Why Do Fools (and Philosophers) Fall in Love?

How do we fall in love? There are countless times during the course of the day when someone catches your eye. I remember recently being in Everyman’s Espresso, a hyggelig coffee bar across from my editor’s apartment with excellent espresso in the triple ristretto style—real espresso, like you get in Italy, and always wonder, why the hell can’t I get a coffee like this in the States?—and there was a fine-boned woman behind the cash register with a neck like an antelope, and we looked at one another in that appraising and mutually approving way that, had I been a single man rather than a very happily married one (more on love, lies and marriage to come in a later column), would have resulted in a conversation. That is, we provoke and are provoked by one another frequently, perhaps many times a day. If our sexual antennae are up—in New York, when I visit, as opposed to Kansas City, where I live, the array and intertwining of sexual antennae seems like a tangle of erotic interest, a dangerous sensual spider web—we could begin the process of feeling one another out (which would lead, one hopes, to feeling one another up) in an almost daily way. Later that day I was with my cousin who also lives in New York, and she was complaining of the hopeless loneliness of the city, but again, that’s a subject for another column. What I am pointing to now is the fact that we are surrounded by close encounters of a sexual kind.

But how different from these initial glances, estimations, rejections or approvals the process of falling in love! The frightening loss of control in throwing oneself down the stairwell, the choosing to fall in love—but I want to be in love!–suddenly transformed into helplessness: now that I am in love, and my only fear is, is s/he?

One of the most interesting facts about falling in love is that in its first throes—like a similar state, depression—we cannot quite tell what part of the process we are making up ourselves and what part is being thrust upon us. “Is it me inventing these virtues in him, or does he actually have these irresistible qualities? Is it me seeking love, or is it happening whether I want it to or not?” It doesn’t matter. We tell little lies about ourselves, we exaggerate, we fictionalize; meanwhile little lies are being told to us, and we doubt, or believe, or half-believe; we deceive while we self-deceive: it is all part of the natural process. It’s okay not to know whether or not you are falling in love yet; it’s natural to lie a little, that’s part of self-protection and part of allure—the natural world is full of examples of counterfeiting to provoke the interest of a lover; to want to believe is almost always to self-deceive, a measure or two, and that, again, is part of the process, a good part of the process. Trust me, it takes all of us seventeen self-deceptions simply to rise from our beds in the morning. A few extra to facilitate the greatest good we know—love—is well worth a modest compromise in your usual daily commitment to self-knowledge, transparency and rigorous truthfulness (ha!).

Speaking of rigorous truthfulness, you wouldn’t expect it from these dry, skeptical, pipe-smoking bachelors in their badly fitting tweed jackets, many of whom never married (and some of whom—Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are two striking examples—seem almost never to have had sex at all), but philosophers have had quite a lot of interesting things to say about falling in love, starting at least with Plato. Okay, he was in a toga or some sort of 4th century BCE Greek equivalent—whose idiotic idea was it that we give up togas, by the way?!–and I don’t think he ever smoked a pipe, but he had a great deal to say about love, in the Symposium and the Phaedrus. A friend of mine, an Irish playwright, used to give a copy of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther to a potential new conquest, and he swore it was better than love potion number 9, but I used to like to tell the story Aristophanes offers during the drinking party in the Symposium.

According to Aristophanes, human beings were once joined together in pairs, so that we had four arms and four legs. But this unusual metrical composition and arrangement of limbs made us so speedy—have you ever noticed how everything accelerates when you’re in love, except the time apart from your lover?—that we dared to roll our way up Mount Olympus, challenging the Gods, which prompted Zeus, quite sensibly, to split us apart with thunderbolts (the stitching up of skin he had to do afterwards was pulled together at one point, which is why you have a belly button). But this splitting in two—whether woman from woman, man from man, or man from woman (there were all three sorts)–is why, now, you feel this desperate need to be reunited with your other half, it is why you no longer feel whole, except when you are in love. True love, then—and this is where all this trouble starts, which is later exploited by so many poets and brokenhearted cowboy singers—is when you are reunited with that single person who was once your other half.

But what does all this have to do with falling in love? And, for my purposes today, with the compromises in autonomy, the relaxation of freedoms, and the little lies and self-deceptions that are crucial to falling in love? I think part of Aristophanes’ story is that the reuniting we seek is of another who we were split from in the distant mythological past: that is, he is explaining the need to reunite, the impulse. He does not mean to say that there is only one lover out there for you: he is speaking to, among others, Alcibiades, one of the most beautiful and sought after men in all of Athens, who has known countless lovers. Rather, he is arguing for the feeling we seek when we are falling in love—the emotional bond we experience once we are in love is the feeling of wholeness that truly is absent from us when we are not (speaking only for myself, I can verify this one).

But the process of falling in love is a poetic and dramatic one—Aristophanes is a poet and a playwright, after all—with all of the inventions, poses, ploys and conceits that any good poem or play requires. “Art,” Flaubert taught us, “is the least untruthful lie,” and for Aristophanes the same may be said of falling in love. When you are angry with someone for telling you a lie, you are angry, in part, because he has manipulated you, he has taken a part of your freedom: but of course this taking of your freedom, and your relinquishing of it, is not only essential to the process of falling in love, it’s part of the good of falling in love. We don’t want to be as free as we like to pretend we do. We’d give up half our freedom if only we could take half of someone else’s away—and what contortions of limbs and pinwheelings of arms and legs (and beliefs and brains) won’t we suffer and enjoy in order to accomplish it?

When we are in love, we may discover a kind of truth, even a kind of transparency that goes with wholeness (as I earlier warned, I will have much more to say on this topic). But in falling in love, when not just the antennae but suddenly all the rest of body is on the move, the process of finding and discovering the beloved is a creative one.

Let me close with a few words from poor old Nietzsche, who sought love earnestly only once, so far as we know, from the notorious, brilliant Lou Salome (later lover to Rilke, among others), and was repulsed:

Here [in falling in love] it makes no difference whether one is human or animal; even less whether one has spirit, goodness, integrity. If one is subtle, one is fooled subtly; if one is coarse, one is fooled coarsely; but love, and even the love of God, the saintly love of ‘redeemed souls,’ remains the same in its roots: a fever that has good reason to transfigure itself, an intoxication that does well to lie about itself—And in any case, one lies well when one loves, about oneself and to oneself: one seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more perfect, one is more perfect— Here we discover art as an organic function: we discover it in the most angelic instinct, ‘love’; we discover it as the greatest stimulus of life—art thus sublimely expedient even when it lies.

This is why Plato puts his speech in the mouth of the greatest artist in the room: he knows the goal of love—finding that other half (of which there can be more than one). And he knows how we will succeed in the search: through lies, through believing what one should not believe (as one believes in a play), with artfulness, through art. How do we fall in love? We create.

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