He throws down his napkin and starts pacing.
Kirsten wants a blow-by-blow account because that’s how she copes with anxiety: she hangs on to and arranges the facts. She doesn’t want to let on directly quite how worried she is. Her style is to be reserved and focus on the administrative side. Rabih wants to scream or break something. He observes his beautiful, kindly wife, on whom he has become a constant burden. Eight times a year at least they have scenes a little like this, when disasters happen out in the world and Rabih brings them back to the hearth and lays them before Kirsten in a muddled heap.
She joins him where he is standing by the fireplace, takes his hand in hers, and says with warmth and sincerity, “It will be okay”—which they both know isn’t necessarily true.
We place such demands on our partners, and become so unreasonable around them, because we have faith that someone who understands obscure parts of us, whose presence solves so many of our woes, must somehow also be able to fix everything about our lives. We exaggerate the other’s powers in a curious sort of homage—heard in adult life decades down the line—to a small child’s awe at their own parents’ apparently miraculous capacities.
To a six-year-old Rabih, his mother seemed almost godlike; she could find his stuffed bear when it was lost, she always made sure that his favorite chocolate milk was in the fridge, she produced fresh clothes for him every morning, she would lie in bed with him and explain why his father had been screaming, she knew how to keep the earth tilted on its correct axis. . . .
Both Rabih and Kirsten have learnt how to reassure the anxious child selves concealed within their adult partners. That’s why they love each other. But they have in the process also unknowingly inherited a little of that dangerous, unfair, beautifully naive trust which little children place in their parents. Some primitive part of the grown-up Rabih and Kirsten insists that the beloved must control far more of the world than any human being in an adult relationship possibly could, which is what generates such anger and frustration when problems nevertheless arise.
Kirsten takes Rabih into her arms. “If only I could do something, I would,” she says, and Rabih looks sadly and kindly at her, recognizing as if for the first time an essential solitude he is faced with that remains utterly impervious to love. He isn’t angry with her; he is panicked and battered by events. To be a better husband, he recognizes, he will have to learn to place a little less of the wrong, destructive sort of hope in the woman who loves him. He must be readier to expect to be, where it counts, all alone.
Teaching and Learning
Rabih’s job carries on, though proper security remains elusive. Most of his and Kirsten’s friends get married and start to have children, and their social life evolves to become ever more concentrated around other couples. There are half a dozen or so that they see on a regular rotating basis, usually at one another’s houses over supper or for lunch (with babies) on the weekend.
There is warmth and companionship among them but also, beneath the surface, a fair amount of comparison and boasting. There are frequent competitive allusions to jobs, holidays, house-improvement plans, and the first children’s milestones.
Rabih affects a defiant, thick-skinned stance with regard to the jostling and the scorekeeping. He frankly concedes to Kirsten that they aren’t the highest-status couple, but then quickly adds that it doesn’t matter in the least: they should be pleased with what they have. They don’t live in a small gossipy village; they can go their own way.
It’s almost one in the morning on a Saturday, and they’re in the kitchen, clearing up the dishes, when Kirsten remarks that she learnt over pudding that Clare and her husband, Christopher, are going to be renting a place in Greece for the whole summer: a villa with its own pool and a garden with a sort of private olive grove. She’ll be there the whole time, he’ll commute down. It sounds out of this world, she says, but it must cost a bloody fortune—unimaginable, really; it’s astonishing what a surgeon can earn these days.
For Rabih, the comment niggles. Why does his wife care? Why aren’t their own holidays (in a small cottage in the Western Isles) enough? How could they ever afford anything even approaching the cost of a villa rental on their salaries? This isn’t the first such statement she’s made in this vein. There was something a week or so ago about a new coat she’d reluctantly had to renounce; then an admiring account of a weekend in Rome that James had invited Mairi on; and, only yesterday, an awestruck report about two friends’ sending their children to private school.
Rabih would love for her to relinquish this tendency. He wants her to take pride in herself without reference to her place in a meaningless pecking order, and to appreciate the nonmaterial richness of their life together. He wants her to prize what she has rather than ache for what is missing. But because it’s well past his bedtime and this is an inflammatory topic around which he has plenty of his own anxieties, his proposal comes out in a less nuanced and less persuasive form than he might have wished.
“Well, darling, I’m so sorry I’m not a high-rolling surgeon with a villa.” He can hear the sarcasm in his voice—he knows at once the effect it will have, but he cannot stop himself. “Shame you’re stuck here in the slums with me.”
“Why are you having a go at me? And so late as well,” retorts Kirsten. “I was just saying they’re going on holiday, you dober, and immediately, out of nowhere, in the middle of the night, you switch to attacking me—as if you’d been waiting to pounce on me. I remember a time when you weren’t always so critical of things I said.”
“I’m not critical. I just care about you.”
The very concept of trying to “teach” a lover things feels patronizing, incongruous, and plain sinister. If we truly loved someone, there could be no talk of wanting him or her to change. Romanticism is clear on this score: true love should involve an acceptance of a partner’s whole being. It is this fundamental commitment to benevolence that makes the early months of love so moving. Within the new relationship, our vulnerabilities are treated with generosity. Our shyness, awkwardness, and confusion endear (as they did when we were children) rather than generate sarcasm or complaint; the trickier sides of us are interpreted solely through the filter of compassion.
From these moments, a beautiful yet challenging and even reckless conviction develops: that to be properly loved must always mean being endorsed for all that one is.
Marriage lends Rabih and Kirsten an opportunity to study each other’s characters in exceptional detail. No one in their adult lives has ever had as much time to examine their behavior in such a constrained habitat and under the influence of so many variable and demanding conditions: late at night and dazed in the morning; despondent and panicked over work, frustrated with friends, in a rage over lost household items.
To this knowledge they bring ambition for the other’s potential. They can at points see important qualities that are lacking but which they believe could be developed if only they were pointed out. They know better than anyone else some of what is wrong—and how it might change. Their relationship is, secretly yet mutually, marked by a project of improvement.
Contrary to appearances, after the dinner party, Rabih is sincerely trying to bring about an evolution in the personality of the wife he loves. But his chosen technique is distinctive: to call Kirsten materialistic, to shout at her, and then, later, to slam two doors.
“All you seem to care about is how much our friends are earning and how little we have,” he exclaims bitterly to Kirsten, who is by now standing by the sink, brushing her teeth. “Hearing you talk, anyone would think you were living in a hovel with only bearskin pelts for clothes. I don’t want you to have this anxiety about money anymore. You’ve become maddeningly materialistic.”