Ridiculous Love

There seems to be a ridiculous, entrenched belief that many humans (particularly “artistic” or political types) posses: that suffering for love is the greatest act possible. That to suffer makes life more meaningful in some way. In her memoir “Fierce Attachments”, Vivian Gornick examines this idea in her own relationships with men, her relationship with her mother (Mama), and also her mother’s relationship to Vivian’s father (Papa). Mama believed that she and Papa were “Not just happily married. (they were) Magically married. Definitively married.” (22) And it was this love that defined and determined Mama’s life, even after (of particularly after) Papa’s death. She sacrificed everything for that love, even her own happiness.

It’s twisted, I know, but I believe that a lot of people long for a love like this; a love that is so all-consuming that it actually hurts. Personally, in my younger and more naive days (Hah, I know I’m not fooling any of you :) I believed that in order to experience life to the fullest and be a really great writer, I needed to suffer deeply in love. Suffering in a normal way just wasn’t going to cut it. And I soon discovered that I wasn’t alone in this crazy belief. I remember meeting a man when I was a freshman undergraduate who, when I told him I wanted be a writer, literally laughed in my face and said, “You can’t be a writer. You haven’t suffered enough. I bet you haven’t even had your heart broken.” I hated that man. And I believed him. And, he was right about not having my heart broken (at least not the way people get their hearts broken in the movies.) So, when I finally fell in love and, after six years, my relationship ended, I was almost disappointed by how well I handled the breakup. I had fantasized about the overwhelming rush of raw sadness that would accompany lost love: deep animal-moans and shrill wailing; black mascara-drench tears spilling from my red eyes as I type feverishly through the blur of tears, unearthing with my the implement sadness the deepest poetic roots of artistic expression. (Ug, cheesy!) I thought I needed to have my heart ripped in two to understand the breadth of human emotion. I thought I would feel like I was in a cliché Hollywood drama: depressed, stuck in bed for days crying, sleeping, eating Haagen Dazs and watching “Sex and the City.” I would relate to Carrie and think how she was just like me, living my story, trying and trying to make it work but always getting her heart broken. I would watch episode after episode until my brain felt fried. I would be furious when Carrie and Mr. Big fall back in love and live happily ever after while I was alone. Then I would cry, imagining that, one day my (ex)boyfriend would follow me to Paris like Mr. Big did for Carrie. Standing in the glow of the Eifel Tower, he’d stare into my eyes and say: “It took me a really long time to get here. But I’m here. Shay, you’re the one.” And then I’d say, “Kiss me you big fool.” And he would and we’d live happily every after.

But it didn’t work that way. When we broke up, I didn’t find myself crying in a penthouse in Paris trying not to get mascara on my ridiculously fluffy, pink couture dress. I was alone in a grimy bathtub in Santa Monica and my Prince Charming was snoring on the couch. It was not some Hollywood romance I was living. It was real life. The hurt I felt was much more complex.

So, in some twisted way, the younger, naive Shay would have envied Vivian Gornick’s mother who lost the love of her life and spent the rest of her life in a state of intense, melodramatic mourning. She was so committed to her suffering that, Gornick writes:

“Mourning Papa became her professions, her identity, her persona. Years later when I was thinking about the piece of politics in which we had all lived (Marxism and the Communist Party), and I realized that people who worked as plumbers, bakers, or sewing-machine operators had thought of themselves as thinkers, poets, and scholars because they were members of the Communist Party, I saw that Mama had assumed her widowhood in much the same way. It elevated her in her own eyes, made of her a spiritually significant person, lent richness to her gloom and rhetoric to her speech.” (76-77)

Thankfully, unlike Mama, I have matured enough (or perhaps simply become disillusioned enough) to be content with normal suffering. I might not be the best writer for it but at least I’m not going to spend my whole life like Mama, taking busses to get to visit her dead husbands grave site "stumbling like a drunk, lurching about and shrieking: "Where's Papa? Help me find Papa! They've lost Papa. Beloved! I'm coming Wait, only wait, I'm coming!" And then, when she locates the grave, flinging herself across the grave "in a storm of climatic release" (79) only to return home and sink into the couch and into depression “like a warm bath.” (75) I can’t imagine I’d get any writing done at all. And perhaps Mama, finally out of her funk (or at least enough to go walking around Manhattan with her daughter) would envy my life--should she, in my delusional hypothetical universe read my memoir. At first she might say, “What can I learn from this? Nothing.” (73) But then her daughter will remind her, “(Shay) didn’t know what she was doing either, Ma, but yes, she carried on, didn’t she?”

“I’m jealous,” (Ma blurts out). “”I’m jealous she lived her life, and I didn’t live mine” (74).

Did I? have I? Am I?

But, before I can finish convincing myself that suffering for love is RIDICULOUS, Mama’s voice interrupts my resolve, “The line of defense swerves. “Don’t you see?” she begs softly. “Love was all I ever had. What did I have? I had nothing. Nothing. And what was I going to have? What could I have? …I had only your father’s love. It was the only sweetness in my life. So I loved his love. What could I have done?” (203)

And, in a second my heart breaks for Mama and for myself and I want to love and be loved like that. Ridiculous love. But then again, did Mama ever really truly achieve the greatest of great loves? Her daughter doesn't think so and, reading the story from her point of view, it's difficult to disagree with her. Gornick sums it up: "My mother said I needed love to experience life at a high level, but in fact mourning lost love was the highest level of life she had attained. We were all indulging ourselves. Nettie wanted to seduce, Mama wanted to suffer, I wanted to read. None of us knew how to discipline herself to the successful pursuit of an ideal, normal woman's life. And indeed, none of us ever achieved it." (114 Maybe "normal" is as good as it gets, after all.