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Relationships
The Unfulfilled Promise of Love
Is disillusionment inevitable?
Updated September 25, 2023 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
It is sometimes suggested that love stories in fiction must end either with “happily ever after” or with a tragedy, because a happy life “ever after” cannot be convincingly portrayed. For we know how the story would really end: The veil will be lifted, and the enamored eyes will become disillusioned. The once-transporting vision will vanish and be replaced by the plain and ordinary. Romeo and Juliet 20 years later won't brew a cup of coffee for each other, let alone die.
It is this idea that disillusionment in love is inevitable that interests me here. What are we to make of it?
The fiction case is not probative, because fiction must be engaging, and no one is interested in reading books about happy families living happily. (Just why that may be is another good question.)
What about real life?
There is a type of case I wish to bring up only to set it aside: disillusionment that precedes a breakup. Sometimes we find that a relationship was based on deception and self-deception. Perhaps, the other misrepresented him or herself and maybe so did we. One or both parties so badly wanted to be transported to an otherworldly place that they let their imaginations build sandcastles which promptly collapsed as soon as the lovers moved in.
In other cases, a match is made, but a bad one. The marriage is a farce and living the farce makes one cynical. Thus, Katherine from Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day thinks at one point that love may come to seem unreal to the parties in a bad marriage:
…to be engaged to marry someone with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveller’s story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true.
How and why we may sentence ourselves to a life without passion is a problem that deserves a separate discussion. (I take up aspects of it here and here.) What I would like to focus on presently is not the type of disillusionment involved in a bad match, but the allegedly inevitable disillusionment said to be there even in the best of matches. The comfort of familiarity is alleged to kill the passion, replacing the vision of an otherworldly love with a homely affair that smells of worn socks.
The will o’ the wisp
It is possible that love is by its very nature of brief duration. This is the view Albert Camus ascribes to the seducer Don Juan. Don Juan, Camus says, neither hopes for nor believes in immortal love. But importantly, he does not think that loves that end are unreal in virtue of their brevity. Camus writes:
Whence each woman hopes to give him what no one has ever given him. Each time they are utterly wrong and merely manage to make him feel the need of that repetition. “At last,” exclaims one of them, “I have given you love.” Can we be surprised that Don Juan laughs at this? “At last? No,” he says, “but once more.” (p. 69)
Camus suggests that we ought not imagine Don Juan as a melancholic man. His desires are fulfilled yet not killed by satisfaction, as they may be in a person of a more dreamy sort. There can be no disillusionment for those without illusions.
In other cases, romantic hopping is seemingly motivated by a desire for something extraordinary. Thus, Virginia Woolf, in a discussion of the turbulent life of Romantic poet Percy Shelley, writes that Shelley:
…was driven by something yielding and enthusiastic in his temperament to entangle himself with men and women. ‘I think one is always in love with something or other,’ he wrote. But this ‘something or other’ besides lodging in poetry and metaphysics and the good of society in general, had its dwelling in the bodies of human beings of the opposite sex. He saw ‘the likeness of what is perhaps eternal’ in the eyes of Mary. Then it vanished, to appear in the eyes of Emilia; then there it was again manifesting itself indisputably in Sophia Stacey or in Jane Williams. What is the lover to do when the will o’ the wisp shifts its quarters? One must go on, said Shelley…
While Shelley, in search of inspiration and escape from ordinary existence, may have read too much into initial sexual excitement, Don Juan is not after "the likeness of what is eternal" but after love made for humans. Neither believes in immortal love, but Don Juan does not fancy he sees the eternal and extraordinary in short-lived love. Importantly, for both, love has an expiration date one must accept.
Love that lasts
The attitude of the speed lover à la Don Juan and that of the person who yearns for a final destination but becomes disillusioned often have a common element: egocentricity. Both the person who pins all of his or her hopes – for healing, and happiness, and salvation – on the object of romantic interest and the one who equates love with infatuation are almost exclusively interested not in the object of attraction but in what the other could do for them. While in the height of passion, they may feel ready to do anything for the other, in actual fact, the whole project is self-centered. The other's thoughts and interests matter only from one's own point of view. It's good the other is done with a project, because that makes a weekend together possible. It's unfortunate they had a bad day at work, because they are distracted during dinner. Egocentric lovers may even be secretly pleased if the other became ill as that’s an opportunity to show affection.
This is not how things play out when we really love. In love that lasts, we come to care about the other independently of how their state affects the relationship. The other’s maladies pain us and are not seen as an opportunity for bonding. We are not simply interested in how the person we love may help us find what we need – like the poet Shelley looking for a new muse. Both we and the other have goals independent of the relationship, and part of the meaning of our lives lies in the achievement of those goals.
It may be supposed that the unfulfilled promise of love is a promise of paradise understood as a place with no cares, born of a magical and wonderful love. The image of Adam and Eve in a garden is forever lodged in our collective psyche as a vision of that kind of place.
There is truth to that idea, actually. But there are two important points to note: First, it is only the strength of the bond between two people that can lead them to experience their own private world as complete and separate from the rest of the world, and this bond develops over time. It is precisely what is perceived as ordinariness in cases of disillusionment that becomes cherished intimacy in love that lasts.
Second, in its initial “innocent” state, Adam's and Eve’s paradise is like that of little children playing in the sand. It has perfection of sorts, but every moment resembles every other moment. They do not lead what we would call a meaningful life. To expect that another person would give us such a carefree place thanks to their magical properties and the omnipotence of love is not only too much to ask of someone but not something worth wanting.
Love that lasts gives us, in virtue of the strength of the bond between soulmates, something of the completeness of Adam’s and Eve’s world, but it accepts the existence of pain and struggle. It proposes not to eliminate them but to allow the lovers to bear them together. Thus, while the person we love is not our salvation, two people may create a world that's as close to salvation as is compatible with the human condition.
The qualification is important since the person we love may die. But if we had the kind of intimacy that gives rise to a shared world, we may, like Mark Twain’s Adam speaking about his dead Eve, say: “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.”
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