But if that particular impediment to good judgment has been removed, another kind of hunger seems to have taken its place. The longing for company may be no less powerful or irresponsible in its effects than the sexual motive once was. Spending fifty-two straight Sundays alone may play havoc with a person’s prudence. Loneliness can provoke an unhelpful rush and repression of doubt and ambivalence about a potential spouse. The success of any relationship should be determined, not just by how happy a couple are to be together, but by how worried each partner would be about not being in a relationship at all.
He proposes with such confidence and certainty because he believes himself to be a really rather straightforward person to live alongside—another tricky circumstantial result of having been on his own for a very long time. The single state has a habit of promoting a mistaken self-image of normalcy. Rabih’s tendency to tidy obsessively when he feels chaotic inside, his habit of using work to ward off his anxieties, the difficulty he has in articulating what’s on his mind when he’s worried, his fury when he can’t find a favorite T-shirt—these eccentricities are all neatly obscured so long as there is no one else around to see him, let alone to create a mess, request that he come and eat his dinner, comment skeptically on his habit of cleaning the TV remote control, or ask him to explain what he’s fretting about. Without witnesses, he can operate under the benign illusion that he may just, with the right person, prove no particular challenge to be around.
A few centuries from now, the level of self-knowledge that our own age judges necessary to get married might be thought puzzling if not outright barbaric. By then, a standard, wholly nonjudgmental line of inquiry—appropriate even on a first date—to which everyone would be expected to have a tolerant, good-natured and nondefensive answer, would simply be: “So, in what ways are you mad?”
Kirsten tells Rabih that as a teenager she was unhappy, felt unable to connect with others, and went through a phase of self-harming. Scratching her arms until they bled, she says, gave her the only relief she could find. Rabih feels moved by her admission, but it goes further than that: he is positively drawn to Kirsten because of her troubles. He identifies her as a suitable candidate for marriage because he is instinctively suspicious of people for whom things have always gone well. Around cheerful and sociable others he feels isolated and peculiar. He dislikes carefree types with a vengeance. In the past he has described certain women he has been out on dates with as “boring” when anyone else might more generously and accurately have labeled them “healthy.” Taking trauma to be a primary route to growth and depth, Rabih wants his own sadness to find an echo in his partner’s character. He therefore doesn’t much mind, initially, that Kirsten is sometimes withdrawn and hard to read, or that she tends to seem aloof and defensive in the extreme after they’ve had an argument. He entertains a confused wish to help her without, however, understanding that help can be a challenging gift to deliver to those who are most in need of it. He interprets her damaged aspects in the most obvious and most lyrical way: as a chance for him to play a useful role.
We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.
How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.
He asks her to marry him in order to break the all-consuming grip that the thought of relationships has for too long had on his psyche. He is exhausted by seventeen years’ worth of melodrama and excitements that have led nowhere. He is thirty-two and restless for other challenges. It’s neither cynical nor callous of Rabih to feel immense love for Kirsten and yet at the same time to hope that marriage may conclusively end love’s mostly painful dominion over his life.
As for Kirsten, suffice to say (for we will be traveling mostly in his mind) that we shouldn’t underestimate the appeal, to someone who has often and painfully doubted many things, not least herself, of a proposal from an ostensibly kind and interesting person who seems unequivocally and emphatically convinced that she is right for him.
They are married by an official, in a salmon-pink room at the Inverness registry office on a rainy morning in November, in the presence of her mother, his father and stepmother, and eight of their friends. They read out a set of vows supplied by the government of Scotland, promising that they will love and care for each other, that they will be patient and show compassion, that they will trust and forgive, and that they will remain best friends and loyal companions until death.
Uninclined to sound didactic (or perhaps simply at a loss as to how to be so), the government offers no further suggestions of how to concretize these vows—although it does present the couple with some information on the tax discounts available to those adding insulation to their first homes.
After the ceremony, the members of the wedding party repair to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and by late that same evening the new husband and wife are ensconced in a small hotel near Saint-Germain, in Paris.
Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.
Ever After
Silly Things
In the City of Love, the Scottish wife and her Middle Eastern husband visit the dead at the cemetery of Père Lachaise. They search in vain for the bones of Jean de Brunhoff and end up sharing a croque-monsieur on top of Édith Piaf. Back in their room, they pull off what Kirsten calls the “spermy bedcover,” spread a towel out, and—on paper plates and with the help of plastic forks—eat a dressed lobster from Brittany which called to them from the window of a deli in the rue du Cherche-Midi.
Opposite their hotel, a chichi children’s boutique sells overpriced cardigans and dungarees. While Rabih is soaking in the bath one afternoon, Kirsten pops in and returns with Dobbie, a small furry monster with one horn and three deliberately ill-matched eyes who, in six years’ time, will become their daughter’s favorite possession.
On their return to Scotland, they start to look for a flat. Rabih has married a rich woman, he jokes, which is true only in comparison with his own financial status. She owns a little place already, has been working for four years longer than he has and wasn’t unemployed for eight months along the way. He has money enough to pay for the equivalent of a broom cupboard, she remarks (kindly). They find somewhere they like on the first floor of a building on Merchiston Avenue. The seller is a frail, elderly widow who lost her husband a year ago and whose two sons now live in Canada. She isn’t so well herself. Photos of the family when the boys were young line a bank of dark-brown shelves which Rabih promptly begins sizing up for a TV. He’ll strip off the wallpaper, too, and repaint the vivid orange kitchen cabinets in a more dignified color.