On Love

by VINCENT SHEEAN

1

ONE of the expressions most often heard in a matter which concerns every human being is “lucky in love.” What does it mean? I think the phrase itself shows an altitude towards love, and the prevalence of the phrase shows that the attitude has influenced most people’s thinking. They might deny the implications, but then why do they use the phrase?

What it implies is that love is a sort of gambling game, that it is a roulette wheel upon which any number may turn up, and that it is only by the sheerest chance that the right man and woman overmeet at the right time. We may sometimes hear this implied by even the happiest of people, as by the unhappiest. What it comes to is a disclaimer of any personal responsibility for whatever has produced either the happiness or the unhappiness-a relegation to some mysterious goddess, fate or fortune or whatever she might be called, of the motive power in this central interest of human life.

We may readily admit that chance does play a part in all the affairs of men, but to give it the sovereign role in any thing so important as love would be to reduce the human personality to a good deal less than it really is. Actually, although we can all name cases in which circumstances decided, it is commoner for the personality itself to determine its desires and their fulfillment.

I do not pretend that this is always conscious, but that it is in general true I can have no doubt. I have seen it work too often, and these observations have harmonized with much that I have read in psychology. (In psychology it depends a good deal on which school you favor, but throughout the present century there has been a general emphasis on the human personality as the determinant of its own fate.)

For an example, let me mention the story of a young man who was in his early twenties about ten years ago. He was a romantic: that is, he had aspirations and desires which outran the limits of his own life, he read poetry and books of travel, he disliked his excellent job and encountered a brief and early disappointment in love (chiefly, I think, because be was short of lemper and it brought him to grief). It was in the nature of this young man to throw up his job and make off into the wilds. What he did was to go to Spain and drive an ambulance there during the civil war. It was also a part of his natural inclination to romanticize the strange, the new and the far-away. I consider that what happened was inevitable, given the structure of his personality . He fell in love with a Spanish girl, a nurse, and against the innumerable difficulties provided by war conditions they were married. It has been a happy marriage ever since.

You may inquire how it happened that the right Spanish girl came along at the right time. My answer is that within my young friend’s nature there was a combination that demanded the right girl, sought her out, and perhaps influenced her to become even more right than she was to begin with: it could almost have been predicted. And on the girl’s side-although I only knew her afterwards I think a character instinctively inclined to more freedom than is usual for women in Spain made her well-disposed toward the American at the start. The other mysteries of love — its electricity, its overwhelming impetus of the one to the other — do not need to be explained. They occur if everything else is in accordance with the preceding nature, the natural demands, of the given personalities.

This is not to underrate the appearance of chance in such matters. It must always, or nearly always, look like chance. Love at first sight is an extremely usual phenomenon and to the persons involved it must always seem to some degree miraculous or at least extraordinary. But according to the view I have set forth, this was predetermined by the characters involved, and the appearance of chance is a delusion.

Chance plays a greater part, I believe, afterwards, when two persons are embarked upon a journey which even for one is not easy. Accident, sudden death, misunderstandings of a woeful nature, may all play havoc with what set out to be a happy relationship in love. Here again the personalities may supply the clue, but not always. There are many vicissitudes in human life which are quite beyond the control of anybody, and in an era which has contained so many wars, revolutions and general upsets these need hardly be indicated. But in the dawn of love, its strange early magic and transfigurement, I believe that each personality — each soul, if you like—realizes a dream it had carried about within itself for a long time, and thus in a sense creates the beloved. That this should occur is inevitable, and “luck" has nothing to do with it: we see it happen every day.

Nobody can pretend, on the other hand, that these magical moments are not very often followed by disillusionment. It depends thereafter upon the depth of affection and loyally, the strength of the fundamentals, whether such disillusionment can be seen to be a mere change in the weather, due most of all to self-deception, and the maturing of a permanent relationship set in. This does happen often enough for us to be confident that it is probably the rule rather than the exception, even though the whole point of view has greatly changed in the past three decades. What it depends upon is most of all a willingness — on both sides — to accept that little thing, the passage of time, and to recognize that in each phase the light and shade (or rewards and disappointments) are different,

2

To generalize about “men” and about “women,”when the varieties are almost as numerous as the examples, is a hazardous business. At the same time one observation has been made so often that it must contain at least a grain of sense, and in my own life I have verified it a large number of times. It is this: that divergence of interests is, or can easily become, a danger to love. Most men have interests which grow upon them with the years and sometimes become almost obsessive— larger, more impersonal interests than any contained within the relationships of the sexes. This, very often indeed, is the shipwreck of a marriage, the end of the story or its transference to another ground altogether. And it sometimes happens — although less often — that the reverse takes place: a woman may become so concerned with some impersonal interest that her life affords little place for love.

Examples of both would probably come to any mind: all they mean is that the capacity to love, in the fullest sense — as practically every human being has it at least once in life — does not always abide. When this takes place there is no going back to the lost dynamite, although it would be a rash man who could ever say there would not be recurrences. (Two of the most notable English novels of the past seventy years, Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career and H. G. Wells’ Sew Machiavelli, were based upon the sudden recurrence or occurrence of love in the life of a man ostensibly entirely given over to the impersonal interests of high politics.)

What I have tried to indicate for love between the sexes is equally true of any form of human affection. That is, it arises most of all from the personality which experiences the emotion. That may sound harshly unsentimental, but it can be proved on a little observation. Eor example, how clearly the capacity for love as mother is indicated in many girls long before they can have any idea of what it means! The differences are far more marked, even in quite small children, than most people are willing to believe until they have watched it.

Mary Jane is cut out for motherhood and Susan Joan is not: that can be seen at the age of twelve. Susan Joan may, by dint of a certain amount of selfdiscipline, correct the balance, but her emotions will never take quite the same track as Mary Jane’s. (Good thing or bad? Who knows?) The object of human affections or passions must, of course, conform to certain demands, meet certain anterior requirements, but it is not the object of love that creates the feeling. Many a time quite unworthy children benefit by a devotion they have never deserved, as everybody knows. The secret lies in the heart of the giver; the one who loves creates.

And on a quite objective scale this act of creation sometimes brings about changes of character which astonish the beholder. The wild youth who “settles down,”the belle of the ball who becomes domesticity itself, are familiar enough in life: they are not mere legends. They became proverbial because they happened often enough to enter the general consciousness. I have seen some very grown-up examples of the alteration in character brought about by this singularly creative emotion, and so have you. The one I am about to cite is extraordinary only in the extent to which the change has brought happiness, so that even the most casual observer can see it.

Camilla, let us call her, is the example. She was born very well off, had an altogether privileged upbringing, and may have been — probably was — spoiled by admiration before she was twenty. She married a rich man not much older than herself and they had a life of the kind most Americans are supposed to desire. That is, they had two big houses and all the domestic assistance they needed or thought they needed to keep them going. California and Europe were the suburbs of their existence. Camilla had a talent for clothes, forgiving parties, for making people enjoy themselves in her house, and even — within limits — for a certain amount of serious conversation. Her husband’s interest in all these things was at least equal to hers, and since they were a handsome, lively pair with every external advantage, nobody in their circle of acquaintance thought their marriage would ever go on the rocks.

It did, however, and for—I think—one main reason, and that the least expected: Camilla was bored. It was not the intervention of a third person — this is well established—but the underlying sameness of her life, wherever and however it was led, its general aspect as an invariable pursuit of pleasure, that sapped and eventually destroyed its emotional basis. (She has since told me that it was selfishness, his, hers and theirs, that ruled their life and thus made it empty of meaning.) In any case she could not endure it; she divorced; she took up about a year trying to find something of a timeconsuming character to occupy her mind, something as different as possible from what she had hitherto known.

In the course of this effort she met a man who seemed to her far more wonderful than she had learned to expect. (I know him well; he is not wonderful at all, but does that matter?, He is at any rate all right.) lie was an advertising man in New York and had one overweening ambition: to be a farmer. They had just about reached the point of making plans when the war came along and he had to go. They were married.

Now this was where Camilla’s startling change began. She went along with him to a prolonged term of serv ice in the West, living as a GI wife on a great deal less money than she had ever had in her life. You might say that this would be all right for a year or two; and so it was; but there came a severer test. He was then sent overseas and remained there for two and a half years, during which time Camilla’s life became busier than ever in the normal job-hunting and job-holding activity of a GI wife who had very little money to fall back upon. (Her alimony had ceased, of course, and her parents were much less well-to-do now.) She learned, she says, a great deal during that time, and I can well believe it.

When her man came home they scraped together everything they could, and between them they bought the farm. It is by no means a life of privation or overwork that they lead — in fact it is a good farm in a beautiful country and they make enough to live in comfort, what with a little extra here and there (he is not only a farmer but an occasional writer). They seem to enjoy their unfashionable neighbors and friends, among whom I count myself, and Camilla would not go back to her earlier existence for anything you could mention.

The full effect of Camilla’s change, upon anybody who had known her before, I have to take on hearsay: I barely knew her in her golden or at least gilded days. She now cheerfully does the work that used to be done by others, and does not regret them; she is gay as a lark in the evenings; she says she has more time now than she used to have when she did-as she puts it—“nothing at all.” In my opinion her Steve, for whom and through whom and by whom all this transformation was worked, is no way remarkable, but he is to her; and it would be worse than useless for me to attempt to explain to Camilla that in my view her own character and personality performed the whole process — that she in effect invented Steve, and by inventing him created them both.

Returning, then, to “luck,” good or bad, it is my conclusion that in love as in every other element of human life you make most of it yourself. There is chance; there is accident; but more powerful than these, for practically every purpose involved in the destiny of any man, is the personality itself. Strands far back may determine our significant actions, those which bring about a train of consequences, but the nature of man is such that these, too, can be changed by experience and by the exercise of the will, so that the whole product — the human being — is more self-contained than we are usually willing to imagine, and must make his way alone through the darkness to the stars.