Tag: Love

Quotes & Commentary #65: Proust

Quotes & Commentary #65: Proust

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.

—Proust

When it comes to love, artists can be usefully divided between romantics and cynics.

The former see love as something unambiguously wonderful, whose presence produces absolute joy and whose absence the most profound misery—something endlessly interesting to contemplate and unquestionably good. The cynical attitude—far less common—sees love as a kind of illusion, a self-hypnosis, which promises everything and delivers nothing. Proust was of the latter camp, whose solipsism admitted no possibility of genuine human connection.

I admit that I normally incline towards Proust’s view. I have never much liked love songs or love poetry, and most love stories leave me cold. Indeed, I wish that we did not dedicate so much of our art to romance. Human life is so rich in potential themes, and yet our art circles endlessly around the standard tropes of romantic love: the pain of rejection, the agony of desire, the triumph of success, the pangs of jealousy, and so on. The conventions are so well-established that it strikes me as artistically lazy to go through the same motions: first, because little originality is needed; second, because love, being an innate human desire, is something that people will respond to automatically, so little skill is needed to hold the audience’s attention.

I would even go farther, and assert that any art which relies so exclusively on these instinctual urges is a form of pornography. This is what I mean. However artfully pornography is directed and acted, it is still a lower form of art than non-pornographic films, since to be effective it only needs to appeal to a fundamental human desire. Food photography is arguably in the same class: even when well-done, its main appeal is to the stomach and not the mind. Extremely sentimental art, by appealing to the basic human desire for intimacy, falls into this category as well.

This is not to say that art should not involve emotions; that would be absurd. But true aesthetic appeal, for me, is always disinterested, involving the absence of desire. Thus any art which appeals directly to desires—and, like pornography, is really just the satisfaction of a desire in fantasy—falls short of real aesthetic appeal. Much love-themed art is clearly based on this fantasy satisfaction.

I do not wish to be dogmatic about this. Undeniably there are poems, plays, songs, and novels of the finest quality about love. My contention is only that these superlative works sublimize love into an aesthetic sensation, a pure appreciation of emotion devoid of pain or excitement. The ultimate example of this is Dante, who took his erotic passion and made it the primary element of his sweeping vision of the universe. But this, of course, is no easy thing. Rather I think it requires the greatest artistry to create excellent works devoted to love, since the artist must resist at every point the temptation to give into fantasy.

If Dante is the ultimate artist of the positive potential of love—describing God as “The Love that moves the sun and other stars”—then Proust is the ultimate artist of the cynical view. For him love was just another false prophet that distracts us from the truth of life and the tranquility of art. And nowadays it is hard to disagree with him.

We have found that love, far from a divine mystery, is the expression of an instinctual drive to procreate. Since stable pair-bonding is helpful for the survival of our children, it makes sense that we would evolve the tendency to fall in love. And now that romantic relationships are more fluid than ever before—with the rise of dating and divorce—we have clear and persistent evidence that even the strongest feelings of love do not necessarily, or even often, lead to permanent relationships.

Indeed, when you observe a person moving from partner to partner, equally in love with all of them in turn, equally convinced that each one is incredible (until he breaks up with them, at which point they become undesirable), then it is hard to resist the conclusion that love is a sort of self-hypnosis. For when we fall in love, we see only perfection in the beloved; and when we fall out of love, we see only ordinary flaws. The conclusion seems to be, as Proust says, that we love what we possess only because we possess it, and see the beloved as extraordinary simply because it is our beloved. This, of course, is an ironical situation, since the “most intimate” of connections appears, upon inspection, to be based on willful misapprehension. The loving eye sees least.

Given these reasons for cynicism, why is the romantic, rosy-eyed view of love so common in our culture? I would even go so far as to say that the cult of love has become a sort of religion. Finding the perfect partner is portrayed as the apex of happiness, the seal and guarantee of a good life.

Now, do not think I am some bitter enemy of love. Anybody who has ever been in love knows that it is one of the best feelings in life. Even so, I think it is unhealthy to dwell so insistently on romantic love, as if it could save us, complete us, perfect us. It is unhealthy, first, because happiness must always come from within us, and not from some external—not even a relationship; and, second, because our inflated notions of love ironically lead us to expect too much from it, which damages relationships.

Though it is a cliché to say so, I think the truth about love lies between the romantic and the cynical view. Neither salvation nor illusion, neither effortless nor impossible, neither invincible nor insubstantial, neither the point of life nor a pointless waste—love is a beautiful but ordinary thing. And art, insofar as it strives to represent reality, ought to try to show love in all its ordinariness.

Quotes & Commentary #64: Goethe

Quotes & Commentary #64: Goethe

And when your rapture in this feeling is complete,
Call it what you will,
Call it bliss! heart! love! God!
I do not have a name
For this. Feeling is all;
Names are but sound and smoke
Befogging heaven’s blazes.

—Goethe

We humans give the name “love” to so many different things that it can be difficult to tell what it means. No word is more overused. Turn on the radio we hear love songs; switch on the television and every show, comedy or drama, has a love story; open a novel, chances are the same is true. We love everything from our children to cheetos, from our friends to our phones. Some people love God and some love Lady Gaga. How can any word accommodate so many different relationships?

Part of the ambiguity comes from our using the word “love” to express three distinct things: feelings, preferences, and values. By “feeling” I mean some emotion felt in the present moment, in this case an emotion of intense pleasure. This is what somebody means when they take a bite of a hamburger and say, “I love this!” We are also expressing a feeling when, with a loved one, we spontaneously say “I love you!” In this sense, the word is purely emotive, comparable to smiling or laughing.

All feelings are, by definition, fleeting and temporary; but we use “love” in calmer moments to express more durable preferences. By “preference” I mean a tendency to enjoy and choose something; this is what somebody means when they say “I love the Beatles.” In less serious moments, we also use the word “love” this way with people, such as when we say “I love my coworkers.” By saying this, the speaker is clearly not expressing any level of commitment to her coworkers; she is only expressing her tendency to enjoy and appreciate their company.

The strongest and, you might say, the most proper use of the word “love” is to express a value. We “value” something when we are willing to act for its sake, enduring inconvenience, pain, or even death in its service. When we value something we identify ourselves with it, making it an extension of ourselves. This is the sort of bond that exists between close friends, family, and romantic partners. And I think it is important to understand love this way, since it explains how it is possible to simultaneously love somebody and be furious at them—which would be contradictory if love were simply a feeling.

Clearly, any good relationship will consist of a combination of these three layers. We feel good in the presence of a loved one, we prefer seeing them, and we value them deeply. Yet is is clearly possible to have one without the others. Specifically, I think a confusion between the emotive and the value aspects of love is what causes people to agonize over the question, “Do I really love x…..?” This is because it is clearly possible to value somebody deeply but to feel angry and hurt in their presence; and conversely it is possible to feel very happy in somebody’s company without being committed to them.

Part of this confusion is unavoidable. This is because it can be difficult to tell how much we really value something. Value is not something we feel and thus is not obvious. Rather, our values are revealed by our actions over a stretch of time. How much time and energy do we devote to somebody? How far are we willing to interrupt our lives for their sake? How consistent is our willingness? We cannot, in other words, simply introspect and feel value. And even when we see that we consistently value something, it is impossible to predict with certainty how long it will last. Thus love, like the rest of life, always requires a leap of faith.

Review: The Captive & The Fugitive

The Captive & The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6)The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

More than a year has intervened between my reading of the last volume and this one; and yet I find that my reaction to Proust has remained constant. Constant, yes, and complicated.

I have this relentless back and forth, tug-of-war reaction to Proust, a mixture of the most intense admiration and absolute disgust. My thinking and writing bear the scar of his influence; it is a scar I wear proudly, but which still stings if I poke at it. Whenever I read Proust, I feel so irritated and sometimes so dreadfully bored—a palpable and suffocating boredom—that I want to tear my hair out by the roots; and when I finish I have the mad desire to yell vulgarities at the top of my lungs, both as a celebration and a way to vent pent up anger. But I keep coming back, I keep rolling the rock patiently up the hill, and I keep watching it tumble back down.

I have had difficulty identifying why I’ve had this reaction. In previous reviews I’ve attributed it to Proust’s Cartesianism: his entrapment in his own ego, his relentless subjectivity. But the fact that this book is so deeply rooted in the first-person does not adequately explain the Proustian effect. There are plenty of autobiographies and memoirs that do not produce this same sensation of being trapped in the writer’s head and buried alive by their cogitations. No, it is not the subjectivism alone. Although you wouldn’t guess it from Proust’s elegant, smoothly drifting prose, or his perpetually calm narrative voice, the upshot of his reams of analysis is not only Cartesian, but deeply cynical. This passage perhaps sums up the cynicism better than any other.

The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

For Proust, the essential error of human life is forgetting this essential subjectivity. This error is most obvious with love. We think we fall in love with other people; but we really fall in love with creatures of our own fancy. The person we love has only an oblique reference to the real person, and is mostly a collection of desires, hopes, fantasies, fears, memories, and other sundry emotions—a jumble of mental propensities only associated, by chance, with another person. Indeed, our beloved is not even singular; we have as many beloveds as we have moods. Proust goes even further. His bleak conclusion is that love not only has very little to do with the other person, but that love, far from a tender emotion, is just an expression of sexual jealousy.

In his Cartesian worldview, there is literally no action, however apparently generous and kind, that is not ultimately selfish. That is inevitable, since we can only ever know ourselves, and all our ideas of other people are just veiled ideas of ourselves. And can we even know ourselves?

Time is constantly stripping our identity away. Our thoughts can never stand still, but ceaselessly rush downstream, and the refuse is swept down the drain. We are trapped in our own perspective; and there is no stable point from which to even come to grips with that perspective. The mind reacts to this existential instability by imbuing its environment with meaning, and then trying to control it. We fall in love—thus imbuing a specific person with all the magic charm of our thoughts—and then do our best to keep our beloved near us. Sexual jealousy is just this attempt to control the beloved; and love, for Proust, is just the anguished feeling that our beloved, whose presence helps to define us, might break away. This is why love evaporates for Swann after marriage, and for the Narrator after Albertine’s death; they no longer feel jealous.

Without going into tedious argument, I will say that I disagree with this intense subjectivism. If you begin, like Descartes and like Proust, with the ego and then try to build the world back up again, you will find, like Proust, that you can’t and that you’re stuck with your own ego. But far from being the most solitary of animals, humans are the most social. And the very fact that the world doesn’t make sense when you take your solitary ego as the starting point—which Proust’s Narrator continually finds—is why you ought not to. Yes, we see other people through the distorting lens of our own personality—as any mortal creature must—but experience so often shows that we are much better judges of other people than they are of themselves, and even, in a way, we know them better than they know themselves—something impossible in Proust’s world.

This is not to say that there isn’t a great deal of truth in Proust’s perspective. Specifically, I think he is brilliant at showing how our happiness depends on our interpretation of events rather than events themselves. Like any patient historian, he catalogues all the ways that the Narrator interprets, misinterprets, and re-interprets Albertine’s words and actions; and he shows again and again that the Narrator’s emotional state depends exclusively on these interpretations, not on the words or actions themselves. He is happy when he thinks Albertine loves him, desparing when he thinks she is cheating (but did she ever love him, and did she cheat?); and he begins to get over her when he stops defining himself in reference to her.

As you might have guessed, art plays a large role in Proust’s worldview. For it is only through art that we can, just barely, break out of our perspectives and reveal ourselves to others. The phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata is the prime example of this, which reappears in Vinteuil’s septet, transformed, in a different context, with different emotional overtones, and yet unmistakably the same basic phrase of music. This phrase communicated the stamp of Vinteuil’s mind so unmistakably because, being the product of focused and impassioned artistic creation, it carries with it something of the composer’s unchanging soul, an identity impossible to discern using formal analysis but which is immediately recognizable nevertheless. (Proust was, you see, no advocate of the death of the author.)

It is only through this artistic communion that we can transcend, however briefly, the limitations of our perspective: “the harmony of a Wagner, the colour of an Elstir, enable us to know that essential quality of another person’s sensations into which love for another person does not allow us to penetrate.” The reference to love is crucial here, since for Proust love is the false idol that leads most people astray. It is only through art, not love, that we really get to know another person; it is only through art that the boundaries that separate mind from mind are bridged; and this, presumably, is why Proust is writing this in the first place. Here is Proust putting this into his own inimitable words:

… is it not true that those elements—all the residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to externals, common to all and of no interest—are brought out by art, the art of a Vinteuil like that of an Elstir, which exteriorises in the colours of the spectrum the intimate composition of those worlds which we call individuals and which, but for art, we should never now? A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect of things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we really do fly from star to star.

Notice how intense is Proust’s subjectivism here. Even if we go visit another planet, he thinks, we really only see ourselves. The exterior world has almost nothing to do with what we observe, think, or feel, and it is only through art, which opens up other perspectives, that we have a window to something new, a temporary escape from ourselves.

At present, I am not sure I agree with Proust about the ability of art to transcend the boundaries that separate consciousness from consciousness; and I certainly do not agree with his cynical views on love, or his subjectivist vision of human life. As a writer of prose, in short bursts I find him extraordinarily eloquent, and in longer sittings I find him soporific and tedious. His books simply wear you out. Proust himself died at 51 while completing the last volume; and his English translator, Scott Moncrieff, died at 40 midway through the same volume. I myself feel as if every page of Proust ages me internally. Time is not only a theme of this book, but an essential aspect of reading it. In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann says:

Can one narrate time—time as such, in and of itself? Most certainly not, what a foolish undertaking that would be. The story would go: “Time passed, ran on, flowed in a mighty stream,” and on and on in the same vein. No one with any common sense could call that a narrative.

But Proust comes perilously close to narrating time. His prose never changes pace, never speeds up nor slows down, but slides by like time itself, uniformly moving along, flowing, drifting, with the same mannerisms repeated again and again, the same sorts of observations, the same themes that repeatedly return—a placid voice narrating a story that makes me neither laugh nor cry, only yawn on occasion—and yet, and yet, you cannot make your way through these pages without being transformed, however subtly, in the process. Just as Proust’s Narrator feels as if great artists and musicians allow him to see the world with a hundred eyes, I feel as if I have lived several lives so far; when I put down Proust my bones ache and I feel weary, I feel weak and dizzy as if I were just breathing a thin atmosphere. And yet, and yet, who would change a word, who would alter a line, and who would consider any time spent in these pages to be lost?

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Review: Romeo and Juliet

Review: Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and JulietRomeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

ROMEO: Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk’st of nothing.

MERCUTIO: True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind.

My memories from my high school literature classes are largely a blank. Books held no interest for me. I spent one year skipping my classes completely. And when I did drag myself to class, I almost never did the reading. A quick look through the Cliffnotes the night before was usually enough to pass the exam—which inevitably consisted of a bunch of multiple-choice questions about plot details, and short-answer questions of ‘analysis’ that could easily be fudged by some clever-sounding nonsense.

We occasionally ‘acted-out’ plays in class. This was normally a cue to space-out while my classmates labored through Shakespeare’s language, and hope the teacher didn’t call on me. I liked to day-dream about videogames and action movies. Shakespeare, I thought, was stuffy boring nonsense, hopelessly cliché and old-fashioned. But despite my apathy, one moment of Romeo and Juliet did manage to worm its way into my memory. This was Mercutio’s enormous, phantasmagoric monologue about Queen Mab:

She is the fairies midwife, and she comes / In shape no bigger than an agate stone / On the forefinger of an alderman, / Drawn with a team of little atomi / Over men’s noses as they lie asleep. / Her chariot is an empty hazelnut made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, / Time out o’ mind the faries’ coachmakers; / Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs; / The cover of the wings of grasshoppers, / Her traces of the smallest spider web, / Her collars of the moonshine’s watery beams, / Her whip of cricket’s bone, her lash of film, / Her waggoner, a small grey-coated gnat, / Not half so big as a round little worm / Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid; / And in this state she gallops night by night / Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love…

The speech goes on much further, describing how the Queen “gallops ov’e a courtiers’ noses” and “driveth o’er a soldier’s neck,” filling their dreams with vain fantasies. I am sure that I didn’t understand even half of it; what is an agate stone, an alderman, or an atomi? But the speech is so exuberant, and interrupted the play’s action so pointlessly (or so it seemed), that I couldn’t help being interested. Yes, I was actually interested in Shakespeare for a moment, and found myself wondering what this fairy queen, so decorously bedecked, had to do with this ridiculous story of love.

I admit that, even now, I find it hard to love this play. It has has become such a ubiquitous cultural reference-point that reading it is rather like seeing the Mona Lisa in person—seeing an icon that is already so relentlessly seen that it is almost impossible to unsee and see afresh. But this is hardly the play’s fault, or Shakespeare’s. Indeed, it is a mark of supreme merit that we can hardly speak of the passions of romantic love without these two lovers coming to mind; and, though we laugh at these outbursts of adolescent passion in our more cynical moments, there is hardly anything more simple and sublime in love poetry than Juliet’s declaration:

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep: The more I give to thee
The more I have, for both are infinite.

A few months ago, I was given a bilingual copy of this book, in English and Italian, from a thoughtful friend who traveled to Verona. I myself was lucky enough to have gone to Verona when I was back in high school, the very same year that I was skipping all my English classes.

I remember getting off the bus, still jetlagged and dazed, but feeling elated and happy in sunny winter’s day. I looked at the stony ruin of the Verona Arena and thought of gladiators wielding tridents and swords. Back then I even knew some Italian—long since forgotten, from lack of both interest and practice—which I was learning in school. So it seems a fitting testament to my misspent youth to quote from this most romantic of plays in that most romantic of languages:

Oh, Romeo, Romeo, perché sei tu Romeo?
Rinnega tuo padre e rifiuta il tuo nome,
o, se non vuoi, giurami solo amore,
e non saró piú una Capuleti.

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Review: Modern Romance

Review: Modern Romance

Modern RomanceModern Romance by Aziz Ansari

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 

One firm takeaway from all our interviews with women is that most dudes out there are straight-up bozos.

My introduction to modern romance was abrupt and unexpected. I was back in New York for the holidays, drinking with a few friends, sipping and gulping the wonderful IPAs that I miss when I’m here in Spain.

Sometime deep into the night, one of my friends, who is a gay man—this is relevant to the story; you should also know that I’m a straight guy—asked if anyone wanted to go on his Tinder. “I do!” I said, and soon found myself face to face with the infamous app for the first time in my life.

Now, for the three remaining people who don’t know how Tinder works, it’s very simple: You look at pictures of people, and swipe left if you don’t want to talk to them, right if you do. (In this respect it’s like the Last Judgment.) If someone you’ve approved of also approves of you, then you are both given the option to send messages.

My friend was obviously a stud, because I was getting matches left and right (well, only right). One of these matches was a young man who I’ll call Woodrow Wilson. With permission from my friend, I sent Woodrow a message. The conversation went something like this:

Me: What’s your favorite tree?

Woodrow Wilson: Uh, White Pines are pretty cool I guess.

Me: White Pines? So cliché.

Woodrow Wilson: You’re right, I was only testing the waters. I’m really fond of Quaking Aspens. You?

Me: Now we’re talking. I’ve always been fond of the Shagbark Hickory.

The conversation proceeded like this for about four days, by which time it was clear that I had found my soul mate through my gay friend’s Tinder. Unfortunately, many barriers stood in the way—I’m straight, I was going back to Spain, and I was basically deceiving him—so I didn’t meet Woodrow Wilson. (If you ever read this—hello, and sorry!) But the experience was enough to make me curious about the opportunities and hazards of romance in the modern world.

Being a reluctant single, a very reluctant millennial, and a very, very reluctant member of the modern world, you can imagine I was, well, reluctant to tackle this topic. This book enticed me, not because it was written by Aziz Ansari—I didn’t consider myself a fan, and in college I even passed up the opportunity to see him live on campus—but because he teamed up with a sociologist, Eric Klinenberg, to write it. I listened to the audiobook, nasally narrated by Aziz.

The most striking thing about this book is that, despite its lighthearted tone and frequent funny asides, it is basically a serious and even an earnest book. Sociological statistics, psychological studies, and anthropological analyses are mixed with anecdotes and interviews and a bit of humor to give a quick but surprisingly thorough tour of romance in the contemporary world.

Aziz begins by pointing out that dating in today’s world is strikingly different from dating in my grandparents’ or even my parents’ generation. This is not only because of advances in technology but, more importantly, because of shifts in values. We now have developed what you might call a perfectionistic attitude towards finding a partner. We want to find a “soul mate,” “the one,” somebody who fulfills us and thrills us. Aziz contrasts this with what he calls the “good enough” marriages of yesteryears—finding a partner that satisfies some basic criteria, like having a job and a shiny pocket watch

I myself have noticed this shift from studying anthropology and history. In cultures all around the world—and in the West until quite recently—marriages were considered a communal affair. Aziz’s own parents had an arranged marriage, and according to him have had a long, successful relationship. (To be honest the idea of an arranged marriage has always been strangely appealing to me, since I don’t think any decision of such importance should be left in my hands. But the rest of my generation disagrees, apparently, so now I’m left to rummage through apps.)

Connected to this rise in the “soul mate” marriage is a rise in our preoccupation with romantic love. According to the biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher, there are two distinct types of love in the human brain: romantic, and companionate. Romantic love is the kind that writes bad poetry; companionate love is the kind that does the dishes. Romantic love hits early in a relationship and lasts up to a year and a half; companionate love grows slowly over time, perhaps over decades. This division accords well with my own experience.

(Parenthetically, I have long been skeptical, even morbidly suspicious, of romantic love: that kind of idealizing, gushing, delicious, walking on air feeling. To me it seems to be a form of self-deception, convincing yourself that your partner is perfect, even divine, and that nobody else in the world could make you so happy—when the truth is that your partner is a flawed person, only one of many flawed people who could induce the same delirious sensation. Wow, I sound really bitter in this paragraph.)

This cultural shift has been bolstered by our new dating technology. Now we do not only have the expectation that we can find the perfect partner, but we have the tools to do the searching. I can, and sometimes do, scroll through hundreds of faces on my phone per day. All this is very exciting; never before could I have so many romantic options at my fingertips.

But there are some major drawbacks to this. One is what the psychologist Barry Schwartz called the “paradox of choice.” Although you’d think having more options would make people more satisfied, in fact the reverse occurs. I remember watching TV was a lot more fun when I was a kid and I only had a few dozen channels; when we upgraded to hundreds of channels, it became stressful—what if there was something better on? Similarly, after spending three months in a camp in Kenya, eating whatever I was given, I found it overwhelming to go to a pizza place and order. How could I choose from so many toppings?

Along with these broader observations is a treasure trove of statistics and anecdotes that, if you’re like me, you’ll be quoting and misquoting for weeks. I found the little vignettes on the dating cultures in Japan, where there’s a sex crisis, Buenos Aires, where there’s a machismo crisis, and Paris, where there’s lots of infidelity but apparently no crisis, to be particularly memorable.

These anecdotes are not just for mental titillation, but are used to support several tenets of dating advice. Here are just a few takeaways. Check your punctuation before you send a text. When you ask someone out on a date, include a specific time and location, not “wanna hang out some time?” vagueness. Texting people is not a reliable way to gauge if you’ll like them in person; it’s best to ask them out sooner and not prolong a meaningless texting conversation. Take the time to get to know people; rarely do you see the more interesting side of someone’s personality on a first date.

As you can see, this book is quite a rare hybrid: part social science, and part self-help, and part comedy. And yet the book rarely feels disorganized or scatterbrained. Aziz keeps a tight rein on his materials; the writing is compact, clever, and informative. With the notable limitation that this book deals only with heterosexual couples, and covers no topic in serious depth, I can say that it’s hard for me to imagine how any such short book could give so complete a picture of modern romance.

Most impressive is the human touch. What could have potentially been a mere smattering of facts and stories, Aziz makes into a coherent whole by grounding everything in the day-to-day frustrations and realities of the dating world. Aziz knows firsthand how much dating can suck, how tiresome, uncomfortable, and stressful it can be. Yet, for all this, the book is ultimately hopeful.

Beneath all these shifts in values and demographics, all the innovations in dating technologies and changes in romantic habits, all the horror stories and the heartbreaks, beyond the lipstick and the cologne, below the collared shirts and high heeled shoes, above the loud music and the strong liquor, pushing every button and writing every text, is the universal human itch to connect.

This itch has always been with us and always will be. Each generation just learns to scratch it in new and interesting ways.

(If interested in setting something up, please direct all inquiries to my mom.)

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On the Quarter-Life Crisis

On the Quarter-Life Crisis

From College to Chaos

In the modern world, there is a certain existential dread that comes with being in your twenties. Certainly this is true in my case.

This dread creeps up on you in the years of struggle, confusion, and setbacks that many encounter after graduating university. There are many reasons for this.

One is that college simply does not prepare you for the so-called “real world.” In college, you know what you have to do, more or less. Every class has a syllabus. Every major has a list of required courses. You know your GPA and how many credits you need to graduate.

College lacks some of that uncertainty and ambiguity that life—particularly life as a young adult—so abundantly possesses. There is a clear direction forward and it’s already been charted out for you. You know where you’re going and what you have to do to get there.

Another big difference is that college life is fairly egalitarian. Somebody might have a cuter boyfriend, a higher GPA, a richer dad, or whatever, but in the end you’re all just students. As a consequence, envy doesn’t have very much scope. Not that college students don’t get envious, but there are far fewer things, and less serious things, to get envious about. You don’t scroll through your newsfeed and see friends bragging about promotions, proposals, babies, and paid vacations.

There’s one more big difference: nothing you do in college is potentially a big commitment. The biggest commitment you have to make is what to major in; and even that is only a commitment for four years or less. Your classes only last a few months, so you don’t have to care much about professors. You are constantly surrounded by people your age, so friendships and relationships are easy to come by.

Then you graduate, and you’re thrown into something else entirely. Big words like Career and Marriage and Adulthood start looming large. You start asking yourself questions. When you take a job, you ask yourself “Can I imagine doing this for the rest of my life?” When you date somebody, you say to yourself “Can I imagine living with this person the rest of my life?” If you move to another city, you wonder “Could I make a home here?”

You don’t see adults as strange, foreign creatures anymore, but as samples of what you might become. You are expected, explicitly and implicitly, to become an adult yourself. But how? And what type of adult? You ask yourself, “What do I really want?” Yet the more you think about what you want, the less certain it becomes. It’s easy to like something for a day, a week, a month. But for the rest of your life? How are you supposed to commit yourself for such an indefinitely long amount of time?

Suddenly your life is not just potential anymore. Very soon, it will become actual. Instead of having a future identity, you will have a present identity. This is really frightening. When your identity is only potential, it can take on many different forms in your imagination. But when your identity is present and actual, you lose the deliciousness of endless possibility. You are narrowed down to one thing. Now you have to choose what that thing will be. But it’s such a hard choice, and the clock keeps ticking. You feel like you’re running out of time. What will you become?

The American Dream

A few weeks ago I was taking a long walk, and my route took me through a wealthy suburban neighborhood. Big, stately houses with spacious driveways, filled with expensive cars, surrounded me on all sides. The gardens were immaculate; the houses had big lawns with plenty of trees, giving them privacy from their neighbors. And they had a wonderful view, too, since the neighborhood was right on the Hudson River.

I was walking along, and I suddenly realized that this is what I’m supposed to want. This is the American Dream, right? A suburban house, a big lawn, a few cars and a few kids.

For years I’d been torturing myself with the idea that I would never achieve success. Now that I was looking at success, what did it make me feel? Not much. In fact, I didn’t envy the people in those houses. It’s not that I pitied them or despised them. I just couldn’t imagine that their houses and cars and their view of the river, wonderful as it all was, made them appreciably happier than people without those things.

So I asked myself, “Do I really want all these things? A house? A wife? Kids?” In that moment, the answer seemed to be “No, I don’t want any of that stuff. I want my freedom.”

Yet nearly everybody wants this stuff—eventually. And I have a natural inclination to give people some credit. I don’t think folks are mindless cultural automatons who simply aspire to things because that’s how they’ve been taught. I don’t think everybody who wants conventional success is a phony or a sell-out.

Overwhelmingly, people genuinely want these things when they reach a certain point in their lives. I’m pretty certain I will want them, too, and maybe soon. The thing that feels uncomfortable is that, in the mean time, since I expect to want these things, I feel an obligation to work towards them, even though they don’t interest me now. Isn’t that funny?

Equations of Happiness

One of the reasons that these questions can fill us with dread is that we absorb messages from society about the definition of happiness.

One of these messages is about our career. Ever since I was young, I’d been told “Follow your passion!” or “Follow your dreams!” The general idea is that, if you make your passion into your career, you will be supremely happy, since you’ll get paid for what you like doing. Indeed, the phrase “Get paid for what you like doing” sometimes seems like a pretty decent definition of happiness.

Careers aren’t the only thing we learn to identify with happiness. How many stories, novels, and movies end with the boy getting the girl, and the couple living happily ever after? In our culture, we have veritable a mythology of love. Finding “the one,” finding your “perfect match,” and in the process finding the solution to life—this is a story told over and over again, until we subconsciously believe that romantic love is the essential ingredient to life.

Work and Love are two of the biggest, but there are so many other things that we learn to identify with happiness. Having a perfect body, being beautiful and fit. Beating others in competitions, winning contests, achieving things. Being cool and popular, getting accepted into a group. Avoiding conflict, pleasing others. Having the right opinions, knowing the truth. This list only scratches the surface.

In so many big and little ways, in person and in our media, we equate these things with happiness and self-worth. And when we even suspect that we don’t have them—that we might not be successful, popular, right, loved, or whatever—then we feel a sickening sense of groundlessness, and we struggle to put that old familiar ground beneath our feet.

Think of all the ways that you measure yourself against certain, self-imposed standards. Think of all the times you chastise yourself for falling short, or judge yourself harshly for failing to fit this self-image you’ve built up, or fallen into a dark hole when something didn’t go right. Think about all the things you equate with happiness.

Now, think about how you judge your good friends. Do you look down on them if they aren’t successful? Do you think they’re worthless if they didn’t find “the one”? Do you spend much time judging them for their attractiveness, popularity, or coolness? Do you like them less if they lose or fail? If someone else rejects them, do you feel more prone to reject them too?

I’d wager the answer to all these questions is “No.” So why do we treat ourselves this way?

Is it the Money?

There’s no question that the quarter-life crisis is partly a product of privilege. It takes a certain amount of affluence to agonize over what will be my “calling” or who will be “the one.” Lots of people have to pay the rent; and their work and romantic options are shaped by that necessity. When you’re struggling to keep your head above water, your anxiety is more practical than existential. This thought makes me feel guilty for complaining.

But affluence is only part of the it. The other is expectation. Many of us graduated full of hope and optimism, and found ourselves in a limping economy, dragging behind us a big weight of college debt. Just when we were supposed to be hitting the ground running, we were struggling to find jobs and worrying how to pay for the degree we just earned. And since many of us had been encouraged—follow your dreams!—to study interesting but financially impractical things, our expensive degrees seemed to hurt us more than help us.

This led to a lot of bitterness. My generation had been told that we could be anything we wanted. Just do the thing you’re passionate about, and everything will follow. That was the advice. But when we graduated, it seemed that we’d been conned into paying thousands of dollars for a worthless piece of paper. This led to a lot of anger and disenchantment among twenty-somethings, which is why, I think, so many of us gravitated towards Bernie Sanders. Our parents had a car, a house, and raised a family, while we were living at home, working at Starbucks, and using our paychecks to pay for our anthropology degree.

For a long while I used my sense of injustice to justify my angst. I had the persistent feeling that it wasn’t fair, and that went back and forth between being angry at myself or the world.

Nevertheless, I think that, for most middle class people, financial factors don’t really explain the widespread phenomenon of the quarter-life crisis.

I realized this when I started my first decent-paying job. I wasn’t making a lot of money, you understand, but I was making more than enough for everything I wanted. The result? I felt even worse. When I took care of the money problem, the full weight of the existential crisis hit me. I kept asking myself, “Can I really imagine doing this forever?” I thought about my job, and felt empty. And this feeling of emptiness really distressed me, because I thought my job was supposed to be exciting and fulfilling.

This was a valuable lesson for me. I expected the money to calm me and make me happy, and yet I only felt worse and worse. Clearly, the problem was with my mindset and not my circumstances. How to fix it?

From Crisis to Contentment

Well, I’m not out of it yet. But I have made some progress.

First, I think it’s important to take it easy on ourselves. We are so prone to hold ourselves up to certain self-imposed standards, or some fixed idea of who we are. We also like to compare ourselves with others, feeling superior when we’re doing “better,” and worthless when we’re doing “worse.” Take it easy with all that. All of these standards are unreal. You tell yourself you’re “supposed” to be doing such and such, making this much money, and engaged at a whatever age. All this is baloney. You aren’t “supposed” to be or to do anything.

Bertrand Russell said: “At twenty men think that life will be over at thirty. I, at the age of fifty-eight, can no longer take that view.” He’s right: There is nothing magical about the age of thirty. There is no age you pass when you don’t have to worry about money, about your boss, about your partner, about your health. There will always be something to worry about. There will always be unexpected curveballs that upset your plans. Don’t struggle to escape the post-college chaos; try to accept it as normal.

Don’t equate your happiness or your self-worth with something external. You are not your job, your hobby, your paycheck, your body, your friend group, or your relationship. You aren’t a collection of accomplishments or a Facebook profile. You’re a person, and you have worth just because you’re a person, pure and simple. Everything else is incidental.

If you want to be rich, famous, loved, successful—that’s fine, but that won’t make you any better than other people. It might not even make you happier. Don’t worry so much about putting ground under your feet. Don’t fret about establishing your identity. You will always be changing. Life will always be throwing problems at you, and sometimes things will go wrong. Try to get comfortable with the impermanence of things.

Don’t look for the “meaning” of life. Don’t look for “the answer.” Look for meaningful experiences of being alive. Appreciate those moments when you feel totally connected with life, and try to seek those moments out. Realize that life is just a collection of moments, and not a novel with a beginning, middle, and end.

These moments are what bring you happiness, not the story you tell about yourself. So you don’t have to feel existential dread about these big Adult Questions of Love and Work. It’s important to find a good partner and a good job. These things are very nice, but they’re not what give your life value or define you or make life worth living. Treat them as practical problems, not existential ones. Like any practical problem, they might not have a perfect solution, and you might fail—which is frustrating. But failure won’t make you worthless, just like success won’t legitimize your life.

One last thing. Stop caring about what other people think. Who cares? What do they know? Be a friend to yourself, be loyal to yourself. Every time to judge yourself, you betray yourself. In a thousand little ways throughout the day, we reject our experiences and our world. Don’t reject. Accept. Stand steadfastly by yourself as you ride down the steady stream of thoughts, feelings, flavors, colors, sounds, mistakes, accidents, failures, successes, and petty frustrations that make up life as we know it.

Review: Feeling Good Together

Review: Feeling Good Together

Feeling Good Together: The Secret to Making Troubled Relationships WorkFeeling Good Together: The Secret to Making Troubled Relationships Work by David D. Burns
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The path to intimacy is nearly always painful.


For a while now I have believed that the Life of Reading, if it isn’t to be merely a diversion or a way of stroking one’s own ego, must be a life of self-transformation. To be well-read does not only mean to be familiar with certain names and ideas, plots and quotes; more importantly, it entails the development of real changes in perspective, personality, and behavior. Thus when I recently ran into a problem in my relationship, I chose to see it as an opportunity to improve myself through reading. And since I’ve already been helped by David Burns’s Feeling Good, I turned once more to his work.

Burns begins with a simple but, for me, surprising point. Psychologists and the general public have long assumed that people experience relationship difficulties because they lack the proper interpersonal skills. They crave intimacy, but they don’t know how to achieve it. The obvious solution would be to train couples to express their feelings—to learn how to empathize and to be assertive. The problem is, despite many different techniques for doing this, couples counseling has a pretty disappointing success rate. Why is this?

The reason, says Burns, is because very often we don’t really want intimacy. There are lots of benefits of having an antagonistic relationship: you get to feel like you’re in the right, you feel powerful, you take without giving, you aren’t vulnerable, you get to complain to your friends about how mistreated you are—and this list only scratches the surface. This is the ugly side of human nature, the side of ourselves we most often don’t like to acknowledge. But coming to terms with this part of ourselves, and deciding whether we prefer the benefits of an intimate or an antagonistic relationship, is a crucial step: you’ve got to decide if you want intimacy, and if you’re willing to look at a part of yourself usually swept under the rug.

Next, Burns introduces his criteria for successful communication: empathize with your partner’s thoughts and feelings, clearly express your own feelings, and always treat your partner with respect. This sounds simple and even obvious, but when I analyzed a common interaction I had with my partner, I realized how badly I was communicating. Indeed, the more I analyzed my own interactions, the more I realized that I had been effectively shutting down communication. And when I imagined what it would be like to be on the receiving end of my words, I suddenly understood—with a pang of remorse—that it would have felt really awful.

After coming to terms with the flaws in one’s own behavior, Burns next teaches you skills for communicating more effectively. Conceptually, these are simple enough: understand your partner’s perspective, acknowledge their feelings, share your own feelings respectfully, give them praise, and encourage them to share more. However, doing this in the heat of battle, when both you and your partner are upset, is challenging and takes a lot of practice. The urge to blame your partner for your problems can be overwhelming; and treating someone else respectfully while you’re feeling angry, hurt, or rejected can be an enormous challenge. Thus Burns has you practice with a variety of imaginary scenarios and also provides some exercises to do with a friend. The practice is the really valuable part. Everyone says they want to empathize better, but most people don’t know how and don’t take the time to learn.

That’s the book in a nutshell. Personally, I found it to be clear, persuasive, and helpful; and although I still need practice, I have found the strategies highly effective. Even if you do all the exercises, it’s a pretty quick read, yet he packs quite a lot into the book.

Of course, this book isn’t perfect. One superficial thing that bothered me was Burns’s calling his strategies “Secrets,” which unfortunately makes him sound like a cheap con artist to me. Also unfortunate was his choice to use imaginary couples for his examples, thus giving most his anecdotes a rather artificial and flavorless quality. The men and women don’t seem like real people with real problems, but soulless illustrations. Another shortcoming, it seems to me, was that Burns didn’t discuss forgiveness. Relationships require constant forgiveness, and they reach crises when one of the partners can’t decide whether to forgive or not. I’ve known many people in relationships who were wondering, after years of accumulated pain, whether it was worth forgiving the partner or if it was better to let the relationship end. Usually I don’t know what advice to give, and I’d be curious to hear Burns on the topic.

But I can’t dwell on these faults, because once again I feel an enormous debt of gratitude to Burns, for I discovered something about myself as I read. While analyzing my own ineffective behavior, I began to wonder why I had acted in such a nasty way to a loved one. Gradually, I was forced to face the fact that I got a real pleasure from acting disrespectfully. Being condescending was a way of propping up my ego and maintaining a heightened self-image.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how many of my actions, both inside and outside my relationship, were done to gratify my ego and create a certain persona. Meanwhile, this prevented me from effectively sharing my emotions or feeling close to others. I was trapped by a need to feel superior, which required constant snobbishness..

It feels odd to write these things about myself, for truly it is ignoble to be so egotistic. But I had to look deeply at this part of myself, and understand that my condescension was fueled by a deep fear of inadequacy, before I could change my behavior. This meant giving up this self-image, letting my ego die—and it’s been hard. Feeling superior to others was something I savored, and now I’m trying to give it up. But it’s worth it. The compensation is being open to a new world of joys.

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