During COVID, my ex used to read to me while I cooked dinner. It’s one of my few positive memories of what was a truly terrible relationship, and I forget from time to time that as much as I felt he took from me, he also left me with bits of beauty I would never have discovered by myself. He fancied himself a man of high art, and quarantine was long and indefinite, so he decided it was the perfect opportunity to read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In what probably should have been a wake up call to the dynamics of my own relationship, I was haunted by Marcel’s treatment of Albertine, of the confusion of love and obsession, and the way darkness could cling so perniciously to what at first feels like a brilliant source of light.
For most of my life I felt my own darkness was constantly threatening to overtake me. In high school, I secretly measured portions of food or binged alone at night in my bedroom where I could hide the empty bags of potato chips and candy bar wrappers. In college, interactions with boys, however innocuous the other party may have felt them to be, left me consumed by insecurity, fear, and shame. I had no idea what to do with my desire and desperately longed for connection, often confusing the two. For awhile, once I started to realize some men did actually like me, and before my own self-image could comprehend why that might be true, I ruined several relationships I really did care about. Friendships, too. It was as if a shadow hung about me incessantly. If I wasn’t careful, if I didn’t play my cards exactly right, someone might see the truth, expose me as a fraud, show everyone I wasn’t really good enough or worthy after all, that it had always just been an act.
My ex saw my darkness, and at first it felt comforting to finally feel known. I’m not sure he ever really saw my light. I didn’t start to see it, either, until after the divorce. Learning to date again was (and still is) a series of revelations about intimacy and control — the ways in which I want to be seen by and witness others, expectations that come along with certain interactions or feelings, the tension between potential and reality, and the endless uncertainty of all of it. I decided to stop using apps because I felt there was too much of a false sense of control, filters and algorithms and measuring people up against an ideal in a way that felt deeply, even if unintentionally, dehumanizing. It scares me just how easy it is to pretend, how thin the line can be between a healthy vulnerability that is slow to bloom and a mask that never comes off. Both people have to very intentionally choose authenticity, and there are so, so many ways to excuse or justify or settle for half-truths when you want something from another that you may not even be aware of yourself.
Fantasy is its own form of control, such a subtle, often even unconscious or passive manipulation that comes in many varieties. Certainly fantasies about the totality of my darkness led me accept treatment that deepened those wounds. Fantasies about others have caused much yearning over people and relationships that I held onto far past their time. Being fantasized about, too, can become such an intolerable form of objectification. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more small than when it has seemed I am trapped in someone’s image of me, a thing to be possessed, kept, or hidden lest my actual self, emotions, and unpredictability threaten to reveal the dream as a nightmare. When someone makes you their muse, or their medicine, or holds you up as their mirror of truth, there’s very little room to be who you actually are — and how selfish, they may say, to want to live for oneself, when another person’s desires depend upon their vision of you, when you are so very needed.
Said’s conceptualization in Orientalism of the Other is as a negative reflection of the self, a foil through which the West defines its own image. While I sill think it’s a very useful idea for analyzing academic work, pop culture, and the news, I’ve always found it relevant in thinking about relationships, too. If the Other is characterized by a dynamic of controlled identity, perhaps the opposite is the Beloved. A Beloved is chosen rather than forced, one who sees us fully, through and beside whom we learn more about and become better versions of ourselves. The Beloved is also one in whom there is always the potential to lose ourselves if we’re not careful. When the desire for love and acceptance is so overwhelming, when we blame ourselves for the aching of its absence, real or perceived, the Beloved can also become an object of control. An ‘othered’ Beloved is something we can’t live without but don’t deserve, a desperate reflection of who we could be, might be, if we were good enough, one day, but not now — a connection that must be maintained at a safe distance, managed, appropriately labeled and filed away to be brought out for just the right occasions, omnipresent and never really, actually there. What may have once been love feels more like living in a cage, like Albertine locked inside Marcel’s Paris apartment.
It’s only when I started to see and accept the love of others that I began to start learning how to love myself. I wish I could say it was a choice I made to become a better person, but it wasn’t. The life I had wanted to build vanished overnight, and just when I thought I had nothing, the people who had always loved me, had never stopped despite the darkness that kept me from returning their care for too long, swept me up and buoyed me along until I could stand on my own feet again. Truly, I learned more about love from my divorce than I ever did from my marriage, not least that I had so much more of it than I ever realized all those years I felt so intensely alone.
For a long time I lived in the shadows afraid of what might confront me in the light, unaware of how unnecessarily ominous everything seems in the distortion of darkness. A friend once had this metaphor about how time together charged the light on their compass so that even once parted, it was easier to carry on through the night. As much as I sometimes want a hand to hold and a guide to tell me exactly where to go, I’m grateful for the beloveds who lend me their charge and let me make my own way. Hopefully someday I’ll trust my light enough to follow where and to whom the path leads or returns without fearing or overanalyzing that moment of goodbye.