This is the third installment of Higher Gossip, an advice column on sex and love. Read previous installments here.
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Q: I’m a woman, and my boyfriend said he’s smarter than me. After I gave him a definition of intelligence (a combination of rapidity, accuracy, depth and creativity of thought), he conceded that in those terms I’m smarter than him. He believes, however, that he’s smarter than me according to some definition he has yet to produce.
I find this disturbing in part because of the patriarchy and in part because in my closest, long-term relationships, both romantic relationships and friendships, I desire to commune with people whom I view as my equals and who view me as an equal. There are some relationships where inequality is inherent: parent/child, teacher/student, worker/boss. This is not to say that parents, children, teachers, students, bosses and workers don’t all have some kind of equal (and inalienable!) human value, but that the relationship is characterized by inequality. By contrast, my close friendships often have some inequalities (e.g. racial, gender, citizenship status, etc.) but it seems to me like these are not characteristic of the kind of relationship: these relationships are (or should be) characterized by a more significant type of equality. I’ve loosely been calling this intellectual equality, though I’m open to the possibility that it’s something else.
I’m curious about why this intellectual equality strikes me as so important in these kinds of relationships, especially when intelligence is difficult to both define and measure. In fact, it seems less about equality itself so much as the belief in it by both members of a given relationship.
A: In the final essay in her forthcoming book, the critic Becca Rothfeld addresses herself to your very problem. (Rothfeld is also an editor of this magazine.) In her pursuit of a theory of equal love, she acknowledges—just as you do—that equality in love can’t be dependent on social equality; and, using as her centerpiece Norman Rush’s wonderful novel Mating, she advocates as the wellspring of equal love a kind of conversational equality that mirrors or invokes the more immeasurable, mysterious intellectual equality. Love is an indefinite and mutually passionate verbal exchange. The essay is aptly titled “Our True Entertainment Was Arguing.” Rothfeld’s wish is to term this equal love simply “love,” since “anything less is unworthy of the name.”
Her argument is elegant and tender, and as I came to its conclusion I felt convinced I had never experienced, and seldom witnessed, the rarefied and spectacular relationship she considers worthy of the name. It put me in mind of a sharp line in Pride and Prejudice (a love story in which the couple is united by Rothfeld’s redemptive conversational equality, despite their disparate backgrounds). When Darcy describes all the qualities he looks for in an accomplished woman, Elizabeth declares, “I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any.” If equal love exists at all, it’s hard to come by—and not only because of structural or historical inequalities. I can say that in my dating experience among queer women, the type of equality you and Rothfeld prize has proven just as elusive. Why is it so elusive?
For her part, Rothfeld sets up, as her enemy of equal love, those ancient and ubiquitous love stories in which men are besotted with women they don’t particularly esteem, at least not for any reason more substantial than their beauty. If this sort of passion constitutes love, she writes, “it is a love polluted and putrefied beyond recognition.” The first and most obvious example she cites is the infatuation of the sophisticated Charles Swann with Odette de Crécy, whom he considers, in Rothfeld’s words, “tasteless and insipid.” I get the sense that what putrefies this sort of love for Rothfeld is a misogynist heart. Love between a woman and a man who, despite being bewitched by her, considers her insipid, does not qualify because there is some fundamental negation of humanity in it. Swann does not really wish to know Odette, at least not as the narrator of Mating wishes to know Denoon; at least, when Swann hears Odette’s opinions, he finds them so empty as to accuse her of not really being a person.
But is it true that Swann doesn’t wish to know Odette, or to converse with her? Swann in Love is flooded with Swann’s desperation to know and understand Odette and her way of life. He has that feeling, which is so familiar to those of us who have experienced a brutally overwhelming passion for a somewhat unavailable person, that the world inhabited by Odette is especially real, and he feels gratitude for the few hours in which he’s invited to feast on the sight of her real, ordinary armchairs and the taste of her orangeade. The fact that, as Proust acknowledges, Swann might no longer be so fascinated by Odette if he lived with her—if he was not constantly in a state of wanting rather than having—is not an indictment of his interest in her but an accurate description of the nature of erotic love.
Swann in Love asserts that there is in the essential makeup of romantic love a division of power, unique and not subject to the structural divisions of power that normally govern our lives, that humbles us and precludes equality. Here love is a force that brings low those who consider themselves superior—even if it does not reverse their opinion of themselves—and invests with great power those whose charms are apparently limited. There is nothing quite like our capacity to become obsessed by, admiring of, enamored by exactly what we do not imagine we want or value. Swann at first finds Odette so completely not his type that her particular beauty causes him “a sort of physical repulsion,” and continues, as he courts her, to carry on with a fresh-faced girl of the type he usually prefers. Of course, as his infatuation with Odette deepens, he begins to see a resemblance between her features and the works of his favorite Italian artists; as we all find justifications to contextualize the attractions that overtake us, so Swann is relieved that now “his pleasure in seeing Odette could be justified by his own aesthetic culture.” The spectacular argument posed by Swann’s love affair with Odette is not for merely the impersonality and iterative quality of love—though this is rendered beautifully—but also for our determination, despite ourselves, to attach ourselves to the last person we would’ve imagined was for us. As Proust puts it, at the moment that the “holy evil” of love sweeps over us, “it is not even necessary for us to have liked [its object] better than anyone else up to then, or even as much.” Most of us—and certainly I myself—have at one time been humiliatingly wild about someone we didn’t especially like. I relish that phrase for love, the “holy evil,” which contains within it the acknowledgment that this love that is apparently baseless is entirely real. Its basis is simply beyond our control and, often, our understanding. I don’t imagine Swann is missing out on the love of a lively, cultured woman he would consider his equal; he has no wish to exit the state of tortured obsession that characterizes his passion for Odette. It entertains, feeds and provokes him, unlike the rest of his refined, appropriate life. To set up Swann in Love as about putrefied not-love and Mating as about glorious equal love is basically to ask: Is love necessarily a mutual exchange of ideas, undergirded by respect?
The ne-plus-ultra quality of equal love can’t help but bring into my mind Freud’s suggestion that, for most of us, “things that have to do with love … are, as it were, written on a special page on which no other writing is tolerated.” As a culture we generally imagine that romantic love alone promises a type of communion in which souls actually meet each other, unmediated by power, inferiority, ego, projection and all of that which Swann brings to his infatuation with Odette. We imagine that romantic love contains a unique, even a magical solace. Your letter conveys your lovely feeling for the significance of friendship; but I think that your invocation of equal love is nevertheless an expression of exactly this belief that love is “written on a special page.” So too is the central relationship in Mating, and so is Rothfeld’s passionate portrait of equal love. Perhaps, for some people, love really is written on this special page. After all, we make our reality. But as I ask myself your question—“Why does this belief in our equality strike me as so important in close relationships?”—I find myself returning repeatedly to the idea that what we wish for most in love is to exist on a special page, that is, to relinquish the concept of power that haunts the whole of the rest of our lives, and to imagine that we have moved beyond it. This is the symbolic promise of love, the source of the word’s extraordinary weight.
Abjection and supremacy, those extreme positions inhabited by lovers like Swann and Odette, are most obvious in the early stages of infatuation; and we insist that those love affairs that settle into the balance of a long-term relationship do so because the lovers deserve each other, because they are in some way equals. Yet even in our most intimate, committed relationships, we constantly negotiate power, however much we like to pretend we’ve transcended it. In Parallel Lives, the book for which this column is named, Phyllis Rose writes about her discovery, in studying five marriages of Victorian intellectuals, that in happy relationships both partners “agree on the scenario they are enacting”—even if the scenario they imagine they are agreeing to enact is “totally at variance with the facts.” Already aware that defining a marriage as a balance of power will offend her romantically minded readers, she defends her conviction and gives this remarkable gloss for love: “When we resign power, or assume new power, we insist it is not happening and demand to be talked to about love. Perhaps that is what love is—the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.” Love is not written on a special page on which the word power is verboten; yet that momentary or prolonged refusal that Rose describes is itself special. In love we decide again and again not to wield our portion of power. The idealized form of equal love, which wouldn’t require this refusal, would also lack love’s most profound and transcendent quality.
You write that your close friendships and relationships “often have some inequalities (e.g. racial, gender, citizenship status, etc.),” but these disparities do not seem to you to be “characteristic of the kind of relationship: these relationships are (or should be) characterized by a more significant type of equality.” It’s true that these relationships, into which we apparently volunteer without being forced into them by birth or the need for material survival, allow us an opportunity for a special type of equality, in which both members speak the same intellectual and moral language and view each other as equals on a shared set of terms. But this is not what actually happens. Like Swann, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary or Lady Chatterley, we choose our romances (and friendships) based on a set of admirations and needs in ourselves that are much more obscure than the need to survive. So too are the patterns of power in the relationships themselves obscured, the organization of weakness and strength, or desire and sacrifice; and we need them to be obscured, in order to tolerate and enjoy our relationships. Yet because you have a particular intellectual mind, this “refusal to think of another person in terms of power” is not something you’re content to practice unconsciously, as a tacit determination not to hurt or take advantage of your boyfriend and a conviction that he won’t abuse his powers with you either. It must necessarily be definable and explicable to you. When you and your boyfriend spar about who is more intelligent, you’re theorizing about which kinds of power each of you have, and whether these types of power have equal weight and insure the relationship against the wielding of those powers. What you want is to be in a relationship in which you do not merely conceal the refusals of power from yourselves, but in which there are no refusals of power. But there are always refusals of power, and there is no such thing as an equal. Love is not democratic; and even in the realms of politics and democracy, those of us on the left have long since recognized the paradoxical emptiness of the term “equality,” whose general stated goals are better served by the pursuit of justice.
Is it this proposed meagerness of the word “equality” that makes me so defensive toward the idea of equal love? Why do I chafe at the very premise? I have certainly more often identified with Swann than with the admirable narrator of Mating. Just as Rothfeld is personally invested in the primacy of equal love, it’s become clear that I’m personally invested in the concept of love as a humiliating, demolishing, inexplicable and inappropriate experience, which has no suitable object for anyone. Am I so resistant to the concept of equality in romantic love because I’m afraid I’ll never find it—it may well be as rare as a truly accomplished woman—or because I worry I wouldn’t be able to recognize it or keep it alive if I did? Is it because I’m uncomfortable with the hierarchical structure of character that the term equality (ironically) evokes? We are always judges in the privacy of our unconscious minds; but it’s ugly to actually don the robes, to deliver a verdict on what kind of person would be equal to us. My friend Saul and I have sometimes discussed, with guilt and only ever in retrospect, our shared knowledge that one of us was not equal with the person we were dating. The language we use is “shiny.” About a breakup Saul went through a few years ago, we now acknowledge that Saul was “shinier” than his ex-girlfriend, that he could be with someone “as shiny” as he is; and with regard to Saul that means as charming, as buoyant, as incisive, perhaps even as successful. This is our playful and shame-ridden way of talking about what we “deserve” and who we imagine would be “good enough” for each other. The impish word “shiny” protects us from what we’re discussing.
Are any of us worthy judges of our own value and our own particular skills? I’ll take you at your word that, based on your own definition of intelligence, you have an accurate handle on how smart you are; but in general we are notoriously bad at judging ourselves. Saul never considers the people I pick “shiny” enough for me, though I have felt that each was gifted in an area in which I was bumbling. About George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, an ingeniously happy and well-suited couple, Rose in Parallel Lives acknowledges that some people did not consider Lewes striking or serious enough for Eliot. And, of course, history endorses the idea that Eliot’s intelligence and talent was of a completely different caliber. Yet privately it seems they considered each other equals; and more than that, Eliot relied on Lewes’s comparative unseriousness, his optimism and constancy, to shore up her own confidence. We don’t have access to essential truths about each other; and this question of equality is, as you point out, always a problem of belief. Isn’t the sensation of love inherently a sensation of overvaluing someone, of knowing that what you feel for them is immeasurable, wild and indefensible to others?
About the question of whether your boyfriend is a misogynist, or whether he loves you as you wish him to, I can’t comment. My first instinct, under the influence of Rose’s “momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power,” is that your boyfriend’s declaration that he’s smarter than you is a violation of the agreement that underlies your love. By thinking of you in comparison to himself, he’s indulging in, rather than refusing, the power he feels he has over you, and puncturing the scenario you imagined you’d agreed on: the scenario of equals. But maybe that wasn’t the scenario you agreed on. Maybe you and your boyfriend share a disinterest in tacit agreements, and the scenario at the heart of your relationship is a willingness to debate anything and everything. If you are largely happy with your boyfriend, and your sparring about your comparable intelligences is proof of great conversational passion of the kind Rothfeld depicts so delightfully, I hope that when your boyfriend insists he is smarter than you, you can take some comfort in one of my favorite characterizations of love, from Milan Kundera’s novel Slowness:
Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you’re intelligent, because you’re decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don’t chase women, because you do the dishes, then I’m disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I’m crazy about you even though you’re neither intelligent nor decent, even though you’re a liar, an egotist, a bastard.
As a culture we have little respect for this sentiment, considering it a sort of paean to abusive lovers; and I had better not tell you to go forth feeling pleased that your boyfriend finds himself unable to stop loving you even though he doesn’t respect your intelligence—as Swann cannot stop loving tasteless Odette. But I am convinced this is the place in which love is actually written on a special page. It’s not because it exists between equals that love is singular, but because it makes us deliciously and maddeningly immeasurable to each other—a state in which the very question of equality is moot. That you and your boyfriend don’t share a definition of intelligence strikes me as a good thing. It prevents you from evaluating each other (and finding each other wanting) on a shared set of terms, which sounds to me like the death of both conversation and love. If your conversation is to go on a long time, you had better not agree on everything.
This is the third installment of Higher Gossip, an advice column on sex and love. Read previous installments here.
●
Q: I’m a woman, and my boyfriend said he’s smarter than me. After I gave him a definition of intelligence (a combination of rapidity, accuracy, depth and creativity of thought), he conceded that in those terms I’m smarter than him. He believes, however, that he’s smarter than me according to some definition he has yet to produce.
I find this disturbing in part because of the patriarchy and in part because in my closest, long-term relationships, both romantic relationships and friendships, I desire to commune with people whom I view as my equals and who view me as an equal. There are some relationships where inequality is inherent: parent/child, teacher/student, worker/boss. This is not to say that parents, children, teachers, students, bosses and workers don’t all have some kind of equal (and inalienable!) human value, but that the relationship is characterized by inequality. By contrast, my close friendships often have some inequalities (e.g. racial, gender, citizenship status, etc.) but it seems to me like these are not characteristic of the kind of relationship: these relationships are (or should be) characterized by a more significant type of equality. I’ve loosely been calling this intellectual equality, though I’m open to the possibility that it’s something else.
I’m curious about why this intellectual equality strikes me as so important in these kinds of relationships, especially when intelligence is difficult to both define and measure. In fact, it seems less about equality itself so much as the belief in it by both members of a given relationship.
A: In the final essay in her forthcoming book, the critic Becca Rothfeld addresses herself to your very problem. (Rothfeld is also an editor of this magazine.) In her pursuit of a theory of equal love, she acknowledges—just as you do—that equality in love can’t be dependent on social equality; and, using as her centerpiece Norman Rush’s wonderful novel Mating, she advocates as the wellspring of equal love a kind of conversational equality that mirrors or invokes the more immeasurable, mysterious intellectual equality. Love is an indefinite and mutually passionate verbal exchange. The essay is aptly titled “Our True Entertainment Was Arguing.” Rothfeld’s wish is to term this equal love simply “love,” since “anything less is unworthy of the name.”
Her argument is elegant and tender, and as I came to its conclusion I felt convinced I had never experienced, and seldom witnessed, the rarefied and spectacular relationship she considers worthy of the name. It put me in mind of a sharp line in Pride and Prejudice (a love story in which the couple is united by Rothfeld’s redemptive conversational equality, despite their disparate backgrounds). When Darcy describes all the qualities he looks for in an accomplished woman, Elizabeth declares, “I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any.” If equal love exists at all, it’s hard to come by—and not only because of structural or historical inequalities. I can say that in my dating experience among queer women, the type of equality you and Rothfeld prize has proven just as elusive. Why is it so elusive?
For her part, Rothfeld sets up, as her enemy of equal love, those ancient and ubiquitous love stories in which men are besotted with women they don’t particularly esteem, at least not for any reason more substantial than their beauty. If this sort of passion constitutes love, she writes, “it is a love polluted and putrefied beyond recognition.” The first and most obvious example she cites is the infatuation of the sophisticated Charles Swann with Odette de Crécy, whom he considers, in Rothfeld’s words, “tasteless and insipid.” I get the sense that what putrefies this sort of love for Rothfeld is a misogynist heart. Love between a woman and a man who, despite being bewitched by her, considers her insipid, does not qualify because there is some fundamental negation of humanity in it. Swann does not really wish to know Odette, at least not as the narrator of Mating wishes to know Denoon; at least, when Swann hears Odette’s opinions, he finds them so empty as to accuse her of not really being a person.
But is it true that Swann doesn’t wish to know Odette, or to converse with her? Swann in Love is flooded with Swann’s desperation to know and understand Odette and her way of life. He has that feeling, which is so familiar to those of us who have experienced a brutally overwhelming passion for a somewhat unavailable person, that the world inhabited by Odette is especially real, and he feels gratitude for the few hours in which he’s invited to feast on the sight of her real, ordinary armchairs and the taste of her orangeade. The fact that, as Proust acknowledges, Swann might no longer be so fascinated by Odette if he lived with her—if he was not constantly in a state of wanting rather than having—is not an indictment of his interest in her but an accurate description of the nature of erotic love.
Swann in Love asserts that there is in the essential makeup of romantic love a division of power, unique and not subject to the structural divisions of power that normally govern our lives, that humbles us and precludes equality. Here love is a force that brings low those who consider themselves superior—even if it does not reverse their opinion of themselves—and invests with great power those whose charms are apparently limited. There is nothing quite like our capacity to become obsessed by, admiring of, enamored by exactly what we do not imagine we want or value. Swann at first finds Odette so completely not his type that her particular beauty causes him “a sort of physical repulsion,” and continues, as he courts her, to carry on with a fresh-faced girl of the type he usually prefers. Of course, as his infatuation with Odette deepens, he begins to see a resemblance between her features and the works of his favorite Italian artists; as we all find justifications to contextualize the attractions that overtake us, so Swann is relieved that now “his pleasure in seeing Odette could be justified by his own aesthetic culture.” The spectacular argument posed by Swann’s love affair with Odette is not for merely the impersonality and iterative quality of love—though this is rendered beautifully—but also for our determination, despite ourselves, to attach ourselves to the last person we would’ve imagined was for us. As Proust puts it, at the moment that the “holy evil” of love sweeps over us, “it is not even necessary for us to have liked [its object] better than anyone else up to then, or even as much.” Most of us—and certainly I myself—have at one time been humiliatingly wild about someone we didn’t especially like. I relish that phrase for love, the “holy evil,” which contains within it the acknowledgment that this love that is apparently baseless is entirely real. Its basis is simply beyond our control and, often, our understanding. I don’t imagine Swann is missing out on the love of a lively, cultured woman he would consider his equal; he has no wish to exit the state of tortured obsession that characterizes his passion for Odette. It entertains, feeds and provokes him, unlike the rest of his refined, appropriate life. To set up Swann in Love as about putrefied not-love and Mating as about glorious equal love is basically to ask: Is love necessarily a mutual exchange of ideas, undergirded by respect?
The ne-plus-ultra quality of equal love can’t help but bring into my mind Freud’s suggestion that, for most of us, “things that have to do with love … are, as it were, written on a special page on which no other writing is tolerated.” As a culture we generally imagine that romantic love alone promises a type of communion in which souls actually meet each other, unmediated by power, inferiority, ego, projection and all of that which Swann brings to his infatuation with Odette. We imagine that romantic love contains a unique, even a magical solace. Your letter conveys your lovely feeling for the significance of friendship; but I think that your invocation of equal love is nevertheless an expression of exactly this belief that love is “written on a special page.” So too is the central relationship in Mating, and so is Rothfeld’s passionate portrait of equal love. Perhaps, for some people, love really is written on this special page. After all, we make our reality. But as I ask myself your question—“Why does this belief in our equality strike me as so important in close relationships?”—I find myself returning repeatedly to the idea that what we wish for most in love is to exist on a special page, that is, to relinquish the concept of power that haunts the whole of the rest of our lives, and to imagine that we have moved beyond it. This is the symbolic promise of love, the source of the word’s extraordinary weight.
Abjection and supremacy, those extreme positions inhabited by lovers like Swann and Odette, are most obvious in the early stages of infatuation; and we insist that those love affairs that settle into the balance of a long-term relationship do so because the lovers deserve each other, because they are in some way equals. Yet even in our most intimate, committed relationships, we constantly negotiate power, however much we like to pretend we’ve transcended it. In Parallel Lives, the book for which this column is named, Phyllis Rose writes about her discovery, in studying five marriages of Victorian intellectuals, that in happy relationships both partners “agree on the scenario they are enacting”—even if the scenario they imagine they are agreeing to enact is “totally at variance with the facts.” Already aware that defining a marriage as a balance of power will offend her romantically minded readers, she defends her conviction and gives this remarkable gloss for love: “When we resign power, or assume new power, we insist it is not happening and demand to be talked to about love. Perhaps that is what love is—the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.” Love is not written on a special page on which the word power is verboten; yet that momentary or prolonged refusal that Rose describes is itself special. In love we decide again and again not to wield our portion of power. The idealized form of equal love, which wouldn’t require this refusal, would also lack love’s most profound and transcendent quality.
You write that your close friendships and relationships “often have some inequalities (e.g. racial, gender, citizenship status, etc.),” but these disparities do not seem to you to be “characteristic of the kind of relationship: these relationships are (or should be) characterized by a more significant type of equality.” It’s true that these relationships, into which we apparently volunteer without being forced into them by birth or the need for material survival, allow us an opportunity for a special type of equality, in which both members speak the same intellectual and moral language and view each other as equals on a shared set of terms. But this is not what actually happens. Like Swann, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary or Lady Chatterley, we choose our romances (and friendships) based on a set of admirations and needs in ourselves that are much more obscure than the need to survive. So too are the patterns of power in the relationships themselves obscured, the organization of weakness and strength, or desire and sacrifice; and we need them to be obscured, in order to tolerate and enjoy our relationships. Yet because you have a particular intellectual mind, this “refusal to think of another person in terms of power” is not something you’re content to practice unconsciously, as a tacit determination not to hurt or take advantage of your boyfriend and a conviction that he won’t abuse his powers with you either. It must necessarily be definable and explicable to you. When you and your boyfriend spar about who is more intelligent, you’re theorizing about which kinds of power each of you have, and whether these types of power have equal weight and insure the relationship against the wielding of those powers. What you want is to be in a relationship in which you do not merely conceal the refusals of power from yourselves, but in which there are no refusals of power. But there are always refusals of power, and there is no such thing as an equal. Love is not democratic; and even in the realms of politics and democracy, those of us on the left have long since recognized the paradoxical emptiness of the term “equality,” whose general stated goals are better served by the pursuit of justice.
Is it this proposed meagerness of the word “equality” that makes me so defensive toward the idea of equal love? Why do I chafe at the very premise? I have certainly more often identified with Swann than with the admirable narrator of Mating. Just as Rothfeld is personally invested in the primacy of equal love, it’s become clear that I’m personally invested in the concept of love as a humiliating, demolishing, inexplicable and inappropriate experience, which has no suitable object for anyone. Am I so resistant to the concept of equality in romantic love because I’m afraid I’ll never find it—it may well be as rare as a truly accomplished woman—or because I worry I wouldn’t be able to recognize it or keep it alive if I did? Is it because I’m uncomfortable with the hierarchical structure of character that the term equality (ironically) evokes? We are always judges in the privacy of our unconscious minds; but it’s ugly to actually don the robes, to deliver a verdict on what kind of person would be equal to us. My friend Saul and I have sometimes discussed, with guilt and only ever in retrospect, our shared knowledge that one of us was not equal with the person we were dating. The language we use is “shiny.” About a breakup Saul went through a few years ago, we now acknowledge that Saul was “shinier” than his ex-girlfriend, that he could be with someone “as shiny” as he is; and with regard to Saul that means as charming, as buoyant, as incisive, perhaps even as successful. This is our playful and shame-ridden way of talking about what we “deserve” and who we imagine would be “good enough” for each other. The impish word “shiny” protects us from what we’re discussing.
Are any of us worthy judges of our own value and our own particular skills? I’ll take you at your word that, based on your own definition of intelligence, you have an accurate handle on how smart you are; but in general we are notoriously bad at judging ourselves. Saul never considers the people I pick “shiny” enough for me, though I have felt that each was gifted in an area in which I was bumbling. About George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, an ingeniously happy and well-suited couple, Rose in Parallel Lives acknowledges that some people did not consider Lewes striking or serious enough for Eliot. And, of course, history endorses the idea that Eliot’s intelligence and talent was of a completely different caliber. Yet privately it seems they considered each other equals; and more than that, Eliot relied on Lewes’s comparative unseriousness, his optimism and constancy, to shore up her own confidence. We don’t have access to essential truths about each other; and this question of equality is, as you point out, always a problem of belief. Isn’t the sensation of love inherently a sensation of overvaluing someone, of knowing that what you feel for them is immeasurable, wild and indefensible to others?
About the question of whether your boyfriend is a misogynist, or whether he loves you as you wish him to, I can’t comment. My first instinct, under the influence of Rose’s “momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power,” is that your boyfriend’s declaration that he’s smarter than you is a violation of the agreement that underlies your love. By thinking of you in comparison to himself, he’s indulging in, rather than refusing, the power he feels he has over you, and puncturing the scenario you imagined you’d agreed on: the scenario of equals. But maybe that wasn’t the scenario you agreed on. Maybe you and your boyfriend share a disinterest in tacit agreements, and the scenario at the heart of your relationship is a willingness to debate anything and everything. If you are largely happy with your boyfriend, and your sparring about your comparable intelligences is proof of great conversational passion of the kind Rothfeld depicts so delightfully, I hope that when your boyfriend insists he is smarter than you, you can take some comfort in one of my favorite characterizations of love, from Milan Kundera’s novel Slowness:
As a culture we have little respect for this sentiment, considering it a sort of paean to abusive lovers; and I had better not tell you to go forth feeling pleased that your boyfriend finds himself unable to stop loving you even though he doesn’t respect your intelligence—as Swann cannot stop loving tasteless Odette. But I am convinced this is the place in which love is actually written on a special page. It’s not because it exists between equals that love is singular, but because it makes us deliciously and maddeningly immeasurable to each other—a state in which the very question of equality is moot. That you and your boyfriend don’t share a definition of intelligence strikes me as a good thing. It prevents you from evaluating each other (and finding each other wanting) on a shared set of terms, which sounds to me like the death of both conversation and love. If your conversation is to go on a long time, you had better not agree on everything.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.