Love (not) at first sight
Essay written for The Daily Telegraph at the time of publication of The Trial of True Love : I strapped the rolled-up tent onto the back of my bicycle. My girlfriend took the two sleeping bags, and the picnic went in her bike basket. The sun was setting. We pedalled off across the Fens to a remote river where, on a recce the previous day, I had found a small tree-covered island reached by a plank bridge. Here on a patch of fern and brambles screened by trees we pitched our tent, and zipped together the two sleeping bags to form one double cocoon. We ate our picnic as night fell, and undressed, and crawled into the nest we had prepared. In this manner, at the late age of nineteen, I lost my virginity. I was passionately in love. I remember it all vividly, and with lasting gratitude, for all its discomforts. The ground beneath the sleeping bag was stony and we were unable to sleep. In the small hours a bird-scarer began firing, mimicking a shot-gun. We thought hunters were approaching, and shouted to them not to shoot us. At dawn, chilled and exhausted, we folded our tent and crept away. But we had been alone together on my first night of love, and for me that was enough.
Over the months that followed, this first and most intense love affair slowly disintegrated, as such things do. My dread that my girlfriend would leave me scratched away at our happiness until there was nothing left to keep us together. When she did leave me, gently and with care, I suffered appallingly, and for a longer time than I had been happy; but I was not surprised. My need had been so intense I would have left myself, if I could. I was young. It was my first love. I can forgive myself my immaturity. But I think, looking back, that a lesson was learned then which it took me twenty long years to unlearn.
My subject is falling in love. I've been revisiting my younger self and my former love life because I've been writing a novel about those long-gone days. To help me in my research I have a time capsule of my hopes and dreams of that time in the form of an earlier novel, written by myself at the age of thirty. This novel, called Amator , took as its subject a young man who falls in love at first sight. He pursues the elusive object of his passion and finally wins her. It was never published. I re-read the yellowing typescript, and found on every page the truth of which its author had been unaware. The story was an exercise in wish-fulfilment. My younger self longed to fall in love again, but, finding it wasn't happening, fell in love in a story.
I begin to see, when I look back, an organic relationship between my love life and my sleeping arrangements. The tent on the island was memorable but unrepeatable, much like that first overwhelming love. Later, when I bought my own flat in west London, I created a different sort of nest in the roof-space. I did this for sound financial reasons. I had no capital, and had bought the flat on an 80% mortgage and a 20% bank loan. The combined repayments exactly equalled my monthly pay cheque. So I let out the two bedrooms to friends, and installed myself in the roof space. I did all the work myself: cut the hatch, boarded over the joists, ran an extension lead for power and light, nailed fibreboard to the rafters, and constructed a vertical ladder for access from the passage below. There was room for a double mattress, but not for a bed. I could stand up, but only in the middle.
Here I lived and conducted my love affairs for three years, while I paid off the bank loan. As a love nest it had advantages and disadvantages. Any girl who followed me up the ladder and sat cross-legged beside me on the mattress could have been under no illusions as to my intentions. At the same time the whole arrangement was so flimsy, so temporary and un-serious, that it negated any prospect of commitment. My attic was both a come-on and a retreat. Girlfriends shared it with me, but they never moved in. There just wasn't room.
The metaphor and the reality converged one unforgotten night when my then-girlfriend got herself drunk in order to tell me my faults. She did this so thoroughly, goading me so far beyond endurance, that I began shouting at her to get out. She refused. Only then did I discover that you can't push a grown woman down a hatch. I tried; but it can't be done. My refuge had turned into a trap.
The burden of her attack on me was that I pretended to be a caring sensitive person with a genuine capacity to love, but in fact I was a bastard. I had no real feelings at all, and only used her for sex, and would be punished for this by spending the rest of my life unloved and alone. This seemed all too likely to me; which is why I reacted with such violence, and tried to push her and her malign prophecy down the hatch.
My more considered response to her accusation would have been that I too had deep feelings; that I was eager to mobilise them in a fully committed love affair; but that to do that, I had to fall in love. However, I didn't say any of this. I just shouted, 'Get out! Get out!' She shouted back, 'Go on, hit me! You know you want to!' I did want to, but I didn't hit her. Nor did I offer my excuse. How do you say, 'I like you but I'm not in love with you?'
I had got myself into this mess because I was giving out the wrong signals. I was aware that this was happening, but didn't know what to do about it. It was the only way I knew how to behave. Each time I met an attractive young woman, I found myself unable to believe that she in her turn might be attracted to me. So instead of risking some simple trial of physical contact, I talked. I would ask her about her love life, and learn all about her unsatisfactory boyfriends, and make intelligent remarks that showed how well I understood what she was going through. She would be flattered by my interest, and touched by my insight, and would part from me at the end of the evening thinking that this might be the start of something special and lasting. As for me, all I wanted was an affair.
It was a form of breach of promise. And yet, even as I presented the misleading front of an honourable young man, even as I dodged commitment and caused needless hurt, I was longing to fall in love. Now, thirty years later, I think I understand the curious contradictory processes that were at work within me.
I was raised in a Roman Catholic home and school, and inculcated with a strong moral sense. By my twenties the scaffolding of faith had fallen away, but I remained, in my own eyes at least, a moral individual. I sought to tell the truth, and not to exploit others for my own ends. I no longer believed that sex should be confined to the exclusive commitment of marriage, but I did believe that sex was properly part of a loving relationship, and that sex without love was a form of exploitation. The unexplored assumption here was that women wanted love, and accepted sex as an expression of love, but did not want sex on its own. Men, I knew, worked differently. Men wanted sex any way it came. But I was a nice young man, and I understood that the nice young women I met wanted real relationships, which meant that I must feel real feelings for them. My first love affair had followed just this pattern. I had fallen in love. That was how it was supposed to be. Now I must fall in love again.
In effect, I believed that there had to be love, or at least the chance of love, to deserve the sex. This was where it all went wrong. Eager for sex but forbidden to treat women as sex objects, I formed emotional relationships that then became sexual. The understanding each time, never expressed aloud, was that this affair could well be the one that goes all the way. But I always knew it was not. I should have issued a warning: 'I love being with you, but in ten weeks' time I'm going to end our affair.' But such things are unsayable, and so I said nothing.
How could I be so sure that this was not the one that would go all the way? Because I hadn't fallen in love.
From time to time I came close, but the women I fell for were always just a little out of my reach. It's so obvious now that I was caught in the Groucho Conundrum; but I didn't spot it for years. Groucho Marx famously said, 'I wouldn't join a club that would have me as a member.' The romantic version goes: 'I could never fall in love with a woman desperate enough to fall in love with me.' I was excited only by women who showed an interest in me, but then turned away. My bursts of passion went safely unreciprocated. However, because they occurred I was fooled into thinking I could still fall in love. All I needed, I supposed, was the right woman.
I was not altogether stupid. I knew that I was capable of falling in love with a woman who was wrong for me in every way, and that it could all end in disaster. But I wasn't troubled by the prospect. Not everything works out. I wanted at least to start an affair by being in love, because then I was equally at risk. There's something fine, something noble, about the act of falling in love: a discarding of protective covering, a blithe willingness to put yourself in the way of harm. The image of myself in love was intensely attractive to me, and not only because it resolved the dilemma of sex. True love brought with it the deepest bond, a companion for life. Of course I wanted that too.
That was how far I'd got when I wrote the novel about falling in love that I called Amator . I remember telling the plot to an attractive young woman I'd recently met, all through a romantic dinner, using it as a means to foster intimacy. The strategy was successful. We enjoyed a short affair. But I was not in love (she had neglected to make herself unavailable) and true to my pattern, the affair trickled away in a few short weeks.
Not long after this time I began to question my single pre-condition for true love: this act of falling in love. While working on my failed novel I'd come across a passage in a letter from the poet Rilke, which I copied out and pinned over my desk:
I sometimes ask myself whether longing cannot so stream out of a man, like a storm, that against it, in opposition to this outgoing current, nothing can reach him.
I had been longing and failing to fall in love for years. Could the two be connected? Could my own desire to fall in love itself be the obstacle that prevented me from loving? And if so, was this what I really wanted? For the first time I contemplated the possibility that my actions revealed more than my intentions: that I did not really want love at all. The more I pondered this, the more it began to seem to me that I had raised a high fence of demands and requirements with the sole purpose of shutting out the chance of love. My desire to fall in love had become my fortification against love.
Why?
The old answer: fear. Fear lies at the heart of my story. Fear of being hurt. Fear of bearing the burden of another person's happiness. Fear of being smothered by another person's needs. Fear of inflicting pain. Fear of being told I'm cruel and selfish, and fear of it being true.
So many fears. Better to make only small promises. Better to create only modest expectations. Never send flowers. Never say, 'I love you.'
Was this cautious milk-and-water lovemaking to go on for ever? No, I answered myself, clinging to the last shreds of my old faith, because one magical day I would fall in love. So went the protective illusion. One day an overwhelming passion would uproot me like a hurricane, and sweep away all my doubts and fears. Then at last I would give all I had to give, my heart, my future, without reserve, because I would have no choice in the matter. It would be beyond my power to resist. And so I would bear no responsibility for the outcome.
That was what I wanted: no choice, no responsibility. A thunderbolt from a blue sky. But stubbornly, it refused to happen.
In time, making the same mistake over and over again wears out even the most dedicated self-destroyer. There came a day when I took further stock of my life and asked myself a new question. How would it be, I said, if instead of seeking to fall in love I sought only to be happy? Who then would I want to be with?
I knew the answer at once: the former girlfriend to whom I'd told the plot of Amator. She had remained a friend, rather to my surprise. She liked me, and saw no reason why we should be strangers just because we were no longer lovers. She went on including me in her social gatherings, and I found myself getting to know her far better than when we had been a declared couple. Nothing was now expected of me, and I felt at ease in her company. In fact, it struck me, I felt happy with her.
Could such a gentle emotion be the basis for true love? It seemed unlikely. But I began to see more of her, all in the way of friendship. The more time I spent with her, the more I came to admire and value her. I allowed myself to think of her in a quite new way, as someone I could picture myself living with for a long time.
Then one day she mentioned that she was going ski-ing with a man called Rupert. I was stunned. Who was Rupert? Would they share a room? Of course they would share a room. It's so much cheaper. They would push the twin beds together. Love would blossom in the snow. She would ski out of my reach just as I was beginning my cautious approach.
This was all it took to propel me into action. I counter-proposed that she join me on a Greek island holiday in the spring, and she accepted. It shames me to admit these petty details; but actually I don't care. Something had to give. She still went ski-ing with Rupert, but Rupert, it turned out, was gay.
Our love grew slowly and steadily from such foolish beginnings, in the only way I now believe love can grow: not by the striking of thunderbolts, but by ever deepening knowledge, and trust in each other, and mutual gratitude. We've been married now for seventeen years, and I know I'll love her till the day I die. We have three children who'll one day soon begin to make their own mistakes in love. But at least they'll know that their parents got it wrong before them, and still ended up happy.
As for the unpublished novel, it seemed to me that I had half a book - the passionate dream of love - and that I could add the other half - the hard-earned reality. So I re-wrote it from top to bottom, and let my younger self battle it out with my older self, and found it was a more equal fight than I had expected. It's now called The Trial of True Love , and it's just been published. Better late than never. |
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