As a result, I was overcome by an urge to tear off her grey-green cardigan and make passionate love to her on the motorway embankment. The disruption of habit had made Chloe unknown and exotic again, desirable like a woman I had never touched, even though she had only that morning walked around my flat naked without arousing any wish in me beyond that of finishing an article I had begun reading on macro-economics in the developing world.
It took the AA man a few minutes to locate the fault, something to do with the battery ('You want to watch your levels, darling,' he had called out to Chloe from behind the bonnet), and we were ready to continue to Winchester. But my desire signalled otherwise.
'Imagine that you've broken down by the side of the road and I'm this leather-clad stranger who wants to take off your
clothes and take you roughly on the embankment, lifting up your innocent flowery skirt and handling you without mercy.'
'Are you sure?'
"With all my loins.'
'Christ, OK. Well, give me a moment to perfect my stranded - without - a - battery - but - extremely - horny expression.'
We made love twice on the back seat of Chloe's Volkswagen, in between pieces of luggage and old papers. Though welcome, our sudden and unpredictable ecstasy, the grasping at one another's clothes and the imaginative scenarios (I adopted a Scottish accent for the roadside tryst, she played at being married-but-looking), were reminders of how confusing the flux of passions could be. Capable of being seized off the motorway by desire, might we not drift apart on the back of less compatible thoughts and hormones at a later date?
Chloe and I had a joke between us which acknowledged the intermittences of the heart, and eased the demand that love's light burn with the constancy of an electric bulb.
'Is something wrong? Do you not like me today?' one of us would ask.
'I like you less.'
'Really, much less?'
'No, not that much.'
'Out of ten?'
'Today? Oh, probably six and a half or, no, perhaps more six and three-quarters. And how about with you with me?'
'God, I'd say around minus three, though it might have been around twelve and a half earlier this morning when you...
In another Chinese restaurant (Chloe loved them), I realized that life with other people functioned a little like the wheel at the centre of the table on which dishes had been placed, and which could be revolved so that one would be faced by shrimp one minute, pork the next. Did loving someone not follow a similar circular pattern, in which there were regular revolutions in the intensity and nature of one's feelings? We tend to remain attached to a fixed view of emotions, as though a line existed between loving and not loving that could only be crossed twice, at the beginning and end of a relationship, rather than commuted across from minute to minute. But in reality, in only a day, I might go around every available emotional dish on my inner Chinese platter. I might feel that Chloe was:
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I was not alone in my erratic moods, for there were times when Chloe too would unexpectedly display bursts of aggression or frustration. Discussing a film with friends one night, she swerved into a hostile speech about my 'consistently patronizing' attitudes towards other people. I was at first baffled, for I had not even said anything, but I soon guessed that I was being repaid for a previous offence – or even that I had become a useful target for a disgruntlement that Chloe was feeling towards someone else. Many of our arguments had an unfairness to them: I might get furious with Chloe not for the surface reason that she was emptying the dishwasher very noisily when I was trying to watch the news, but because I was feeling guilty about not having answered a difficult business call earlier in the day. Chloe might in turn deliberately make lots of noise in an effort to symbolize an anger she had not communicated to me that morning. We might define maturity as the ability to give everyone what they deserve when they deserve it, to separate the emotions that belong and should be restricted to oneself from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals. We were often not mature.
If philosophers have traditionally advocated a life lived according to reason, condemning in its name a life led by desire, it is because reason is a bedrock of continuity. Unlike romantics, philosophers do not let their interests veer insanely from Chloe to Alice and back to Chloe again, because stable reasons support the choices they have made. In love, they will stay constant, their feelings as assured as the trajectory of an arrow in flight.
As a result of such reasoning, philosophers can be assured a stable identity, for who I am is to a large extent constituted by what I want. If the emotional man one day loves Samantha and the next Sally, then who is he? If I went to bed one night loving Chloe, and awoke the next morning indifferent to her, then who was I? Yet I was also faced with the intractable problem of locating solid reasons for either loving or not-loving Chloe. Objectively, there were no compelling reasons to do either, which made my occasional ambivalence towards her all the more irresolvable. Had there been sound, unassailable reasons to love or hate, there would have been benchmarks to return to. But just as the gap between two front teeth had never been a reason to fall head over heels in love with someone, so opinions on wildlife reserves was never a fair basis for hating them.
Tempering our ambivalence was a contrary pull towards stability and continuity, which reined us in whenever there was an urge to develop romantic subplots or digress from our love story. Waking up from an erotic dream I had spent in the company of a woman who was a blend of two faces I had seen at a conference on solar energy the day before, I at once relocated myself emotionally on finding Chloe beside me. I stereotyped my possibilities, I returned to the role assigned to me by my status as a boyfriend, I bowed to the tremendous authority of what already exists.
Tempests within the couple were also kept in check by the more stable assumptions that others around us held about our relationship. I remember a furious row that erupted a few minutes before we were due to meet friends for coffee one Saturday. At the time, we both felt this row to be so serious, we imagined breaking up over it. Yet this possibility was curtailed by the arrival of friends who could not remotely envisage such a thing. Over coffee, there were questions directed at the couple, which betrayed no knowledge of the possibility of rupture and hence helped to avoid it. The presence of others moderated our mood swings. When we were unsure of where we were going, we could hide beneath the comforting analysis of those who stood on the outside, aware only of the continuities, unaware that there was nothing inviolable about our plot line.