Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [132]
In small doses, this is an accusation most of us can accept. We understand that we are not the most objective judges of our loved ones, since, by definition, loving someone requires relinquishing our claim to objectivity. “The fellow who kisses the mole on his mistress’ neck, the lover who is delighted with the growth on his dove’s nose, the father who calls his son’s crossed eyes gleaming—what, I ask, can this be except pure folly?” inquires Erasmus. “You agree that this is folly three and four times over; but it is this same folly that makes our friendships and keeps them after they are made.” When it comes to our loved ones, being a little wrong in the right direction is the name of the game.
Still, being a little wrong in the right direction is one thing, and being massively wrong in the wrong direction is something else entirely. When we are colossally wrong about love, it feels like nothing we’ve ever experienced—and yet, structurally, such errors are similar to mistakes about any other major belief. For starters, they often come about for the same kinds of reasons. We are swayed by the conventions and prejudices of our communities, we draw swift and sweeping conclusions based on scanty evidence (there’s an armada of psychological research showing that we form strong and often lasting impressions of other people within the first sixty seconds of meeting them—in fact, often within the first two seconds), and we are reluctant to change or revise those conclusions once we have formed them.* None of this prevents us from thinking that we are keen observers of our fellow humans, of course. As the seventeenth-century French writer François de La Rochefoucauld observed, “Everyone complains about their memory; no one complains about their judgment.”
If the reasons we err in love are familiar, so too is the trajectory those errors follow. When we are in love, we can’t imagine that we will ever be out of it—a kind of error-blindness of the heart. If we leave our lover, that illusion often switches: we can’t quite believe that we were ever really in it. (Recall Charles Swann, expressing his wonder, sorrow, and scorn that he should have behaved so absurdly for a woman “who did not appeal to him.”) If we are the one who is left (and sometimes even when we are the one who did the leaving), we reel from the shock of losing the organizing principle of our current life and the template for our future. And we often treat our lovers as we treat our theories, rejecting one that isn’t quite working only when we have a new one to replace it. That’s part of why so many people have affairs by way of ending their relationships, or rocket into a “rebound relationship” after a difficult breakup.
Structurally, then, errors of love are similar to errors in general. Emotionally, however, they are in a league of their own: astounding, enduring, miserable, incomprehensible. True, certain other large-scale errors can rival or even dwarf them; we’ve gotten a taste of that in recent chapters. But relatively few of us will undergo, for example, the traumatic and total abandonment of a deeply held religious belief, or the wrongful identification of an assailant. By contrast, the vast majority of us will get our hearts seriously broken, quite possibly more than once. And when we do, we will experience not one but two kinds of wrongness about love. The first is a specific error about a specific person—the loss of faith in a relationship, whether it ended because our partner left us or because we grew disillusioned. But, as I’ve suggested, we will also find that we were wrong about love in a more general way: that we embraced an account of it that is manifestly