The more Rabih appreciates how chaotic and directionless his feelings are, the more sympathetic he grows to the idea of marriage as an institution. At a conference, he might spy an attractive woman and want to throw away everything for her sake, only to recognize two days later that he would prefer to be dead than without Kirsten. Or, during protracted rainy weekends, he might wish that his children might grow up and leave him alone until the end of time so he could read his magazine in peace—and then a day later, at the office, his heart would tighten with grief because a meeting threatened to overrun and get him home an hour too late to put the kids to bed.
Against such a quicksilver backdrop, he recognizes the significance of the art of diplomacy, the discipline of not necessarily always saying what one thinks and not doing what one wants in the service of greater, more strategic ends.
Rabih keeps in mind the contradictory, sentimental, and hormonal forces which constantly pull him in a hundred crazed and inconclusive directions. To honor every one of these would be to annul any chance of leading a coherent life. He knows he will never make progress with the larger projects if he can’t stand to be, at least some of the time, inwardly dissatisfied and outwardly inauthentic—if only in relation to such passing sensations as the desire to give away his children or end his marriage over a one-night stand with an American urban planner with exceptionally attractive grey-green eyes.
For Rabih it is assigning too great a weight to his feelings to let them be the lodestars by which his life must always be guided. He is a chaotic chemical proposition in dire need of basic principles to which he can adhere during his brief rational spells. He knows to feel grateful for the fact that his external circumstances will sometimes be out of line with what he experiences in his heart. It is probably a sign that he is on the right track.
Beyond Romanticism
Attachment Theory
With age, they both feel a new awareness of their own immaturity and, at the same time, a sense that it can hardly be unique to them. There are sure to be others out there who can understand them better than they understand themselves.
They’ve joked about therapy over the years. At first the jibes were at the discipline’s expense: therapy was the exclusive preserve of crazy people with too much time and money on their hands; all therapists were mad themselves; people in trouble should simply talk to their friends more; “seeing someone” about a problem was what people did in Manhattan, not Lothian. But with every large argument between them, these reassuring clichés have come to seem ever less convincing, and on the day when Rabih furiously knocks over a chair and breaks one of its arms in response to Kirsten’s query about a credit card bill, they both know at once, without saying a word, that they need to make an appointment.
It’s hard to track down a decent therapist, a good deal harder than locating, for instance, a competent hairdresser, a provider of a service with a perhaps less ambitious claim on humanity’s attention. Asking around for recommendations is tricky, because people are prone to interpret the request itself as a sign that the marriage is in trouble rather than taking it as an indication of its robustness and likely longevity. Like most things that stand properly to help with the course of love, counseling seems gravely unromantic.
They eventually find someone through an online search, a sole practitioner with an office in the center of town whose simple Web site refers to an expertise in “problems of the couple.” The phrase feels reassuring: their particular issues aren’t isolated phenomena, just part of what happens within a well-studied and universally troublesome unit.
The consulting room is three flights up in a gloomy late-nineteenth-century tenement block. But inside it’s warm and welcoming, full of books, papers, and landscape paintings. The therapist, Mrs. Fairbairn, sports a plain dark blue smock and a large helmet of tightly curled grey hair that frames a modest and sincere-seeming face. When she sits down in the consulting room, her feet are a significant distance off the floor. Rabih will later ungenerously reflect that the “hobbit” appears unlikely to have had much firsthand experience of the passions she claims to be an expert on.
Rabih notes a large box of tissues on a little table between him and Kirsten, and feels a surge of protest at its implications. He has no wish to accept the invitation to commit his complex griefs in public to a pile of tissues. As Mrs. Fairbairn takes down their phone numbers, he nearly interrupts the proceedings to announce that their coming here was actually a mistake, a rather melodramatic overreaction to a few arguments they have had, and that on second thoughts the relationship is perfectly fine and indeed at moments very good. He wants to bolt from the room back out into the normal world, to that café on the corner where he and Kirsten could have a tuna sandwich and a glass of elderflower cordial and carry on with the ordinary life from which they have so oddly excluded themselves of their own volition from a misplaced sense of inadequacy.
“Let me begin by explaining a few things,” says the therapist in a tightly enunciated, upper-class Edinburgh accent. “We have fifty minutes, which you will be able to keep track of on with the clock above the fireplace. You may be feeling a little apprehensive at this point. It would be unusual if you weren’t. You may think either that I know everything about you or that I cannot possibly know anything about you. Neither is exactly true. We are exploring things together. I should add a note of congratulation for your coming here. It requires a bit of bravery, I know. Simply by agreeing to be here, you have taken one of the biggest steps two people can take to try to remain together.”
Behind her is a shelf of key books for her profession: The Ego and Its Mechanisms of Defence, Home Is Where We Start From, Separation Anxiety, The Echo of Love in Couples’ Psychotherapy, and Self and Other in Object Relations Theory. She is herself halfway through writing a book, her first, called Secure and Anxious Attachment in Marital Relationships, which will be published by a small press in London.
“Tell me, what gave you the idea that you might want to come and see me?” she continues in a more intimate voice.
They met fourteen years ago, explains Kirsten. They have two children. They both lost a parent when they were young. Their lives are busy, fulfilling, and, at times, hellish. They have arguments of a kind she hates. Her husband is too often, in her eyes, no longer the man she fell in love with. He gets angry with her; he slams doors. He has called her a cunt.
Mrs. Fairbairn looks up from her note taking with an imperturbable expression which they will come to know well.
All of that is true, admits Rabih, but in Kirsten there is a coldness and occasional silent contempt that he despairs of and that seems designed to make him furious. She responds to worries, his or her own, by falling silent and freezing him out. Often, he questions whether she loves him at all.
From Dr. Joanna Fairbairn, Secure and Anxious Attachment in Marital Relationships: An Object Relations View (Karnac Books, London):
Attachment theory, developed by the psychologist John Bowlby and colleagues in England in the 1950s, traces the tensions and conflicts of relationships back to our earliest experience of parental care.