The Second Mountain by David Brooks

Author:David Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

PUSHING OPEN THE GATES

A dialogue between two people takes the form of a tennis rally. One partner takes a deep breath and provides a small display of, This is what I like. She shares her favorite movies. He volleys back with his own. She shares the playlists on her phone, and he volleys back with his own. He sends some favorite video late at night, and she sends one back.

Then comes, These are the important moments of my life: the stories, ever deepening, from childhood to adulthood, and gradually, bravely, past relationships and losses.

Phase by phase, the risks become bigger and bolder. Love is possible only if two people eventually reveal the center of their existences. If the love is to bloom, they have to get to, This is how I’m crazy. As Alain de Botton notes, we are all crazy in some way. The crucial question at the depth of any relationship is not Is he crazy? It is What are the ways you are crazy? What parts of your life have been blocked by fear? How exactly do you self-destruct? In what ways have you not been loved?

My wife and I really got to know each other over email. The steps of self-disclosure were so gradual, the progress would have been like watching a lake evaporate to any outsider. But each successive email was carefully considered to not push things too far. I’d hit SEND and wait with a dread that I had crossed some forbidden line. I once sent her an email about some completely innocent topic, some minor step forward of mutual knowing, and then got on a cross-country flight with no Wi-Fi service. I spent the entire flight in an anxiety of uncertainty, wondering if the tone had been too familiar. I can still remember the great relief I felt upon landing and finding that my volley had been returned. In any courtship, you show your trustworthiness by the safe steadiness of your advance.

And with the sensitivity of your ear. People are judged as much by their listening as by what they say, because when you think you are passively listening to others, you are actually teaching them about yourself.

“Good people will mirror goodness in us, which is why we love them so much,” Richard Rohr writes. “Not-so-mature people will mirror their own unlived and confused life onto us.” Thus, a meeting of the minds is not always gentle. When the poet Ted Hughes first met Sylvia Plath, he made a bold advance to kiss her on the neck. She reached up and bit his cheek so hard that she broke through his skin. She was saying, I understand you. I am your match.

When you choose to marry someone, you had better choose someone you’ll enjoy talking with for the rest of your life. It doesn’t work unless two people can fall into a state of fluid conversational flow. The phone calls can last hours. They can spend a fourteen-hour day together and the words don’t stop.

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