The Summons of Love by Ruti Mari

Author:Ruti, Mari
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PSY026000, Psychology/Movements/Psychoanalysis, FAM029000, Family & Relationships/Love & Romance
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Craving for Solitude

There are of course times when silence does not directly enhance communication, but rather signifies our need to momentarily withdraw from our lover. Even then, however, it does not necessarily imply emotional disengagement. We may, for instance, crave solitude as a way to restore our waning conception of who we are. We may wish to protect our capacity to remain connected to ourselves against the soul-numbing inauthenticity that is sometimes the price of our constant immersion in the norms, demands, and enticements of the social world. Because solitude allows our usual public defenses to disintegrate—because it enables us to drop the various masks that we wield for the purposes of social conformity—it may empower us to experience ourselves on a more immediate (or unmediated) level; it offers us a tiny but delicious morsel of personal distinctiveness in the midst of the myriad pressures of collective life, giving rise to a sense of self-belonging that allows us (fleetingly, at least) to feel “real.” According to this view, solitude is a way to tend the needs of the true self.

On our own, we come to rest within the calming confines of our inner experience. In the slow rhythm of solitary moments, we are able to suspend the preoccupations that normally drive our everyday actions and thought processes. As a result, we suddenly have space for the kind of self-reflexivity that helps us better process the challenges of our lives, including the confounding opacity of our relationships. In this sense, solitude renders us more insightful, and hence more able to love, than we would be if we never allowed ourselves to leave the world behind. States of aloneness may, for instance, allow us to focus on relational complexities that we habitually overlook. Facets of relating that we ordinarily suppress may surface to the forefront of our awareness. We may contemplate what we do not usually have time to think about, perhaps even addressing issues that we have neglected in the past. On this account, solitude is less a matter of detaching ourselves from our lover than of cultivating a different relationship with him—one that thrives on distance rather than proximity. It is, potentially at least, a breeding ground for fresh relational possibilities in the sense that when we return from it, we may have something new to contribute; we may have something innovative and interesting to offer.

Solitude can thus be a means of sustaining love and, at times, even of reigniting passion that has lost its luster. Yet many of us are deeply suspicious of our need for it, often reading it as a lapse of affection. Similarly, we tend to experience our lover’s hunger for it as intimidating, rarely interpreting it as a strategy for love’s recovery. This is in part because it is hard for two individuals to negotiate their different wishes and fears regarding the matter. One partner may construe his lover’s desire for periods of separation as a painful rejection and a sure sign that the relationship is falling apart.

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