Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [137]
The conflation of these things—wanting to be right with wanting to be valued—helps explain why disagreements within intimate relationships can feel not just like betrayal, but like rejection. That’s one reason why silly squabbles over the dishes sometimes blow up into epic battles about whether our partner listens to us, understands us, and cares for us. The moral here is obvious: we can learn to live with disagreement and error as long as we feel esteemed and loved. That conclusion has suggested itself over and over throughout this book. We saw it in the deepest cognitive sense in our discussion of inductive reasoning, where it became clear that getting things wrong doesn’t mean that something is wrong with us. And we saw it in the deepest emotional sense in the chapter on denial and acceptance, when Penny Beerntsen realized that making a horrible mistake did not make her—and does not make anyone—a horrible person.
So we should be able to be wrong from time to time, and be at peace with other people’s occasional wrongness, and still love and be loved. That’s so basic as to be banal, and yet it runs counter to our prevailing model of romantic love. There is no room for divergence, disagreement, or error in the starry-eyed, soul-mate version of love articulated by Aristophanes et al. To accommodate those eventualities—and we had better accommodate them, since we can be damn sure they are coming—we need a more capacious model of love. In this model, love is not predicated on sharing each other’s world as we might share a soul. It is predicated, instead, on sharing it as we might share a story.
This analogy is not accidental. What is true of a story is true of love: for either one to work, you’d better be good at talking and good at listening. Likewise, if stories only succeed when we consent to suspend disbelief, relationships require of us something similar: the ability to let go of our own worldview long enough to be intrigued and moved by someone else’s. This is storybook love in a whole different sense of the phrase. It is not about living idyllically in our similarities, but about living peacefully and pleasurably in our differences. It is not bestowed from beyond the normal human realm but struggled for and gained, slowly and with effort. And it is not about unchanging love. It is about letting love change us.
13.
Transformation
It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then maintain that in their youth they had been little butterflies.
—G. E. VAILLANT, ADAPTATION TO LIFE
On April 4, 1968, the day that Martin Luther King Jr., was killed, Claiborne Paul Ellis threw a party. At the time, Ellis owned and operated a gas station in Durham, North Carolina—and, on the side, ran the Durham branch of the Ku Klux Klan. When the local radio station announced the assassination, he let out a whoop and began calling his fellow Klansmen, inviting them over to celebrate King’s death. “We just had a real party at the service station,” he would later tell the famed journalist Studs Terkel, “really rejoicin’ ’cause that sonofabitch was dead.”
C. P. Ellis, as everyone called him, grew up poor and uneducated in North Carolina at a time when white supremacy was rampant there. By the 1960s, there were 112 Klan chapters in the state, which together boasted some eight or nine thousand members; according to federal investigators and the Anti-Defamation League, it was the most active and best-run branch of the KKK in the nation. The state’s future and famously racist senator, Jesse Helms, was then providing weekly news commentaries on TV and radio stations in Raleigh—platforms he routinely used to denounce Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement as hell-bent on the destruction of America, and to expound on the “purely scientific” evidence that black people were inferior to whites.
For Ellis—whose father had been abusive and alcoholic, who had dropped out of school in the eighth grade, who married at seventeen, who worked