Undeniable Love

She calls me up in the grocery store and she’s having a hard time holding it together. What’s wrong, I say. Do you have a minute, she says. She’s been crying, or trying not to cry, or she’s about to, or all three. Yeah, I say. I’ve got a minute.

A while back people woke up and realized they couldn’t get away with pretending to believe God was a great beard in the sky anymore, because of science, and this caused a lot of problems. Nietzsche said it meant God was dead. Kierkegaard said what, you can’t believe in something just because there’s no evidence for it? Skill issue. He said that irrefutable evidence for God wouldn’t help you have faith, it would eliminate your ability to have faith. He said that committing what we might call “your identity” to what we might call “the bit” was what gave “the bit” its value. Like killing a guy to get into a gang: it’s not just that it’s a bonding thing, it’s that doing it changes you. If you want into the eternal salvation gang you have to murder your reason, or at least acknowledge its limits to the extent you’re willing to subordinate it to your heart.¹

I think all important movements of the soul² are self-fulfilling prophecies like this, and can be numbered (1) faith (2) joy and (3) love. But it’s (3) that bears on my friend’s situationship.

Because she’s been with this guy for a few months, since the week she came back to San Francisco, I vaguely recall, and now it’s over over. Like actually over, this time. But she’d blocked his number because they kept talking and talking even after they decided to end it and it was just too much, just too painful for her to have to be the one to enforce NO MORE. Because what if? So when she goes to take the dog out that night he’s there on her porch waiting for her, unwilling to give up on what was by all accounts a really nice relationship marred apparently only by his inability to say whether or not he felt he could ever really “commit” to the relationship, and her need to know whether or not he felt he could at some point “commit” to the relationship because, you know, young and vivacious people and all but like we’re not getting any younger, are we haha! And so on.

Most people don’t choose serial monogamy as a lifestyle any more than gamblers choose being broke as a lifestyle. But to win the big bucks you’ve got to play the game. Thankfully, human nature being what it is, at least in dating the odds are stacked in your favor, no matter what they say online. People want to be together. Leaving aside recreational sport-dating and youthful new-city feral burnout dating arcs, serial monogamy is a thing people choose to undergo because only through it are they offered the promise of escape from it into the lifestyle they actually want. It’s just that the window of that escape narrows in proportion to a few factors: the degree of obsessive optimization-brain they carry over from their high-achieving professional lives; the strength of their ability to create their own reality through faith; and especially the disney factor - the lightning bolt - the wait for force majeure, for the levee to break, for something irresistable to finally just happen to them.

But I approve of the bold and romantic gesture of this guy, the subject of the grocery store’s phone call. Tenacity in courtship is an unfortunate casualty of modernity in general and woke 1 in particular and even if this guy can’t seem to wrap his head around the idea of being in a relationship, well, at least his heart seems to have the steering wheel. So I browse the Asian Foods aisle looking for tamari (which is far superior to soy sauce) and wait for the other shoe to drop.

When he wasn’t doing whippets for psychonautical research purposes to formalize the varieties of religious experience, William James was pretty busy as a dating discourse writer:

It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else? Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. (The Will to Believe, 1897)

You don’t get to have certainty, he says. You gain certainty the way a smoker stops being a smoker: by quitting smoking. Before, the evidentiary judgement fails. I see you smoking that cig. After, the evidentiary judgement passes: you’re not smoking, so you’re not a smoker, QED. In between is freefall.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. .. Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two possible universes true by your trust or mistrust (Is Life Worth Living?, 1895)

Of course, he’s talking about faith, not commitment to a relationship. My contention is that all the major movements of the soul work the same way.

The other shoe drops while I’m in the canned goods aisle loading up on crushed tomatoes for stews. In fact I attract some alarm by dropping a few cans while stopping dead in my tracks to chant GALLOWS. THE GALLOWS. THE GALLOWS. But it’s Portland, so not that much alarm.

Because it turns out after making this big romantic gesture and circumventing the block and coming to her stoop to rescue the relationship - it turns out that the next time they have a conversation about what they want to do with their mutual compatibility and enjoyment and admiration for each other (with her giving him lots of space, not pushing, sensitive to his sensitivity around commitment) - when they finally talk, you know what he says? That he’s just not sure he can ever be ready to commit. It’s not her, he snivels, the coward, the knave, it’s just something in him, he’s never been able to commit and he’s not sure when and how - and if - he’ll become somebody who has that kind of certainty. A spiritual dodge, an ethical retreat to the ultimate redoubt of “muh psychological makeup” to flee from the ten-thousand-watt glare of the reality of his decision to avoid deciding.

And I’m not sure he’ll ever become that guy. He’ll get older, and the screws of time will turn, and he’ll finally stop being being able to score situationships with brilliant charming thirty-year-old women, and the pressure will amplify, and I expect he’ll give up on waiting around for God to reach out and transform him into somebody with the capacity to risk himself, and he’ll settle. Even if he settles with somebody quite lovely, somebody he could have leapt for, in his mind it’ll be calculated.³ And that’s a tragedy.

I’m not sure what to make of the meandering, aimless serial monogamy of my friends and peers. I used to describe it, cruelly, as a game of musical chairs in which everybody just kind of stumbled around until their time was up and they were forced to pair off and leave the game. Everybody seems to want to get married, for the most part, but just - not right now. Easily explained in the same way all our other behavior can be explained: we live by habit, only rarely summoning the energy to alter our own orbits. And with the death of the overpowering Jane Austen social pressure to marry, so too the death of dating with intent to marry.

Of course also to be considered is the biologically gendered aspect of the game of musical chairs that allows a guy like this to waste years of not just one but several women’s lives in his own personal journey of self-nondiscovery. I used to deride the Peter Pans running around New York, overgrown children unwilling to get off the swingset. I used to be cruel. So while it’s easy to moralize about courage, about religion, about the strength of will to alter one’s own destiny, one must also acknowledge that the enemy here is not the poor schmuck cursed to wander the earth like this.

The enemy is the dreadful tyranny of freedom. It was thrust upon us in victory over the former tyrant of a structured life of strict roles and expectations, and the price of the freedom to write our own scripts was the necessity of writing our own scripts. “And truly it demands something Godlike,” says Emerson, “in he who has chosen to cast off the common motives of humanity and trust himself for a taskmaster.” Well, that’s all of us, now. The game got harder and our culture didn’t level up to meet its new difficulty. So we have to level up ourselves, each of us, alone. Or you can join a church.

She’s fine now, anyway. She takes hardship on the chin and nods and picks herself up and soldiers on joyfully. She knows she’ll be fine. She’s got faith.