18. Though from a position of unrequited love they long to see their love returned, Marxists unconsciously prefer that their dreams remain in the realm of fantasy. Why should others think any better of them than they of themselves? Only so long as the loved one believes the Marxist to be more or less nothing, can the Marxist continue to believe the loved one to be more or less everything. If Chloe had been lowered in my estimation because she had slept with me, it was because she had in the process caught a bad case of I-infection.
19- I had often seen Marxism at work in others. At the age of sixteen, I was for a while in love with a fifteen-year-old girl, who was both captain of her school volleyball team, very beautiful, and a committed Marxist.
'If a man says he'll call me at nine,' she once told me over a glass of orange squash that I bought for her at the school cafeteria, 'and he does actually ring at nine, I'll refuse to take the call. After all, what's he so desperate for? The only guy I like is the one who'll keep me waiting, by nine thirty I'll do anything for him.'
I must at that age have had an intuitive understanding of her Marxism, for I remember efforts to seem uninterested in anything she said or did. My reward came with our first kiss a few weeks later, but though she was unquestionably beautiful (and as adept at the arts of love as she was at volleyball), the relationship did not last. It was too tiring to make a point of always calling late.
20. A few years later, I was seeing another girl, who (like a good Marxist) believed that men should in some way defy her in order to earn her love. One morning, before going out for a walk with her in the park, I had put on an old and particularly off-putting electric-blue pullover.
'Well, one thing is for sure, I'm not going out with you looking like that,' exclaimed Sophie when she saw me coming down the stairs. 'You've got to be joking if you think I'll be seen with someone with that kind of jumper on.'
'Sophie, what does it matter what I'm wearing? We're only going for a walk in the park,' I replied, half-fearing she was serious.
'I don't care where we're going, I tell you, I'm not going to the park with you unless you change.'
But pig-headedness descended on me and I refused to do as Sophie wanted, arguing the case of the electric jumper with such force that a while later we headed for the Royal Hospital Gardens with the offending garment still in place. When we reached the gates of the park, Sophie, who had till then been in a mild sulk, suddenly broke the silence, took my arm, gave me a kiss, and said in words that perhaps provide us with an essence of Marxism, 'Don't worry, I'm not angry with you, I'm glad you kept the old horror on, I would have thought you were so weak if you'd done what I told you.'
21. To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally 'together' – when subjectively, we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.
A long, gloomy tradition in Western thought argues that love is in its essence an unreciprocated, Marxist emotion and that desire can only thrive on the impossibility of mutuality. According to this view, love is simply a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal, the possession (in bed or otherwise) of the loved one. The whole of troubadour poetry of twelfth-century Provence was based on coital delay, the poet repeating his plaints to a woman who repeatedly declined a desperate gentleman's offers. Centuries later, Montaigne declared that, 'In love, there is nothing but a frantic desire for what flees from us' – an idea echoed by Anatole France's maxim that, 'It is not customary to love what one has.' Stendhal believed that love could be brought about only on the basis of a fear of losing the loved one and Denis de Rougemont confirmed, 'The most serious obstruction is the one preferred above all. It is the one most suited to intensifying passion.' To listen to this view, lovers cannot do anything save oscillate between the twin poles of yearning for someone and longing to be rid of them.
There was a danger that Chloe and I would trap ourselves in just such a Marxist spiral. But a happier resolution emerged. I returned home from the breakfast guilty, shamefaced, apologetic, and ready to do anything to win Chloe back. It wasn't easy. She hung up on me at first, then asked me whether I made a point of behaving like a 'small-time suburban punk' with women I had slept with. But after apologies, insults, laughter, and tears, Romeo and Juliet were to be seen together later that afternoon, mushily holding hands in the dark at a four-thirty screening of Love and Death at the National Film Theatre. Happy endings – for now at least.
24. There is usually a Marxist moment in every relationship, the moment when it becomes clear that love is reciprocated. The way it is resolved depends on the balance between self-love and self-hatred. If self-hatred gains the upper hand, then the one who has received love will declare that the beloved (on some excuse or other) is not good enough for them (not good enough by virtue of associating with no-goods). But if self-love gains the upper hand, both partners may accept that seeing their love reciprocated is not proof of how low the beloved is, but of how lovable they have themselves turned out to be.
7
False Notes
Long before we've had a chance to become truly familiar with our loved one, we may be filled with the curious sense that we know them already. It can seem as though we've met them somewhere before, in a previous life, perhaps, or in our dreams. In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes accounts for this feeling of familiarity by claiming that the loved one was our long-lost 'other half to whose body our own had originally been joined. In the beginning, all human beings were hermaphrodites with double backs and flanks, four hands and four legs and two faces turned in opposite directions on the same head. These hermaphrodites were so powerful and their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two, into a male and female half – and from that day, every man and woman has yearned nostalgically but confusedly to rejoin the part from which he or she was severed.
Chloe and I spent Christmas apart, but when we returned to London in the new year, we began spending all our time in each other's company. We led the typical romance of late-twentieth-century urban life, sandwiched between office hours and animated by such minor external events as walks in the park, strolls through bookshops, and meals in restaurants. We found agreement on so many different issues, we hated and loved so many of the same things, that, after only a short time, it seemed churlish to deny that, despite an absence of clear separation marks, we must once have been two parts of the same body.
It was congruence that made life with Chloe so attractive. After unending irreconcilable differences in matters of the heart, I had at last found someone whose jokes I understood without the need of a dictionary, whose views seemed miraculously close to mine, whose loves and hates kept tandem with my own and with whom I repeatedly found myself saying, 'It's amazing, I was about to say/think/do/express the same thing . . .'