This is the fourth installment of Higher Gossip, an advice column on sex and love. Read previous installments here.
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Q: What does it mean, on Instagram, when a follower—a ghost from one’s romantic past—views your story? It could mean: I quickly swiped past in pursuit of more salient content. It could mean: I want you to see that I’m seeing you. It could mean: I’m still in love with you.
Now we can always find each other, but we have nothing to say—we sort of just make mysterious virtual eye contact for a second. We see each other through a one-way mirror, taking turns on either side, wondering. My question regards the Instagram story as a freighted communicative act: Is it pointless to resist harboring the emotional attachments this enables? Is it unhealthy? Is it worth the benefits to be so irrevocably accessible to former friends and lovers? And what are the benefits, exactly?
I don’t mean to harp on a perceived “authentic” past compared with a more hollow, oblique, lonely present. Yet so much of romance used to involve a sacrifice of time and effort: “I’ve travelled all this way just to see if anyone in this town knows where you live now.” Is this the death of the grand gesture?
A: What was the grand gesture, and what do we think of as grandeur now? This, to me, is the mystery at the heart of your question. Classic grand gestures from novels and films are, as you say, defined by a kind of sacrifice: hallmarks include the willingness to be rejected if, for example, you show up at the stoop of a woman you haven’t seen in years to make your proposal, or the selflessness of never receiving credit for the gesture you’ve made, like some of Austen’s romantic heroes, who secretly rescue the family members of their love objects from financial or social ruin without hope of earning any reciprocation.
It’s true that we see these types of gestures pretty seldom, though I’d venture to guess that most of the lovers who enjoyed the periods we feel nostalgic for—those who might have encountered the need to search a foreign town for their paramours—found these gestures vanishingly rare as well. But because we’re accessible to each other, that kind of strident purpose in love now seems to represent recklessness or unseriousness, a blindness to the information and cues we do have. To me it seems that social media has in fact made possible, and defined, a new type of grandeur in our generation: not having embarked on a private pilgrimage to look for someone we were not sure we would find, not quietly bailing our crush’s cousin out of debt, but rather making a public declaration, consumable by thousands or millions of people. Where once a wedding was one of the only ways to publicly declare our commitment to and feeling for someone, we now have the opportunity to announce our love—the flower arrangements we give, the surprises we plan for, the planes we board—at an unprecedented scale.
Yet there’s something in the type of grand gesture you’re reminiscing about that is distinctly private and uncertain. Fundamentally, I think you’re asking: Do we ever really feel uncertain about each other anymore? Is there space for us to imagine each other and desire each other from a distance when we’re prodded by facsimiles of each other online? The question that underlies this, in turn, is: Do we experience romance as we’ve inherited it from history and art—full of prohibition, mystery and yearning? When I asked my friends about their experiences with grand gestures, the most striking was a story from my friend Jeremy, though, like the stories all my friends told me, it didn’t look like the grand gestures we remember from films or the ones you’ve described in your question.
Years ago, Jeremy broke up with his first serious partner, a man he had been with since he was eighteen years old. Their relationship was so foundational that for the first five or so years of my friendship with Jeremy I considered the two of them a package deal. He told me that six months after they broke up, he went to his ex in a state of emotional agony. “I had a true breakdown in front of him,” Jeremy told me. “It was like an ego death.” Through the breakup Jeremy had realized that in all the years they’d been together, he’d never loved his ex at his full capacity: he never gave more than ninety percent of himself or made himself genuinely vulnerable. Now he wanted to show the full extent of his love, and to make amends for the depth of hurt he’d caused. It was a gesture of both reckoning and atonement. When I pressed Jeremy on why he considered this breakdown a grand gesture, he said that it felt so much bigger than anything he’d ever communicated before, so violent and inadmissible. He felt brutally exposed, and this exposure made possible a new kind of intimacy. Now, about four years later, Jeremy and his ex have one of the closest and most enviable relationships I know.
If they’d spent the six months after their breakup making mysterious virtual eye contact with each other online, would Jeremy have gotten used to seeing his ex at a distance, his conviction neutralized? In fact, that is how they’d spent those six months. Though they sometimes went weeks without explicitly communicating, they followed each other online and never retreated from each other’s fields of vision. Jeremy didn’t need to run into his ex, or see one of his posts, to think of him and wonder whether he’d made a mistake. And even in more diffuse digital scenarios, I’m convinced there is something timeless and even routine in this reemergence of exes into our peripheries. Ease of communication and travel may have genuinely changed the landscape of romance, and maybe the possibilities for the grand gesture, but the peripheral awareness of one’s former flames that emerges and retreats at unexpected moments hasn’t changed at all. How often do we walk past the restaurant where we used to eat with a former girlfriend, or the street of a former shared apartment, or momentarily mistake a stranger for someone we didn’t realize we still thought about? Or, if you date in your social circle, as most of us do, how often do we hear mention of someone we used to be intimate with, that she’s moved, or that she’s getting married? Reminders of the past always resurface with this undemanding ambiguity, in contrast to the passion and disturbance we used to feel about a given person. Love flows between new containers in each generation, of course, but these are merely containers, not inherently healthy nor toxic, neither useful nor bereft.
You might say that walking past an ex’s apartment, or even Googling her, doesn’t have the same quality as the moment in which she views our Instagram story, because though we’re reminded of her, we don’t have the assurance that she’s been reminded of us. It’s true there is something winking and particular about how we sometimes see each other online. Yet I don’t think it meets any of our needs, distracts us from our desires or dissuades us from a grand gesture that we might have contemplated if only we hadn’t been reminded of our ex’s pets, or the restaurants she likes to visit. And if we imagine the hearts of the lovers who made those classic pre-internet gestures that so move us in the chronicles of history and art, do we consider their passion so flimsy that a glimpse of their crush’s Instagram story would neuter it?
I’ll tell you about a grand gesture of my own. In my early twenties, I had a short, intense affair with a woman I knew from college. I sometimes thought about this woman, Noa, after the affair ended. I assumed that the degree of passion I’d felt for her was a product of the situation we’d been in, how mysterious we were to each other, and the short-lived nature of our romance. In the two or so years we didn’t speak, I sometimes heard about her from people we’d gone to school with, or thought of her when I walked past the building where she’d once lived. She didn’t have an Instagram account, but I followed some of her friends, and occasionally I saw a picture of her and felt alienated and sad. Then, one afternoon, as I was meeting one of our mutual friends for lunch, I happened to walk into my friend’s apartment as she was finishing a video call with Noa. Briefly, awkwardly, Noa and I said hello and goodbye to each other through the phone screen. She had been in my peripheral vision periodically, and certainly in my thoughts, yet these intrusions had no relationship to her actual presence, nor had they rendered it trivial. Making actual eye contact, in real time, even on a video call, overwhelmed me. Immediately upon speaking to her, I thought: I was wrong about everything; I’m completely in love with her.
A few months after I stumbled upon her on that video call I broke up with my then-boyfriend. Two days later I flew to the city where Noa was living, where she met me at the airport and I made a clear confession of my love. That remains the grandest gesture of my life. It didn’t feel like a relic from another time, and it wasn’t neutered by our having glimpsed each other in the previous months. Being in the same room with someone, however simple or difficult it is to get there—it doesn’t get old.
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Q: I’m a 22-year-old woman, and I recently left my boyfriend of three years. My ex-boyfriend was heartbroken and told me he is sure I am the love of his life. My question is: Is that a thing? Is it possible that I could be so sure that he is not the love of my life, and nevertheless be the love of his life? I’m not asking if he believes it; I know he does. But is there any possibility he won’t someday realize I wasn’t? I feel so sure that I can’t have been, because there’s a sense in which it wasn’t really me that was with him, or it was a version of myself that couldn’t last. He is in his mid-thirties, and the fact that it’s in part our times of life that make our visions for the future different makes me question his surety even more. Does that really happen—that we could see the relationship that differently, and both be right?
A: I can’t read this question without thinking of The Worst Person in the World (2021), a film that follows the relationship between a young woman, Julie, and her older boyfriend, Aksel. My friend June and I have sometimes discussed this film and laughed—in our late-twenties early-thirties bravado—over the absurd way Aksel lords his experience over Julie. He insists while they’re together, for example, that Julie is too young to realize the surpassing quality of their love. Despite her love for Aksel, Julie nurses crushes on other men and, rather than wanting to start a family, fantasizes about her freedom. Aksel’s campaign for the relationship is grounded in his certainty that nothing better is out there. To him, Julie’s motivating belief that she might want something different isn’t a sign of the weakness of her affection, but of her own doomed naïveté about the compromises of romantic life.
Isn’t this the haunting mystery that makes the very concept of marriage both so difficult and so intoxicatingly rich? At what point will we realize that nothing better is out there—and how lucky or unlucky in our romantic lives will we be at that grave moment? Having maintained the same email address for the last decade, I still have the text of this question, which I wrote when I was 22. It’s the only question I’ve ever written to an advice columnist. Perhaps to my benefit, it was never answered, and I’ve had to go about attempting to answer it myself.
There must certainly be people in the world who go to their deaths convinced that the supreme passionate experience of their life was directed toward someone for whom they were a mere drop in the bucket. But even while I was breaking up with my boyfriend, I had a feeling that he was not one of these people. I was surprised to hear him use a phrase like the love of my life. He and I had an affectionate, restrained dynamic. Personally, I had been raised by practical, cheerful people who placed absolutely no store in grand gestures; in my family there were no marriages, no ceremonies, no commitments or anniversaries, and no reason to disguise the essentially adaptive, conditional nature of healthy relationships. When I met my boyfriend I was easily convinced that real love was not dramatic, fantastical or even particularly intimate. We had satisfying sex three or four times a week; we attempted to get along with each other’s friends; we didn’t share interests in art or music, and even when we argued, we did so without visible anger. At times, when we touched on topics that were clearly sensitive, I pressed my boyfriend to confide his fears or bad memories. He almost always demurred. By the time we broke up, I was extremely freaked out that a man with twenty years of dating experience could mistake such a détente for the best of all possible loves. Which was worse: that I had spent three years with a person inured to what I conceived of as love, or that I might find out his conception of love was the true, adult one?
We crave confirmation of our devastating importance, which is what my ex-boyfriend briefly granted me; we would rather shoulder the responsibility of having been devastatingly important than discover we were merely incidental. But to judge a relationship, in retrospect, as so asymmetrical has the arresting effect of reminding us that we and our partners are always simultaneously experiencing different relationships—which are, as Janet Malcolm (writing on Freud’s theory of transference) chillingly describes them, “at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems.” Does that really happen, I asked at the time, with disbelief, that we could see the relationship that differently, and both be right? A few years after our breakup, my ex-boyfriend and I had coffee together and caught up. I’m almost certain he wasn’t disturbed by seeing me, and that he would not even remember the histrionics that had surrounded our breakup,1 let alone his conviction at one time that I was the love of his life. In fact, a different breakup he had recently gone through was on his mind. Yet now there is nothing surprising to me in the fact that we had oppositional convictions about the relationship. Rather, this is the fundamental, universal situation of love, which we disguise from each other in our months or years of fluctuating harmony, and reveal in the course of a breakup. Phyllis Rose stakes a claim in Parallel Lives that every marriage is “a subjectivist fiction with two points of view often deeply in conflict, sometimes fortuitously congruent.” I suspect you could say the same for any long-term relationship. I feel bemused, looking back on the way I framed this question, at my longstanding obsession with putting my finger on “reality.”
I suspect what most disturbed me about my ex-boyfriend’s protest was the possibility that he actually had felt a supreme, epitomizing emotion for me—and that all the time he had concealed it from me beneath his affection and restraint. The fact of not really knowing whether he had felt this passion, since I had not perceived it, felt like being robbed. What good was it, if he didn’t offer it to me? When I left him, I had in mind a woman, Noa, with whom I’d had a short affair, and who I often dreamed about. I hoped, in a guilty and inchoate way, that she and I might pick back up again. Noa seemed to represent the passion I felt was missing from my relationship. What if I had failed to communicate my serious passion for her in the little time we spent together? What if she believed me incapable of serious passion at all? I had, after all, prematurely cut off our romance, which I feared had dishonored and disguised how much I loved her. Imagining that I was shuddering at the spectacle of my ex-boyfriend’s pain, I actually shuddered at the apprehension that it was possible to love violently while conveying a terrible indifference.
Noa and I did pick back up again. The suspicion that visited in me my dreams—that she was the love of my life—became a living conviction. When she eventually dumped me, I felt what my ex-boyfriend had once claimed: that her leaving did nothing to revoke the fact that she was the love of my life. Of course, to protest that she was the love of my life was not any sort of inducement. To bargain on the basis of the obligation that being loved creates seldom leads to the type of love we hope for by bargaining. In fact the prostrate haggling of a person we want to respect, and who we imagine would only accept a freely given love, often feels like proof in itself that there is not much left to be consecrated. What does it matter to us, in the final tallying, what someone else feels? We’re only interested in pursuing our own passions—or perhaps, as Aksel implies in The Worst Person in the World, that’s just the naïve pastime of young women. If it turns out that nothing better is out there, we don’t have much choice but to go and find out for ourselves. I don’t begrudge Noa—nor Julie—the tenacious quality of her search.
Want to submit a question to Higher Gossip? Write us at highergossip@thepointmag.com.
This is the fourth installment of Higher Gossip, an advice column on sex and love. Read previous installments here.
●
Q: What does it mean, on Instagram, when a follower—a ghost from one’s romantic past—views your story? It could mean: I quickly swiped past in pursuit of more salient content. It could mean: I want you to see that I’m seeing you. It could mean: I’m still in love with you.
Now we can always find each other, but we have nothing to say—we sort of just make mysterious virtual eye contact for a second. We see each other through a one-way mirror, taking turns on either side, wondering. My question regards the Instagram story as a freighted communicative act: Is it pointless to resist harboring the emotional attachments this enables? Is it unhealthy? Is it worth the benefits to be so irrevocably accessible to former friends and lovers? And what are the benefits, exactly?
I don’t mean to harp on a perceived “authentic” past compared with a more hollow, oblique, lonely present. Yet so much of romance used to involve a sacrifice of time and effort: “I’ve travelled all this way just to see if anyone in this town knows where you live now.” Is this the death of the grand gesture?
A: What was the grand gesture, and what do we think of as grandeur now? This, to me, is the mystery at the heart of your question. Classic grand gestures from novels and films are, as you say, defined by a kind of sacrifice: hallmarks include the willingness to be rejected if, for example, you show up at the stoop of a woman you haven’t seen in years to make your proposal, or the selflessness of never receiving credit for the gesture you’ve made, like some of Austen’s romantic heroes, who secretly rescue the family members of their love objects from financial or social ruin without hope of earning any reciprocation.
It’s true that we see these types of gestures pretty seldom, though I’d venture to guess that most of the lovers who enjoyed the periods we feel nostalgic for—those who might have encountered the need to search a foreign town for their paramours—found these gestures vanishingly rare as well. But because we’re accessible to each other, that kind of strident purpose in love now seems to represent recklessness or unseriousness, a blindness to the information and cues we do have. To me it seems that social media has in fact made possible, and defined, a new type of grandeur in our generation: not having embarked on a private pilgrimage to look for someone we were not sure we would find, not quietly bailing our crush’s cousin out of debt, but rather making a public declaration, consumable by thousands or millions of people. Where once a wedding was one of the only ways to publicly declare our commitment to and feeling for someone, we now have the opportunity to announce our love—the flower arrangements we give, the surprises we plan for, the planes we board—at an unprecedented scale.
Yet there’s something in the type of grand gesture you’re reminiscing about that is distinctly private and uncertain. Fundamentally, I think you’re asking: Do we ever really feel uncertain about each other anymore? Is there space for us to imagine each other and desire each other from a distance when we’re prodded by facsimiles of each other online? The question that underlies this, in turn, is: Do we experience romance as we’ve inherited it from history and art—full of prohibition, mystery and yearning? When I asked my friends about their experiences with grand gestures, the most striking was a story from my friend Jeremy, though, like the stories all my friends told me, it didn’t look like the grand gestures we remember from films or the ones you’ve described in your question.
Years ago, Jeremy broke up with his first serious partner, a man he had been with since he was eighteen years old. Their relationship was so foundational that for the first five or so years of my friendship with Jeremy I considered the two of them a package deal. He told me that six months after they broke up, he went to his ex in a state of emotional agony. “I had a true breakdown in front of him,” Jeremy told me. “It was like an ego death.” Through the breakup Jeremy had realized that in all the years they’d been together, he’d never loved his ex at his full capacity: he never gave more than ninety percent of himself or made himself genuinely vulnerable. Now he wanted to show the full extent of his love, and to make amends for the depth of hurt he’d caused. It was a gesture of both reckoning and atonement. When I pressed Jeremy on why he considered this breakdown a grand gesture, he said that it felt so much bigger than anything he’d ever communicated before, so violent and inadmissible. He felt brutally exposed, and this exposure made possible a new kind of intimacy. Now, about four years later, Jeremy and his ex have one of the closest and most enviable relationships I know.
If they’d spent the six months after their breakup making mysterious virtual eye contact with each other online, would Jeremy have gotten used to seeing his ex at a distance, his conviction neutralized? In fact, that is how they’d spent those six months. Though they sometimes went weeks without explicitly communicating, they followed each other online and never retreated from each other’s fields of vision. Jeremy didn’t need to run into his ex, or see one of his posts, to think of him and wonder whether he’d made a mistake. And even in more diffuse digital scenarios, I’m convinced there is something timeless and even routine in this reemergence of exes into our peripheries. Ease of communication and travel may have genuinely changed the landscape of romance, and maybe the possibilities for the grand gesture, but the peripheral awareness of one’s former flames that emerges and retreats at unexpected moments hasn’t changed at all. How often do we walk past the restaurant where we used to eat with a former girlfriend, or the street of a former shared apartment, or momentarily mistake a stranger for someone we didn’t realize we still thought about? Or, if you date in your social circle, as most of us do, how often do we hear mention of someone we used to be intimate with, that she’s moved, or that she’s getting married? Reminders of the past always resurface with this undemanding ambiguity, in contrast to the passion and disturbance we used to feel about a given person. Love flows between new containers in each generation, of course, but these are merely containers, not inherently healthy nor toxic, neither useful nor bereft.
You might say that walking past an ex’s apartment, or even Googling her, doesn’t have the same quality as the moment in which she views our Instagram story, because though we’re reminded of her, we don’t have the assurance that she’s been reminded of us. It’s true there is something winking and particular about how we sometimes see each other online. Yet I don’t think it meets any of our needs, distracts us from our desires or dissuades us from a grand gesture that we might have contemplated if only we hadn’t been reminded of our ex’s pets, or the restaurants she likes to visit. And if we imagine the hearts of the lovers who made those classic pre-internet gestures that so move us in the chronicles of history and art, do we consider their passion so flimsy that a glimpse of their crush’s Instagram story would neuter it?
I’ll tell you about a grand gesture of my own. In my early twenties, I had a short, intense affair with a woman I knew from college. I sometimes thought about this woman, Noa, after the affair ended. I assumed that the degree of passion I’d felt for her was a product of the situation we’d been in, how mysterious we were to each other, and the short-lived nature of our romance. In the two or so years we didn’t speak, I sometimes heard about her from people we’d gone to school with, or thought of her when I walked past the building where she’d once lived. She didn’t have an Instagram account, but I followed some of her friends, and occasionally I saw a picture of her and felt alienated and sad. Then, one afternoon, as I was meeting one of our mutual friends for lunch, I happened to walk into my friend’s apartment as she was finishing a video call with Noa. Briefly, awkwardly, Noa and I said hello and goodbye to each other through the phone screen. She had been in my peripheral vision periodically, and certainly in my thoughts, yet these intrusions had no relationship to her actual presence, nor had they rendered it trivial. Making actual eye contact, in real time, even on a video call, overwhelmed me. Immediately upon speaking to her, I thought: I was wrong about everything; I’m completely in love with her.
A few months after I stumbled upon her on that video call I broke up with my then-boyfriend. Two days later I flew to the city where Noa was living, where she met me at the airport and I made a clear confession of my love. That remains the grandest gesture of my life. It didn’t feel like a relic from another time, and it wasn’t neutered by our having glimpsed each other in the previous months. Being in the same room with someone, however simple or difficult it is to get there—it doesn’t get old.
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Q: I’m a 22-year-old woman, and I recently left my boyfriend of three years. My ex-boyfriend was heartbroken and told me he is sure I am the love of his life. My question is: Is that a thing? Is it possible that I could be so sure that he is not the love of my life, and nevertheless be the love of his life? I’m not asking if he believes it; I know he does. But is there any possibility he won’t someday realize I wasn’t? I feel so sure that I can’t have been, because there’s a sense in which it wasn’t really me that was with him, or it was a version of myself that couldn’t last. He is in his mid-thirties, and the fact that it’s in part our times of life that make our visions for the future different makes me question his surety even more. Does that really happen—that we could see the relationship that differently, and both be right?
A: I can’t read this question without thinking of The Worst Person in the World (2021), a film that follows the relationship between a young woman, Julie, and her older boyfriend, Aksel. My friend June and I have sometimes discussed this film and laughed—in our late-twenties early-thirties bravado—over the absurd way Aksel lords his experience over Julie. He insists while they’re together, for example, that Julie is too young to realize the surpassing quality of their love. Despite her love for Aksel, Julie nurses crushes on other men and, rather than wanting to start a family, fantasizes about her freedom. Aksel’s campaign for the relationship is grounded in his certainty that nothing better is out there. To him, Julie’s motivating belief that she might want something different isn’t a sign of the weakness of her affection, but of her own doomed naïveté about the compromises of romantic life.
Isn’t this the haunting mystery that makes the very concept of marriage both so difficult and so intoxicatingly rich? At what point will we realize that nothing better is out there—and how lucky or unlucky in our romantic lives will we be at that grave moment? Having maintained the same email address for the last decade, I still have the text of this question, which I wrote when I was 22. It’s the only question I’ve ever written to an advice columnist. Perhaps to my benefit, it was never answered, and I’ve had to go about attempting to answer it myself.
There must certainly be people in the world who go to their deaths convinced that the supreme passionate experience of their life was directed toward someone for whom they were a mere drop in the bucket. But even while I was breaking up with my boyfriend, I had a feeling that he was not one of these people. I was surprised to hear him use a phrase like the love of my life. He and I had an affectionate, restrained dynamic. Personally, I had been raised by practical, cheerful people who placed absolutely no store in grand gestures; in my family there were no marriages, no ceremonies, no commitments or anniversaries, and no reason to disguise the essentially adaptive, conditional nature of healthy relationships. When I met my boyfriend I was easily convinced that real love was not dramatic, fantastical or even particularly intimate. We had satisfying sex three or four times a week; we attempted to get along with each other’s friends; we didn’t share interests in art or music, and even when we argued, we did so without visible anger. At times, when we touched on topics that were clearly sensitive, I pressed my boyfriend to confide his fears or bad memories. He almost always demurred. By the time we broke up, I was extremely freaked out that a man with twenty years of dating experience could mistake such a détente for the best of all possible loves. Which was worse: that I had spent three years with a person inured to what I conceived of as love, or that I might find out his conception of love was the true, adult one?
We crave confirmation of our devastating importance, which is what my ex-boyfriend briefly granted me; we would rather shoulder the responsibility of having been devastatingly important than discover we were merely incidental. But to judge a relationship, in retrospect, as so asymmetrical has the arresting effect of reminding us that we and our partners are always simultaneously experiencing different relationships—which are, as Janet Malcolm (writing on Freud’s theory of transference) chillingly describes them, “at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems.” Does that really happen, I asked at the time, with disbelief, that we could see the relationship that differently, and both be right? A few years after our breakup, my ex-boyfriend and I had coffee together and caught up. I’m almost certain he wasn’t disturbed by seeing me, and that he would not even remember the histrionics that had surrounded our breakup,11. In one twist that still amuses me with its frankness, I kissed the tears on his cheeks and he remarked that they were artificial tears he’d just put in, and that he hoped I had swallowed enough of them to have mild laxative poisoning and have to run to the bathroom all night. let alone his conviction at one time that I was the love of his life. In fact, a different breakup he had recently gone through was on his mind. Yet now there is nothing surprising to me in the fact that we had oppositional convictions about the relationship. Rather, this is the fundamental, universal situation of love, which we disguise from each other in our months or years of fluctuating harmony, and reveal in the course of a breakup. Phyllis Rose stakes a claim in Parallel Lives that every marriage is “a subjectivist fiction with two points of view often deeply in conflict, sometimes fortuitously congruent.” I suspect you could say the same for any long-term relationship. I feel bemused, looking back on the way I framed this question, at my longstanding obsession with putting my finger on “reality.”
I suspect what most disturbed me about my ex-boyfriend’s protest was the possibility that he actually had felt a supreme, epitomizing emotion for me—and that all the time he had concealed it from me beneath his affection and restraint. The fact of not really knowing whether he had felt this passion, since I had not perceived it, felt like being robbed. What good was it, if he didn’t offer it to me? When I left him, I had in mind a woman, Noa, with whom I’d had a short affair, and who I often dreamed about. I hoped, in a guilty and inchoate way, that she and I might pick back up again. Noa seemed to represent the passion I felt was missing from my relationship. What if I had failed to communicate my serious passion for her in the little time we spent together? What if she believed me incapable of serious passion at all? I had, after all, prematurely cut off our romance, which I feared had dishonored and disguised how much I loved her. Imagining that I was shuddering at the spectacle of my ex-boyfriend’s pain, I actually shuddered at the apprehension that it was possible to love violently while conveying a terrible indifference.
Noa and I did pick back up again. The suspicion that visited in me my dreams—that she was the love of my life—became a living conviction. When she eventually dumped me, I felt what my ex-boyfriend had once claimed: that her leaving did nothing to revoke the fact that she was the love of my life. Of course, to protest that she was the love of my life was not any sort of inducement. To bargain on the basis of the obligation that being loved creates seldom leads to the type of love we hope for by bargaining. In fact the prostrate haggling of a person we want to respect, and who we imagine would only accept a freely given love, often feels like proof in itself that there is not much left to be consecrated. What does it matter to us, in the final tallying, what someone else feels? We’re only interested in pursuing our own passions—or perhaps, as Aksel implies in The Worst Person in the World, that’s just the naïve pastime of young women. If it turns out that nothing better is out there, we don’t have much choice but to go and find out for ourselves. I don’t begrudge Noa—nor Julie—the tenacious quality of her search.
Want to submit a question to Higher Gossip? Write us at highergossip@thepointmag.com.
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