Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [133]
We can’t do much about the specific error—the one in which we turn out to be wrong about (or wronged by) someone we once deeply loved. (In fact, this is a good example of a kind of error we can’t eliminate and shouldn’t want to.) But what about the general error? Why do we embrace a narrative of love that makes the demise of our relationships that much more shocking, humiliating, and painful? There are, after all, less romantic and more realistic narratives of love available to us: the cool biochemical one, say, where the only heroes are hormones; the implacable evolutionary one, where the communion of souls is supplanted by the transmission of genes; or just a slightly more world-weary one, where love is rewarding and worth it, but nonetheless unpredictable and possibly impermanent—Shakespeare’s wandering bark rather than his fixèd mark. Any of these would, at the very least, help brace us for the blow of love’s end.
But at what price? Let go of the romantic notion of love, and we also relinquish the protection it purports to offer us against loneliness and despair. Love can’t bridge the gap between us and the world if it is, itself, evidence of that gap—just another fallible human theory, about ourselves, about the people we love, about the intimate “us” of a relationship. Whatever the cost, then, we must think of love as wholly removed from the earthly, imperfect realm of theory-making. Like the love of Aristophanes’ conjoined couples before they angered the gods, like the love of Adam and Eve before they were exiled from the Garden of Eden, we want our own love to predate and transcend the gap between us and the world.
In some ways, this strategy seems doomed to fail. As anyone who has experienced it knows, heartbreak socks us not only with the temporary loneliness of lost love, but also with the enduring loneliness of being alive. When we are in its grip, the lesser crisis of heartbreak is not terribly distinguishable from the greater crisis of existential despair. And yet there is a method to the madness. The idea of transcendent love can’t save us from all suffering, but it can save us from perpetual suffering. It makes our moments of disconnect from the universe seem isolated and astounding, rather than ongoing and inevitable. And that, in turn, helps us dismiss such moments as aberrations and forge the necessary amnesia to carry on with our lives.
That should sound familiar, because our overall relationship to error follows the same pattern. As I noted at the beginning of this book, we take rightness to be our steady state, while experiencing error as an isolated incident, no matter how many times it has happened to us. This might be a pragmatic choice—just a strategy for getting through the day with a minimum of hassle—but it is also emotionally alluring. Constantly reckoning with the possibility that we are wrong requires remaining aware of the chasm between us and the universe. It compels us to acknowledge that we can’t know with certainty the truth about each other or the world, beyond the certainty that, in the deepest and most final sense, we are alone. That explains why we work so hard to dodge reminders of our fallibility, and why we weather so uneasily even our relatively trivial mistakes. And it helps explain, too, why being wrong about love is so particularly intolerable. Love as the unifier of souls, the conqueror of time and death, transcendent, infallible, enduring: now that’s something we can’t afford to be wrong about. “If this be error and upon me proved,” Shakespeare concludes, “I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”*
Lovely, lovely—but turn the page. In the next four sonnets in this series, we learn that Shakespeare (or at least his