Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [131]
The marriage of minds: the insistent message here is that love does not begin with the heart (or points south). It begins from the neck up, with the search for a communion of consciousnesses. We want love to save us from our isolation, from the fundamental and sometimes frightening solitude of being human. Shakespeare continues:
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
In other words, the body must succumb to Time (with a capital T; the Grim Reaper in street clothes), but Time succumbs to Love. Shakespeare, who didn’t want to admit any impediment to true love, didn’t want to admit any end to it, either. To solve our existential despair problem, love must endure until, as we say, death do us part. Better still, it must trump even death. Shakespeare saw it halting at “the edge of doom,” but others allege that love carries us completely beyond the reach of the reaper. I give you, again, Phil Collins: “together forever till the end of time.” Grant us undying love and eternal life, and we’ll all be just fine.
All this business about commingled souls, about a communion that predates time and postdates death—this is not just the stuff of sonnets and pop songs. We actually feel this way. The couples counselor Harville Hendrix has written that the entire experience of falling in love can be distilled down to just four characteristic emotions. The first, he says, is a feeling of recognition—the thing that makes you say to your newfound love (the quotes are his), “I know we’ve just met, but somehow I feel as though I already know you.” The second is a feeling of timelessness: “Even though we’ve only been seeing each other for a short time, I can’t remember when I didn’t know you.” The third is a feeling of reunification: “When I’m with you, I no longer feel alone; I feel whole, complete.” The fourth is a feeling of necessity: “I can’t live without you.” This is Aristophanes all over again. We speak of our partners as if they were a long-lost part of our selves—and, accordingly, we are certain that they will be with us forever. We know they will never cheat on us. We know that we will never cheat on them. We say that we have never felt so understood; we say that nothing has ever felt so right.
What is remarkable about this idea of love is how deeply entrenched it is—in our hearts as well as our culture—even as it utterly fails to correspond to reality. We fall out of love left and right. We question whether we were really in it in the first place. We cheat and are cheated on. We leave and are left. We come to believe that we never truly knew our lover after all. We look back on our passion in the chilly dawn of disenchantment—in the after-afterglow—and are so baffled by our conduct that we chalk it up to something like temporary insanity.
In short, we are wrong about love routinely. There’s even a case to be made that love is error, or at least is likely to lead us there. Sherlock Holmes, that literary embodiment of our much-admired if lately discredited ideal thinker, “never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer.” Love, for him, was “grit in a sensitive instrument” that would inevitably lead into error. In this same spirit, we routinely speak of love as being blind—meaning that it makes us blind, unable to perceive the truth about our beloved. Eros and Cupid, the Greek and Roman gods of love, are frequently depicted as blindfolded, and Ate¯, the Greek goddess of infatuation, is sometimes referred to as the blind goddess. (According to myth, Ate¯ scorned the surface of the earth, preferring to walk around on the top of men