Love

For the first time [Wilson] realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship -- pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish one was to be afraid of loneliness.

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[Scobie] forgot for the while what experience had taught him -- that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

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If [Scobie] had been returning to an empty house he knew that he would have been contented.

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[Wilson] had read somewhere that love had been invented in the eleventh century by the troubadors. Why had they not left us with lust?

Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

In these quotations from different chapters of The Heart of the Matter, Greene captures what experience has taught me, too. We expect too much from "love." I am not saying that people constituted to find pleasure in constant companionship can't make a go of it sometimes, with luck and with patience. But my beef with "love" is that it represents a form of unhelpful magical thinking -- in the thrall of the emotion, we impute to others qualities that they are highly unlikely to possess (one of those being an overriding concern for our happiness). People are fascinating, endlessly so, but they are not magic beings. We are all of us distinctly limited, and the notion that we can find "the one" whose limitations will dovetail and actually work productively with ours -- I can't see making this the priority that most of us do. It is such a terribly unlikely outcome.

Leaving minor episodes out of the reckoning, I have been "in love" six times in my life. On every single occasion, I completely misread and wrongly estimated the other person. There have been no exceptions to this. In only one of these instances did the other person fall in love with me, very briefly and also on the basis of a mis-estimation of my actual characteristics. That relationship folded quickly when the other person discovered their error -- much the best outcome, in retrospect.

In one other case, there was a disastrous live-in relationship that lasted better than four years, with "love" on my side and none on the other, and no understanding whatsoever on either side. It was a folly of ridiculous proportions.

Now, my record is particularly bad -- I'd never deny that. But how well do most of us really do in identifying a life partner? Is life partnership in the way we have to come to imagine it even a realistic goal? Ironically, I'm known among my friends for having pretty shrewd insights into character -- but not where my own love life is concerned. And that is a weak area of understanding for most of us.

If I analyze the roles of sex and money in the equation of attraction, I tend to draw even more cynical conclusions. But focusing on sentiment alone leads me to believe that it a very poor guide to decision and action -- there is scarcely one worse. I think I have come to understand a little better the logic of cultures where arranged marriages prevail -- I find no appeal in that, either, but I kind of get it.

[T]he mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

George Eliot, Middlemarch