may be able show us in a laboratory that love is just a powerful genetic need to procreate, but when we read about love in romantic literature, we recognise that the best stories hold a mirror up to our human nature - a human need - that is more than just sex for the survival of the race. It's about connection. And isn't it possible that some writers have left the reader at the happy end to signify - as in real life - that the rest is up to us?
We read the stories of unrequited love to confirm what we all feel in the absence of love in our lives. We read about a love that conquers all, because it's a love we want to aspire to. We read these stories, because they have lessons to teach us about our own mortality.
On this topic, I'm reminded of a 1980s Twilight Zone episode where "a prince from below decks" comes to give a recently deceased songwriter a no-strings carte blanche gift if he will go below now and then to play the damned his music. When the songwriter is asked what he most desires in the entire universe, he replies to go back to his youth and make out with the girl of his dreams.
"Mortals," the prince replies with a nonchalant sigh, "it's always the same isn't it?"
Published 14 February, 2011
