CHAPTER 1
Mystified Love
For the good that I wish, I do not do; but I practice the very evil that I do not wish.
ROMANS 7:19
The mass of mankind live lives of quiet desperation.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
In my early teens I worked as a grocery checker at Butera’s Food Market in Houston, Texas. I was, like most young teenage boys, obsessed with thoughts about sex. One of my unofficial jobs at Butera’s was to be on the lookout for specimens of female pulchritude. When a good-looking girl came in the store, I’d press a buzzer to alert Leon in the produce department and Bubba and Phil in the meat market so that they could come and look her over. This was, of course, raw objectification and unhealthy male chauvinism. That’s what I grew up with, but that is not the point of the story.
What inevitably happened, to our amazement, was that the shapely woman was accompanied by an unshapely, and to our mind, unattractive partner. “It’s a goddamn shame,” Leon would mutter. “Too bad there ain’t more of me.” (With two front teeth missing—lost in a brawl—Leon would not have won any beauty contests himself.) It was also astonishing to me how many handsome men came in with very plain partners.
This is a rather raw, physical, almost primitive example, but it was my first impression of what I am calling the bafflement of love. It all seemed so illogical to my 16½-year-old mind.
When I started dating I was often bewildered by the strange reversals that could take place in the course of an evening. I can remember starting out on a date full of excitement and vitality, and having it end in harsh words and door-slamming separation. Trying to reconstruct the sequence of events was never enlightening. I always felt confused, sad, and lonely.
Years later, I came to see that human beings live out the drama of their relational lives motivated by feeling and desire rather than by logical assessment. When it comes to love, reason is not our guiding light. In over twenty years of marriage counseling, I rarely saw a marriage where the partners could have been predicted. Love is not logical. This is one reason it baffles us.
In almost every case I dealt with as a counselor the spouses had made the seemingly illogical choice of marrying someone who had the undesirable character traits of one or both of their parents. They were repeating the destructive relationships they had in childhood.
Another baffling aspect of love is our hatefulness with loved ones. I have often been the most hateful and mean with the people I love the most.
After I married, I can remember driving home, vowing to be sweet and loving no matter what, and then walking in the house and immediately saying something critical. Afterward I would feel terrible about what I did or said. A week or so later I would do it again.
THE “IN-LOVE” BAFFLEMENT
I remember the day Jack and Jill married. What a joyous occasion! The dinner toasts the night before, the beautiful maids-in-waiting, the bridegroom, the flowers, Jill herself in her shimmering dress. I had counseled them during the year of their engagement. I had some serious reservations about their getting married, but no two people were more truly in love, I thought.
Jack’s whole demeanor changed in their early days together. He started exercising, ate nutritious food, and completely came out of the depression he’d been in. Jill was radiant. She had started therapy, and she went at it with the excitement of a child exploring the world. Jack and Jill said they were happier than they had ever been. They seemed happy.
After two years of intensely dramatic conflict, affairs, and an unsuccessful attempt at annulment, Jack and Jill divorced. A split-screen movie showing this couple’s courtship and early marriage on one screen and their bitter fighting and divorce on the other would offer an amazing, almost unbelievable contrast.
I remember how confused Jill was at the very end. I remember how baffled Jack was as he asked me, “What happened? What happened? How could this happen?”
This was the second marriage I had been through with Jack. There would be a third after I was gone.
THE LOVE-AS-ENDURANCE BAFFLEMENT
For some the sad story never ends.
I think of another woman I counseled. Let’s call her Lady G. She had been married thirty-eight years. Her husband was a top-notch salesman. He had also been a great athlete, honored in the press, popular. He was Mr. Nice Guy to everyone—everyone but Lady G. At home he was petty, mean, and self-centered. Lady G told me what had become by then a familiar story. They were college sweethearts. He was the star football player, and she was a cheerleader and the most popular girl. After they married, the nightmare began for her. Within six years she had four children. She raised them mostly alone, as he traveled most of the time. His company provided him a liberal expense account. He partied and entertained his clients, wining and dining them at the most expensive places. Lady G was given an allowance, as she called it. Whenever she spent any money on herself, her husband railed at her for sending him to the poorhouse.
When he was not traveling, her husband demanded sex daily. Lady G had rarely had an orgasm. She said she enjoyed the sense of closeness she felt when they were making love. However, she claimed that he had not actually kissed her in twenty years.
Their kids were grown when she saw me, and she was terribly lonely. She spent most of her time playing tennis, going to luncheons with her friends, doing volunteer hospital work, and preparing her husband’s meals. He was seldom home; when he wasn’t working, he spent most of his time at the company country club.
One day, in an unguarded moment, she said that she really detested her husband. She said if he were a beggar dying of thirst, she wouldn’t give him a drink of water. “Why do you stay with him?” I asked. “Because I love him,” she replied.
How could this be love? I thought to myself. I thought of some of the people I knew who had been married a long time. I remembered how members of my family used to point to these long marriages as examples of what marital love was all about. I remember thinking how unhappy and lonely such and such a couple used to look. Endurance seemed to be what it was all about. True love means endurance. Lady G was miserable, frustrated, and totally unfulfilled. Surprisingly, so was her husband, although he came to only two counseling sessions. “We have never had a divorce in our family,” he stated, “and I do not intend to be the first. Besides,” he told me, “in spite of all her annoying foibles and idiosyncrasies, I love her.”
The delight and promises of their college days had ended with two strangers bonded together by the terrors of aloneness. Again we ask, what happened?
