Serepax

Because the world needs more overwrought candour.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Like puzzle pieces
Dozing next to B of a morning last week, my mind drifted off. I started thinking about whether what we had would have been possible in Victorian times, or earlier, in times when Christian thinking ruled. What were relations between men and women really like? Could we have spoken honestly about ourselves? Would there have been much laughter? Or would the emotional walls and barriers erected by the terse morality of religion have kept us from this closeness?

I wondered at the concept of romantic love - a rarity, historically speaking, or at least not typical. Perhaps romantic love is linked to heightened individualism. As the sharpness of class division and the necessity religion slumped beneath rising standards of living, an unprecedented individualism took the place of these former social tensions and glue.

But individualism is a lonely place to rest; freedom is loneliness and tyranny is relief, to paraphrase John Gray. (He actually wrote, in Straw Dogs:"The needs that are met by tyrants are as real as those to which freedom answers; sometimes they are more urgent. Tyrants promise security - and release from the tedium of everyday existence ... The perennial romance of tyranny comes from its promising its subjects a life more interesting than any they can contrive for themselves")

To counteract loneliness - to make a connection between two people possible - is to implausibly heighten the emphasis on romantic love; to assume that 'The One' lurks out there, perhaps in a bar, a supermarket, an internet dating site. And once you meet this one, you will neatly, inexorably interlock like two puzzle pieces, each of your cultivated eccentricities lining up neatly, solving this proud loneliness. What a stupid myth. Divorce rates soar; people keep looking restlessly, scouring the world for 'The One' or even the person for now, out of desperation. The whole thing's a myth which arose to underpin and justify Western individualism. When I watch my parents talk, I see not romantic love but a practical, peaceful thing: two cards leaning against each other.