All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion by Appignanesi Lisa

Author:Appignanesi, Lisa [Appignanesi, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-07-17T23:00:00+00:00

The initial transcendent ecstasy of union may, some speculate, last for two years, perhaps more, in an echo of the time it takes for a child to acquire language. Then ecstasy dissipates. It is as if the passionate merger has become too much: the couple, the one that is made of two, now feels as if it may swallow up what has become a newly vulnerable because unbounded self, cannibalize it. If eroticism is a ‘movement towards the Other’, as Simone de Beauvoir writes, echoing Montaigne, ‘in the deep intimacy of the couple, husband and wife become for one another the Same; no exchange is any longer possible between them, no giving and no conquering. Thus if they do continue to make love, it is often with a sense of shame’, as if incest were taking place. In this incestuous sameness, the taboo of the sexual mother can re-emerge, and the very act of sex may feel frightening and breed impotence. Tenderness is possible in coupledom, but rarely the passion that confounds inside and outside, into which one feels one may disappear never to know separate boundaries again.

Of course, the passion doesn’t go all at once or necessarily for ever. Rows that demarcate difference can reignite it. So, too, can exchanged memories of past lovers, or the eyes of a third party focusing on the beloved in a way which once more constitutes him or her as other–as that tantalizing, mysterious person first spied across a crowded room.

Yet gradually the passion that so forcefully drew two separate beings together and made them one, can seep away. Sometimes it may seem that this happens for only one partner, but in this coupling there is rarely only one, though only one may take the blame. For some, the tenderness, the fondness, the companionship and sharing that replace passion may be more than enough. For others, as sex diminishes in intensity or quantity, disappointment follows in its wake, and often enough irritation. The very differences that drew lover and beloved together, that made passion possible, now exasperate, seem too close to one. Every half of a couple has at one time or another felt shamed by the other’s comments or actions in public, as if the other were oneself. Once admired energy seems to have become overbearing loudness; sweet spontaneity, babbling silliness; austere rectitude, punitive stiffness, and so on. Trapped in a ‘we’, the partners chafe against the chains that were once the bonds of ecstasy.

Domestic life inevitably requires some reformulation of early passion. Sexual intimacy can, of course, speak other idioms than that of obliterating passion. It can speak affection and tenderness. It can tease and laugh. It can speak the sensual and the playful. It can aspire to an erotic art. It can be a parenthesis for emotional recharging or be replete with a benign possessiveness. It can also be a site for power play, withdrawal, coldness and forms of deceit. In the lifetime of any couple, it can be all of these at different times.

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