How to Make Love Last
Love
Courage for the Journey
Love is meant to be a pleasurable part of life, yet there are no people Can we are more likely to hurt, or to be hurt by, than those we are in a
We Get relationship with. The degree of cruelty that goes on between lovers
puts established enemies to shame. We hope that love will be a powerful source of fulfilment, but it sometimes turns into an arena for neglect, Love? unrequited longing, vindictiveness and abandonment. We become sullen
or petty, nagging or furious, and, without quite grasping how or why,
destroy our lives and those we once claimed to care for.
Can art help?
In a famous maxim, the seventeenth-century French moralist La Rochefoucauld makes the point that 'some people would never have fallen in love if they hadn't heard there was such a thing: While making us laugh at our slavish and imitative tendencies, the maxim also points us towards a genuine phenomenon that we can observe in contexts other than love: we have a huge range of emotions and decide socially rather than individually which of these we should take seriously and which we should ignore. We receive external cues that will lead us to regard some emotions as especially significant, and inspire us to dampen or neglect others. Whatever La Rochefoucauld might suggest, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
In the eighteenth century, for example. Romantic poets recast the seemingly minor pleasures of a country walk into one of the central experiences of a sensitive and good life. Twentieth century feminism rendered patriarchal attitudes unacceptable and pointed out their prevalence in the small moments of relationships. In the 1960s, the American Civil rights movement transformed racial contempt from an unremarkable attitude into one of the worst feelings a person could have. In their different ways. Romanticism, Feminism and Civil Rights activism have revolutionized our sense of which parts of our emotional spectrum we should pay attention to and which parts we would be wiser to reject.
Better at
If we accept that guiding our emotions is an important part of the process of creating a civilized society, then culture should be recognized as one of the central mechanisms by which we do it, along with politics. It is the music we listen to, the films we see, the buildings we inhabit and the paintings, sculptures and photographs that hang on our walls that function as our subtle guides and educators.
We had sent but not noticed the fog.
56. James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Nocturne: Tire Rirer at Rattersea, 1878
We start to see things which artists point out to us.
57. Salomon van Ruysdacl, River View, 1642
Almost two centuries later, and referring to the most fashionable artist of his day, Oscar Wilde formulated a maxim that applied La Rochefoucauld s idea about love to art: There was no fog in London until Whistler started painting it/ Wilde did not mean that people had failed to glimpse the thick vapours that can drift over the water flowing through the English capital; his point was just that the experience of seeing the fog was not considered interesting or exciting until an artist raised its status through his talent (56). Great art has the power to sensitize us to the appeal of diners by the American roadside (Edward Hopper); the richness of velvet against skin (Titian); the grandeur of modern industry (Andreas Gursky) or the resonance of artfully arranged stones in the landscape (Richard Long).
Take a quiet afternoon, with clouds scuttling over our heads, on a river near Amsterdam (57). It is not that the beholder would never have felt the appeal of such a scene before alighting on a Ruysdael; he or she may, from time to time, have had a tentative and fleeting sense, but would then have forgotten or ignored it. Ruysdael's canvas concentrates and focuses our attention on a fragile experience, endowing it with greater prestige. It says that this sort of atmosphere is important too, and helps us to grasp why. Skies start to loom larger in our lives; it may become
Teaching us to be better lovers (of lines and circles of granite, slate and limestone).
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part of our sense of identity that we love this sort of weather, which we might term Ruysdaelian in honour of the person who helped us to take it seriously.
58. Richard Long. Tame Buzzard Line. 2001
To define a mission for art, then, one of its tasks is to teach us to be good lovers: lovers of rivers and lovers of skies, lovers of motorways and lovers of stones (58). And - very importantly - somewhere along the way, lovers of people.
To demonstrate the therapeutic qualities of art in relation to love, we can imagine systematically arranging - in a book, a set of postcards, a website or an entire museum - particular works that highlight the attitudes we should adopt if we are trying to love someone. It could start by showing us what feelings of gratitude to a lover look like, a quality about which there are many clues, for example, in the work of Niccolo Pisano. In his Dapbnis and Chine, Pisano evokes the beginnings of love, a moment when the sweetness and grace of the other is intensely present to us (59). Daphnis regards Chloe as so precious he hardly dares to touch her. All his devotion, his honour and his hopes for the future are vivid to him. He wants to deserve her; he does not know if she will love him and this doubt intensifies his delicacy. In his eyes, she absolutely cannot
A reminder of how much we knew to be grateful for on the first date.
59. Niccold Pisano. An Idyll: Dapbnis andCbloe, r.1500 I
be taken for granted. This is a representation of how one should properly appreciate a person one loves. The beauty of it should in turn help us see, and be convinced by, an attitude we might not have taken seriously enough had it been depicted in words in a philosophical tract. Seen by someone in a long-term relationship after years of shared domestic life, and hence the inevitable conflicts about sex and money, childcare and holidays, and when habit has made the other completely familiar, this image seems particularly necessary because of its power to return us to a woefully forgotten sense of tenderness.
Pictures that sensitize us to important aspects of loving someone need not be obviously romantic. They can just foreground a state of mind that helps us to remember and stay sensitive to part of what love is about. Given how easily we can get bored in a relationship, and long for what is glamorous and new, a picture by Pieter de Hooch of a courtyard in Delft might be useful guide to strengthening our capacity for enduring mature love because it studies a quiet, modest moment with deep appreciation (60). Look, for instance, at the old door in the wall on the right, or at the angled (and mended) wooden support holding up the trellis. These are far from perfect; if there was more money around they might have been replaced with something more elegant. It is certainly not an image of material deprivation, though. It focuses in, one might say, on the art of making do. They can't get a new door, but the courtyard can be kept clean. And de Hooch rather likes the old door, the distempered bricks and the warped boards of the compost bin; they are not actually ugly, just at odds with the demand that everything should be pristine. That can be like a marriage after a few decades. De Hooch knows how to shape our responses and expectations of love in ways that counteract some of the less good models we have around.
Homage (о 60. Picicr dc Hooch.
tidying Up. The Courtyard of a