All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (13 page)

Comforting as it may be to have time-tested rules to live by, the injunctions for capturing the heart of Mr Right contain a number of decidedly odd underlying assumptions at which our grandmothers would have baulked. They take it as given that there is a single, unique Mr Right, and that he belongs to a wild male tribe, so contemptible as far as intelligence is concerned that he can be captured by a manipulative performance of femininity as ‘bait’.

The linked assumption is that men don’t want to be ‘tamed’–or to change the discourse, that men are in fact the evolutionary psychologists’ fundamental male: a hoary hunter only and ever in search of reproduction, for whom the female of the species is a mere receptacle for sperm. Both presumptions contain a large element of fantasy and an admixture of observed truth. In traditional societies, and before the pill, men of course had the power to roam freely, to seduce and abandon. In our more equal and permissive times, men (but women, too) may indeed change partners more readily than our grandparents would have approved. Like women, all too many have bought into the metaphor of the ‘selfish gene’ and expanded it into a template for serial relationships. However, men marry or live in partnerships as often as women do–more often, if one calculates the current tendency for late divorce and men’s greater access to younger generations. (That, indeed, may be the rub!) Nor are many men the rakish Don Juans women seem both obsessed by and–in fantasy, at least–so attracted to. Even that arch-seducer Valmont, at the end of his
liaisons dangereuses
, finds himself in love with the virtuous Madame de Tourvel, the woman he had set out merely to seduce. Men are, indeed, as complicated as women–and since we serve as their mothers, we would hope they are as capable of loving.

The year following the publication of
The Rules
a different kind of dating book appeared, this time in Britain.
Bridget Jones’s Diary
, a sparkling satire of everyday singleton life, also rose into worldwide bestsellerdom, spawned a sequel and a series of films. Plump, boozy, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed and accident-prone, Bridget Jones is an endearing working woman in her early thirties. Though she loathes the ‘smug marrieds’ in her entourage, she longs for a romantic attachment that will transport her into the married state: after all, she doesn’t want to die alone, her remains to be eaten by some mangy dog. Meanwhile, her diary chronicles her obsessions, her love life, her countless ever broken resolutions to transform herself into the svelte, non-smoking, perfected self who will win Mr Right. There are two men in her sights: her publishing boss, Daniel Cleaver, the deceitful seducer whose charms are impossible to resist despite his ‘fuckwittage’, the emotional tumult his doings cast Bridget into; and Mark Darcy, the upright and uptight human rights lawyer, at first infinitely resistible.

Bridget Jones’s Diary
as everyone knows is a contemporary take on Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
, that other surprise hit of the turn of the century, made into an oft-repeated television series first screened in 1995, and a film in 2005. In 2008 came
Lost in Austen
, another popular television series which has a contemporary young woman, mad about
Pride and Prejudice
, travelling back in time to the original site of ‘courteous’ love. Post-feminists, it appears, yearn for the weddings Jane Austen provides to culminate a span of courtship, itself replete with pitfalls and hurdles. Americans,
Time Magazine
noted in 2007, spend $50 billion a year on weddings. An Irish bridal gown website went so far as to use Simone de Beauvoir’s famous adage about the cultural conditioning that made girls into subordinate creatures–‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman’–as advertising copy. The topsy-turvy suggestion here is that a deliciously cream-puff-white wedding is all any girl needs so as to become that now desirable entity, woman–and married, to boot.

Comparing Jane Austen’s comedy of manners to
Bridget Jones’s Diary
and
The Rules
tells us something about the road love and marriage have travelled. Published in 1813, though begun before the turn of the century under the title ‘First Impressions’, the novel coincides with the period when the sentimental marriage, a union based on love, was effectively consolidated as a cultural wish, if not quite a reality: the book still bears many of the traces of marriage’s older aristocratic form in which property and family alliance took precedence over any sentimental attachment, let alone those spurred by sex. Part of its contemporary drama arises precisely in the tug between these forms of union.

Marriage, indeed, is the book’s subject: it is as much a social and economic imperative as it may be a sentimental one. The famous opening line makes this clear: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ The corollary of this is that women, particularly if not in possession of a good fortune, which is the five Bennet daughters’ case, must be in want of a husband.

If the search for the ‘right’ partner is a modern gloss on the book’s theme, Austen emphasizes that success in the endeavour entails inward adjustments and a recognition of one’s own failings: it is not only a matter of behavioural ploys. Both her male and female characters undertake what we would now call the ‘emotional work’ of relationship, something the film versions inevitably make less clear. Both sexes, too, are in search of partners. Austen gives us various possible kinds of marriage, together with an ironical gloss on what ‘rightness’ may mean. Her principal heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, like Bridget Jones with Daniel Cleaver, is initially greatly taken by the charming Mr Wickham. But her ‘first impressions’ prove faulty here, as they do in her assessment of her eventual Mr Right, Fitzwilliam Darcy, considered for a good half of the book to be a disapproving prig, overblown with pride in his superior status.

Austen imbues Lizzy with wit, intelligence and independence of mind: she is hardly a submissive, simpering puppet obsessed only by the chase that will allow her to be caught. In that sense, she is something of a protofeminist. Despite the real possibility of future insecurity, she refuses her first offer of marriage from the sententious and fawning Mr Collins. When Darcy initially proposes to her, stating that he does so against his will, she adamantly refuses him: passion is not enough to justify union with a man who manifests so much simultaneous contempt for those she values. Only when he has recognized his own lacks as Lizzy has hers, only when she garners an insight into his character as composed of more than pride, does she begin to fall in love with him. Judgement, good sense and some of those traditional virtues–generosity, just action, helpfulness, devotion–rather than an excess of ‘sensibility’ are always core values for Austen. The choice between one partner and another is not a matter of romance, but of argument and discussion, of shared values and hopes of the world.

If attraction at first sight can be said to play its part in the eventual union of Lizzy’s sister Jane to the affable Mr Bingley, it hardly makes the path towards it smooth. Jane may not have read
The Rules
, which advise women ‘not to open up too fast’, but her temperament is such that she conceals her special affection for Bingley. As a result ‘he cannot trust it’, while his interventionist friend Darcy can’t see it at all and shepherds him quickly away from what he understands as a less than perfect match, one in which a rise in social status alongside financial advantage would be all on Jane’s side. Lizzy’s friend Charlotte, an unmarried twenty-seven-year-old, who is the wise pragmatist in the novel, says to her:

Charlotte herself accepts a marriage proposal from Mr Collins after the briefest acquaintance, even though she considers him ‘neither sensible nor agreeable’ and thinks highly neither of men nor of matrimony. Nonetheless, it is the only honourable provision for ‘well-educated young women of small fortune’. Indeed, Charlotte’s views on marriage counterbalance the high hopes Lizzy and Jane have of it: ‘Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance,’ Charlotte states. ‘If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation.’ Lizzy’s silly and effervescent sister Lydia, who elopes (at the dizzy age of sixteen) with the ever charming Wickham, soon to be strong-armed into marriage with her, will be proof of that, Austen suggests at the end of the book. Nor is there much ‘felicity’ in the central marriage we are shown: that of the intelligent, diffident, passive Mr Bennet and his coarse, controlling, histrionic wife, a union propelled by lust and lived in estrangement. Bridget Jones’s parents live out its modern parallel, which includes an affair on the mother’s part, yet the author, Helen Fielding, seems intent on having them come together in happiness at the end.

Despite easy access to divorce and the knowledge that half of marriages will end in one, despite women’s greater economic freedom, despite an abundance of youthful sex and cohabitation figures which in Britain estimate that some two million people are living together, we seem to want marriages based on love to work ‘till death do us part’ even more than Austen did. A YouGov poll commissioned by the
Sunday Times
in 2008, based on interviews with cohabiting, married and once divorced men and women in almost equal numbers, found that 66 per cent of people who were cohabiting and 77 per cent of those in their first marriage thought that marriages should entail a commitment for life. Broken down into age groups, 80 per cent of the under-forties believed in lifelong marriages, as did 76 per cent of the over-forties.

Though in 2010 actual marriage figures in England and Wales had fallen for four consecutive years and cohabitation figures had risen, 60 per cent of those cohabiting believed in marriage, and simply wanted to be sure. Some, of course, like Hugh Grant in the perennially popular
Four Weddings and a Funeral
(1994), may be sceptical about the formal trappings of weddings and humorously contemptuous of conventional marriage. But what they seek in cohabitation is a marriage in all but name. In America, cohabitation figures increased by 88 per cent between 1980 and 2007, while about 55 per cent planned to marry their partners.

The young men and women I interviewed talked of marriage as a wish or a lack, even if their parents had divorced. Like gay men and women, they spoke of it as a public and symbolic act: an important ritual–of which we now have so few–in which a community witnessed their vows. As the Flemish writer Erwin Mortier said to me about his marriage after twenty years of ‘sinful cohabitation’: ‘It’s a triumph of endurance over hope.’ So even if we marry late, often having cohabited first, marriage maintains its aura as a good ignited and inhabited by love.

Can it be that marriage is simply the best way human beings have found to live together even though it may also sometimes be the worst? And what kinds of love precipitate and inhabit it? Are we talking about the romantic swoon of the courting lover, the anguished heights and obsessional lows of passion, a contract between admired master and submissive or pampered servant, a companionship based on attraction, affinities and mutual projects, a shelter against loneliness and the terrors of mortality, or a union that mingles several of these?

Inventing Love

Western ideas of love have their source in fiction as much as in lived history. Like fairy-tale, the fictions carry an element of wish, rather more than they may reflect any immediate and widespread reality. But shaping aspirations and daydreams as they do, as well as delineating appropriate behaviour, fictions help to form the psychological bedrock of the way we live love. As that mordant seventeenth-century French aphorist La Rochefoucauld observed, ‘People would never fall in love if they had not heard talk of love.’ Indeed, fictions are society’s way of carrying on a conversation with itself about what it values and what it detests, about what may invoke happiness or produce despair, and what we mean by both.

Notions of romance and courtship find one starting-place in the select atmosphere of the Provençal courts of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The very word ‘courtship’, which has now taken on its more specific sense of anyman wooing anywoman, derives from the courtesy, the good manners and behaviour expected of a courtier in the presence of queenly beings more elevated than himself. Love and seduction here are part of a civilizing enterprise exacted by high-ranking women of lower-born men. These codes of civility spread through the Renaissance courts. They played an important part in the entourage of Louis XIV, and were very gradually disseminated through the rising middle classes of Europe. Here they eventually–and always unevenly–found themselves bound into the union of love and marriage.

In the love poetry of the Provençal troubadours, the mistress is inaccessible. Like Lancelot’s Guinevere, she is married. Courtship is secret. She is wooed through brave deeds and through verse which sings her beauty and ineffable charms, as well as the lovesickness of the poet-lover. The sickness or madness is central: romantic love, often unrequited, is tantamount to a mental or imaginative imbalance, an anguish which catapults the lover into an obsessive concentration on the beloved. His idealization of her makes him blind to all faults and other concerns.