This is the seventh installment of Higher Gossip, an advice column on sex and love. Read previous installments here.

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Q: I’m married to a man I love absurdly and completely. It’s a miracle to me. Our relationship and the closeness we have is so beyond anything I had experienced before him that it feels like the difference between our world and some alien culture. We had to go through a lot to be together and to stay together. In the stress of those early years, we wounded and traumatized each other over and over. Even now, married and with a baby! I would be lying if I said I was totally healed.

We have no doubt that what we have is irreplaceable, right, and that we are ridiculously lucky to have found each other, but we seem to contain in our love the capacity to hurt the other more than we’ve hurt and been hurt by others. I often run into a sentiment on social media, in advice columns, etc. that although relationships take work, they shouldn’t be a constant struggle and should certainly not contain the kind of gaping psychic wounds I have. If I were to lay out in detail the story of my relationship I can’t even count the number of times the collective “they” would tell us to break up. They’re wrong, but I do think my willingness to be in pain might be a little off of the average. I feel like my husband and I are very… overwrought… in the way we deal with each other, at least compared to other couples I know (though of course their private lives are mysteries). Beyond just my husband, I’ve never been able to separate the idea and experience of romantic relationships from deep struggle. On a good day I think that I’m the enlightened one—that I understand the sacrifice to insane, vertiginous experiences that true love requires. On a bad day I think, welp, I’m broken and incapable of ease and happiness.

Is “good advice” about love just kind of inherently unromantic in its avoidance of pain? Is the world secretly full of people who find fulfilling love by having fun and being themselves?

A: For three years in my twenties I had a tumultuous relationship with an adventurous, passionate woman named Sam. Sam was a romantic. She devoted herself to love easily, and she held onto it with gusto. Personally, I never knew quite whether I wanted to be in a relationship at all. Sam and I had met when I was 25, rolling around New York at top speed. Then the pandemic turned our relationship unexpectedly domestic and high-stakes. When we argued, it was often about my hesitations. Sam brought the full strength of her creativity and passion to a fight. She was frank and unflinching. She was not afraid to be, as you put it, overwrought. To her, fighting this way was the requirement of intimacy, the proof of love; if I met her there and fought back, that would illustrate that I loved her enough to endure our differences.

About thirty minutes into an increasingly vicious argument, some instinct in me would say: this isn’t love. If this is the way we speak to each other, it’s unsalvageable. What I said to Sam at the time was that fighting this way was destructive, that it was unhealthy, that she should learn to be gentler with me. She returned, correctly, that it was destructive to give up on a relationship the moment a fight started. It became a sort of moral disagreement: I thought love was civil, she thought love was passionate. She felt dismissed and judged, and when I wasn’t feeling righteous and defensive, I felt almost inhuman. Was I really so unromantic, would I really describe love as “civil”? I’ve written before about conceiving of romance as one of my great skills, and yet about feeling a perhaps unusual—though, to me, natural—distinction between romance (my skill) and serious love or partnership (not in my wheelhouse).

I’m admitting here that I tend toward the attitude that you describe as unromantic, an attitude I might have preferred to describe as “independent.” Let me set myself up here as your antagonist, the “good advice giver,” as you put it— the consummate “them.” In a way, my position is impossible; if I push against your conviction, I’ll be relegating myself to the unromantic realm of the good advice givers, and if I simply agree with your characterization of good advice, I don’t think that will get either of us anywhere. But I may have a useful way into the questions I imagine you’re really asking through the story of your relationship with your husband. Most of the letters I deal with in this column describe people who are at odds with themselves. Your letter gestures toward this—you have reservations and anxieties about your capacity for pain, for example—but I think your question is fundamentally about feeling at odds with your society. By defining the prevailing “good advice” as the simple avoidance of pain, I think you’re really asking: Is what these people are advocating for actually love, or just a glorified version of respect? By remarking with disbelief that the world could be full of people who find love by “having fun and being themselves,” what you’re really wondering—while hoping the answer is negative—is: Are there actually people for whom fulfilling love is gentle and healing? These questions betray a basic insecurity: Why don’t other people think my overwrought love is real, sustainable or good enough? Marriage is, after all, a social institution, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you are married. Every relationship is a private, alien world unto itself, but part of the reason we marry ceremoniously, in view of witnesses, is to integrate our private sense of love into the cultural one.

What is the cultural sense of love? When I was with Sam, I probably would’ve described my ideal of romantic love as two people who simply enjoyed being in each other’s lives. This is the ideal I was raised with, and to me, it still has a special flavor. In this vision, love is always frolicking together, love is endlessly erotic, love is a delicious addition to a complete life, love is always desiring and never demanding. It’s not only the fantasy of a big happy future but also this effortless sense of untainted pleasure that makes the first months of a relationship so sublime. But plenty of people—Sam among them, and probably you and your husband—don’t find this especially romantic. It’s too thin and unreliable, too likely to fall apart at the first sign of trouble. It implies no commitment, no sacrifice, no proofs: all it describes is a fling. The true romantic ideal, you might propose, is instead defined by the confessions, certitudes and transformations that follow because we realize we enjoy spending time together, and wish it to continue indefinitely. “In sickness and in health, for richer or poorer” is the quintessential expression of the inadequacy of simple enjoyment to encompass the full implications of love.

Here we find a key problem we face in reaching a shared sense of what constitutes love. I’ll call this the problem of subjection. To what extent do we wish to be subject to another person? No other measure of love seems so important and yet so difficult to discuss. For those of us for whom love demands subjection—entrusting each other with our happiness—a love in which we aren’t called on to be subject to our lover feels hopelessly inadequate. What is this merely comfortable sharing of space, we think, when love is knowing I’d be miserable without you? For those of us for whom love is the release from this type of subjection—embracing, in each other, the thrill of our individuality—a love in which we are called on to be so fundamentally reliant on another feels controlling and perverse. What is this punishing enmeshment, we think, when love is admiring what you do with your freedom?

A shared sense of how much subjection we feel love implies is a basic foundation of a good relationship; divergent proportions are a death knell. The problem, of course, is that most everyone assumes that the amount of subjection they personally associate with love is the universal situation of love, and few of us go around articulating what we want in a relationship with phrases like “being immutably enmeshed” or “independently sharing space.” The vastness of the spectrum of desirable subjection is extraordinarily difficult for us to conceive. It’s easier to imagine why someone might be attracted to a physical type we don’t like, or prefer a different sense of humor or degree of ambition, than to try to comprehend how other people handle the basic conditions of their relationships: how much privacy they want, how much solitude, how much passion, how much financial dependence, how much physical intimacy, how much family integration. We believe that a person might love someone we don’t personally find lovable, yet if we find out a couple sleeps in separate bedrooms, or are so entwined that they have no independent friends, we think: That’s what you call love?

The degree of dependence and subjection one desires in a relationship seems to me an obviously more fundamental and positive type of compatibility than, say, shared reading habits or the ability to travel well together. This is why theories of attachment and “love languages” are so popular today: we urgently wish for a shortcut into our lover’s sense of what love feels like, though these sorts of frameworks only glancingly address the underlying problem of subjection. We have little effective language for it. After all, romantic love has long been premised on a great degree of subjection; for centuries, some of our most enduring romantic narratives rested on the premise that a lover would sooner choose death than live without their beloved (Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina). At the same time, of course, marriages in previous eras rarely entailed the level of emotional-erotic communion that we now expect from our long-term partnerships. This near-impossible confluence of security and erotic charge requires a lot of navigational help, which a whole cottage industry of love-culture pundits and advice givers attempt to provide for us.

Doesn’t it seem like the expectations for relationships are mysteriously homogeneous now? That our approach isn’t expected to be different based on what we’re actually looking for, but based on a normative definition of what constitutes a “good relationship”? Beyond the early dating stage, our romantic culture patterns all relationships on the same rubric, with categories defining what is healthy and what isn’t. Recently, when a new acquaintance referred to the woman I’ve been dating as my partner, I was taken aback; for a moment I was tempted to clarify that our relationship isn’t a “partnership,” that it’s both too new for that and shaped in a different way. But it’s not that she had misunderstood us as life partners, spouses; “partner” has simply become the polite, standard way to refer to a current significant other, as marriage has become less ubiquitous and terms like “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” have become fraught with the presumption of pronouns. Yet this vocabulary is meaningful: it feels increasingly commonplace to think of someone to whom we’re not married (or even similarly committed) as a partner, even for a relatively short period in our life—to lean on them, to know their family, to share a home with them. “Partner” implies different baseline expectations in a relationship than the gestural, fun, childish “girlfriend.” This transition from the transformational language of “girlfriend” and “wife” to the blanket language of “partner”—and I know this isn’t remotely universal, but it remains telling—expresses this collapsing of passionate, deathly romance and quieter, more sustainable marriage. And there’s plenty of evidence that this collapsed, universal relationship ideal tends toward the privileging of the self over the couple. Perhaps the most familiar exhortation in the annals of clichéd therapeutic narratives is to love yourself first, as a prerequisite to being able to love someone else. In my last column, for instance, I mentioned the prominent assumption in mainstream dating culture, evident on reality TV, that the crucial quality in a partner (especially for a woman in search of a mate) is that they care for you first, that they sacrifice to make you happy, rather than that you adore their individual qualities. “Dependence” has become the dirtiest word in relationship culture. You call this “unromantic,” and in a strict sense you’re right. Perhaps this is what happens, bleak as it is, when the fierce American mythology of self-reliance is paired with our impatience to escape the historical dependency of women on their husbands.

So, in part, we’re negotiating with the legacy of gender-based dependency. But even so: Isn’t our allergy to dependence a bit insincere? After all, even if we write our own vows and they no longer refer to sickness-and-health or richer-or-poorer, we still value and participate in marriage, a relationship system based on the idea that when things get tough you’ll grapple together rather than hit the escape hatch. While I was considering this contradiction, I thought of an essay by Vivian Gornick, who I also referenced in last month’s column. In The End of the Novel of Love, she argues that the love plot, as a great metaphor for the human situation, can no longer address and illuminate “the panic with which people discover that the life they are living is the only one they are able to make”:

When Lawrence, James, Stendhal, were writing, readers felt themselves in the presence of men diving down into the depths. For these writers love was a snake pit, marriage a menacing drama. Their insights were penetrated through with anxiety, their stories accumulated dread. Love, then, provided the context within which an enormous amount could and did get said. The writing promised self-understanding—that alone which gives courage for life—and it delivered. … Could [books like these be] written today? Never. [Their] power is wholly dependent on the static quality of the world against which [their] characters are struggling. Everything they learn and do and become takes place against that restraint. It’s because they cannot get out that the intensity builds and they break the taboo. The broken taboo allows them into themselves.

Love no longer serves as a powerful restraint in novels, because we read with the knowledge that if one marriage fails the characters will eventually find another without facing the permanent destruction of their lives. And I think that for most people today this is also true. When we marry, we vow that we won’t look in the direction of the escape hatch, but we don’t forget its presence. The struggles against which we define ourselves, the circumstances through which we persevere and against which we rail: romantic love is seldom that primary force. Yet your letter reminded me of this essay because what you describe evokes the “menacing drama” of the older form of marriage. You dismiss outright the possibility that you and your husband would ever break up; and it also seems to me that you ascribe to your marriage an intensity that breaks some taboo and forces you deeper into yourself. That you and your husband have privately generated this dynamic, which was at one time socially imposed, prevents other people from comprehending its power but does not diminish it.

It’s a truism that we are hurt most by those we love; yet in your case, the feeling of subjection is not a symptom of love but its very basis. I strongly suspect that the love you and your husband share feels so miraculous because you have such a capacity to hurt each other. A love which didn’t ask you to face your specific, vivid capacity for pain would not ring so true to you, nor would it engender this degree of closeness. There is a very particular intimacy in recovery and the licking of wounds. Your husband’s ability to withstand and return the overwrought struggle that you associate with love—and emerge, as you are, convinced of the miraculousness of your relationship—is likely what you most value in him, the exact type of compatibility that is so verboten to articulate.

When I wrote a few months ago about the inherent inequality in love, I defended love relationships in which there is a vast gap in the degree of subjection between the two lovers: Charles Swann’s complete infatuation, for example, with the relatively indifferent Odette. We each have an innate, mysterious sense of what true love feels like, of the degree to which we expect our lives to be overturned, how much awe or disbelief we expect to feel, how sacred or erotic we expect our feelings to be, how much fighting we imagine must be done on behalf of the deepest love, whether a true love is inherently one that other people hate and disavow, a secret love, or whether a true love is one that makes our parents smile. Won’t it always be whatever relationship provokes this feeling, the instinct we can’t quite defend but about which we feel as though we have decades’ and centuries’ worth of images inside us, that feels truest? Your sense that you’re at odds with your society is not a problem in your love; it may well be the friction that makes your insane and vertiginous experience possible. You might be grateful to the influencers and the good advice givers for allowing you and your husband to feel so alone together.