Can Love Last? by Stephen A. Mitchell

Author:Stephen A. Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2002-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

4

Aggression and the Danger of Desire

To live in anger is to forget that one was ever weak, to believe that what others call weakness is a sham, a feint that one exposes and removes, like the sanitizing immolation of a plague-ridden house.

—MARY GORDON

WE TEND TO REGARD ROMANCE as an expression of the best of us, our most tender, sweetest, most loving sentiments. That is why it is often startling when romantic love turns instantly into its opposite—hatred. Romance, like politics, makes for strange bedfellows. The bedfellows of romance are not always other ennobling, inspiring feelings like devotion or admiration, but often expressions of the worst of us, the darker side of human experience: envy, jealousy, hatred, and a deep malevolence. Romantic infatuation, we are told, is most usefully mellowed into something less intense and more stable. But the road from being in love to loving is no easy route. Cliffs on either side plunge the would-be lover rapidly into the most hateful feelings and actions of which we are capable.

Sometimes romantic passion turns into intense hatred and a thirst for revenge which, in extreme form, motivate actual violent crimes. But passionate hatred comes in many subtler forms, and everyday crimes against objects of desire are very much a part of ordinary life: emotional detachment, provocative testing, strategies of control, retaliation. The most interesting crimes of passion for most of us take place only in our minds. But our minds are very important places.

A recurrent theme in the popular wisdom on love is that romance is fragile because human beings are naturally aggressive: love’s contamination by hatred is inevitable. It is natural enough to regard aggression and hatred as inimical to love, to try to protect love with a vigilant civility. But many lovers have experienced the profound relief at love’s survival of the dreaded first real knock-down, drag-out fight. A love that has endured episodic aggression has a depth and resilience obtainable in no other way. Because of love’s profound risks, hatred is its inevitable accompaniment, and, paradoxically, the survival of romance depends not on skill in avoiding aggression but on the capacity to contain it alongside love. We shall see that inhibitions in hating a potential object of desire can serve as an obstacle to the development of romantic passion.

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