The death of God and ideology have meant that relationships have become a form of religion. If Marx, Freud and Jesus can’t deliver you from this wicked world, who can? That special other. This illusion is one of the most insidious that has ever found crawl space in our collective minds. And I’m not speaking from the point of view of an innocent – I too have spent much of my life believing I could be transformed, saved if you like, by the proper relationship. It’s never happened and it never will, because the human condition cannot be reprieved.
Women, historically, have been particularly targeted for this line – in the form of the genre of romance, from Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy to Fifty Shades of Grey. The hope that they can save a man or be saved by them or both, still runs deep in their cultural DNA – if I am to believe the continuing appeal of Mills & Boon and the romantic form in general.
The infection now spreads both ways, although the rules are now a lot more confused. Women, the culture insists, still want a man to save them, while the women themselves assert that they are strong, independent and not in need of a man at all. Men still want a woman to save them, although they are not sure what they need saving from. Perhaps immaturity, perhaps the endless round of pickup lines in dingy bars.
Above and beyond this is the fantasy of unity – which is made all the more confusing by the fact that it isn’t entirely a fantasy. Sexual union with someone you love is as close to spiritual fusion you can get. And in rare cases, there is also (or so I am told) real spiritual union, in which people “complete” one another. But in most cases, what you really get is two average human beings loving, hoping and struggling to get on with one another – at least after the rosy-pink first few years have played themselves out.
Thus the impossibility of completion is made all the more painful by the propagation of the romance myth. If you’re not lost in a semi-mystical union with your significant other, you are failing somehow, in life and in relationships. But relationships are hard. About four in 10 of all marriages end in divorce in the UK and given the number of people who are holding on for the sake of the children or because they’re scared of the alternative, I think those who enjoy anything remotely approaching a mystical union must be quite a small percentage.
This is not cynicism. It is an attempt to remove the sugar coating from what is a real human problem: connection. It is wonderful when I feel that connection with my wife, but it comes and goes, like everything else. “Living happily ever after” clearly falls short of the truth, but we still carry the fairytale template inside us and it makes us feel bad when we have no need to – at least not on this account.
I love being in a relationship despite all the pain and confusion and misunderstanding. Children offer a deep source of love, but a proper adult relationship is as close as you can come to unity. However, the trouble with unity is that it is not only a salve, it is a threat. To be unified with someone is to lose an element of your own individuality and to make yourself deeply vulnerable. If we are not good at relationships – and many are not – then it is partly our own fault; our own fear, our own caution, our determination to protect ourselves from harm.
I cannot escape the great love illusion, even as I rationally reject it. I cannot do without God, and there is no God, so I have to make do with love. Love, at least, exists. But how it works is as ineffable as any eternal deity, and how it can be attained is as mysterious as grace.
