Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [125]
It makes sense, then, that we care so much about getting other people right.* And it makes sense, too, that, overall, we are astonishingly good at it. The phone rings and you pick it up and your mother says hi, and you know—from a thousand miles away, with only one syllable to work with—that something is wrong. An expression flickers across a stranger’s face and you have a very good chance of correctly deducing his feelings. You and a friend sit through a particularly ludicrous meeting together and carefully avoid catching each other’s eyes, because if you did, you would each know so much about what was going on in the other’s mind that you would both laugh out loud. These acts of instant interpersonal comprehension are among the most mundane facts of life; we experience them dozens of times a day, mostly without noticing. Yet they are among the most extraordinary of human abilities. To understand someone else, to fathom what’s going on in her world, to see into her mind and heart: if at first this is what makes staying alive possible, ultimately, it is what makes life worthwhile.
As that suggests, our need to be “gotten” by other people, so critical in early childhood, doesn’t fade as we age. “People frequently walk into my office and they want to know: Are you married? Do you have children? Are you divorced? Are you gay? Are you a New Yorker? Are both of your parents alive?” Gadd says. “What they’re really asking is: Will you understand me?” (Take note of this assumption that we need to have shared backgrounds and experiences in order to really understand each other; we’ll return to it shortly.) When that kind of comprehension is not forthcoming, we take it hard. Think about how distressing it is to feel misunderstood, and how frustrating it is when someone believes something about you—that you’re irresponsible or can’t handle commitment or don’t pull your weight at work—that you think is untrue. Conversely, there are few things more gratifying than the feeling that someone deeply understands us. In fact, as we are about to see, this feeling of being “gotten” is the sine qua non of our most important relationships, and the very hallmark of being in love.
Pity poor Charles Swann. In the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, we watch him fall helplessly, haplessly, stupidly in love with a woman named Odette de Crecy. Bad choice: Odette is greedy, pretentious, vulgar, unpredictable, and cruel. And that’s just her personality. There’s also her CV to consider: an early stint in a whorehouse, a later career as a courtesan, at least one lesbian affair, multiple orgies, and rumors of anonymous sex in the woodsier parts of the Bois de Boulogne. (If you’ve never read Proust and this doesn’t make you reconsider, I don’t know what will.) From the get-go, it’s clear to everyone except Charles that she consorts with him for love of his money and status, not for love of the man himself.
But no matter: our hero is besotted. However badly he is treated, he remains, the narrator notes, “always prepared to believe what he hoped for”—that Odette is worthy of his love, and that she cares for him as passionately as he cares for her. He endures not only her vapidity and infidelity, but also the company of her insipid, ignorant, preening friends. And by endures, I mean endures: Charles Swann’s love affair lasts ten