One Night: Two Birthday Messages
Questions posed by a former girlfriend lead Ron Rosenbaum to ponder the nature of long-term love, and his own past tendencies around it.
Ron Rosenbaum is the author of seven books including The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler. In addition, he has written many articles for periodicals including Harpers, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and Smithsonian as well as columns for Slate and The New York Observer. He has interviewed many singers and musicians from Bob Dylan to Linda Ronstadt and Rosanne Cash.
This essay is excerpted from In Defense of Love: An Argument, in which legendary journalist Ron Rosenbaum tackles his hardest topic yet: everyone’s favorite four-letter word. He begins by investigating the neuroscience of love, arguing that our understanding of love is imperiled by quantification and algorithms, which distill our behavior into mathematical formulas, our personality into brain-chemical categories, and our curiosity into quiz questions. The very capacity that makes us human, Rosenbaum posits, is being taken over by numbers.
To save it, he turns to literature and pop culture, discussing writing about love from a vast range of sources, including Tolstoy novellas, trailblazing Updike manuscripts, David Foster Wallace and Chrissie Hynde. Part of love’s essence is its mystery, says Rosenbaum, and when he eventually finds his own answer to the riddle of love, it turns up in a completely unexpected place.
In Defense of Love is more than an examination of the intersection of love with literature and science. It is a celebration of the uncanny and the persistent, the sublime and the ridiculous: the inexorable power of love.
By Ron Rosenbaum
Let me cut to the chase. The question beneath the two questions put to me that night at a bistro in Brooklyn for a birthday dinner with my girlfriend, Maya (not her real name) was this: What does it mean that one can fall in love more than once, indeed, in some cases, many times, and each time feel that it is forever? Does each successive time just make greater and greater fools of us and our illusions, or do such repeatedly refuted beliefs in eternity summon up a ghostly congregation of lost lovers to appraise and approve, perhaps? Can any current love offer an answer to [Philip] Larkin’s questioning “What will survive of us is love”? Does that mean every love is “One Love” (props to Bob Marley)? Every love? Every love that lasts two years or more? Or two weeks but feels like two years?
If what will survive of us is love—Larkin’s hesitant final affirmation in “An Arundel Tomb”—must each successive illusion of permanence of survival mark a greater and greater “learning experience” but still something less than the telos, the Singularity, the ultimate attainment of the love so perfect that it “will survive us”—or is every lesser love a greater and greater delusion about something less than love?
Seeing the bistro closing for the night, and that it was time for my birthday present, Maya opened her stylish purse and, as I recall, removed a parchment-like envelope and took from that envelope another smaller one with my name inscribed on the front with childlike formality: “To Ron from Maya.”
And inside that envelope was a single sheet of parchment-like paper, the candlelight giving it a waxen glow, on which I could see displayed her bold cursive handwriting in black ink.
“This is from a page I copied from my diary,” she said. “Two questions.”
I knew she was a veritably religious diary keeper and wrote down her deepest thoughts in it, for which reason, I now suppose, she never let me read it.
What was the state of our relationship at this point? On some level we both knew we were treading on thin ice, the thinness inhering in the question of why she should commit herself to the first person she fell in love with or who fell in love with her after she left her marriage. Thin ice precariously supporting our dual weight.
But she had not given me any particular reason for fear or suspicion because of that unique circumstance, at least after she had succeeded in (lovingly) extorting from me a promise that we would sooner or later live together in Washington, D.C., although it turned out we had different ideas of “sooner,” “later,” and “together.”
I had sincerely prepared myself (or deceived myself) that I was ready for what I knew would be a major sacrifice, a major life change, because I felt I was truly, deeply in love with her and would do anything, including set my way of life on fire, not to lose her.
But I was truly, madly, deeply in love with New York City, too. “Two Lovers,” as the great Mary Wells sang.
I would change my life and accept the consequences, though it’s true I did find a succession of reasons to postpone taking the big step immediately. And she, it turned out that night, had found one reason to worry about my commitment.
I had no doubt of her love, nor she mine, albeit subject as it was to long access interruptions due to its two-city nature.
I had sincerely prepared myself (or deceived myself) that I was ready for what I knew would be a major sacrifice, a major life change, because I felt I was truly, deeply in love with her and would do anything, including set my way of life on fire, not to lose her…But I was truly, madly, deeply in love with New York City, too.
To me the interruptions made the reunions all the more romantic, even cinematic—the times I arrived early at Penn Station awaiting the arrival of her D.C. Amtrak train, heart pounding when the train would arrive late, drawing out the suspense and elevating those moments when she’d finally emerge with the other passengers from the sublevel tracks beneath the big hanging two-faced (two-sided) arrival/departure board in the huge waiting room, the board all the waiting lovers had been gazing fixedly at (I assumed those waiting and staring were, like me, all waiting lovers).
When at last she would emerge from the underworld, my Persephone, glance around, and find me, and our eyes would meet with “we’ll always have Paris” fervor, and she would smile casually as if her life, unlike mine, had not been hanging like a thread up ’til that moment of mutual recognition. You probably know what I mean. Don’t you?
That arrival recognition smile, nothing could ever seem more unforced, casually undramatically genuine. Nothing performative about it.
So was her smile that night at Lodge as she handed me the parchment envelope with the two fateful diary questions.
The first question in cursive black ink was, as I remember it: “Why is it I’m so in love with Ron?”
Well, I couldn’t help being happy, thrilled, by that. At first. Couldn’t be improved on. Although I later realized it could be interpreted as “Why on earth am I so in love with Ron of all people?”
Still, that candlelit moment would admit no such doubts. So far so good, I remember feeling. The next question in my “present,” not so much.
The next question she had written was: “Why is it that Ron’s relationships never last longer than two years?”
Not exactly my idea of a “present,” even in conjunction with the first question, but it didn’t trouble me unduly at the moment—I didn’t see the implication for our relationship—although I rarely saw the end coming when it roared toward me like I was Anna Karenina on the tracks.
I did worry that I had been too free with remembrances of flings past. Most of which she seemed to enjoy hearing about as well as my assurances that we had something none of the others did. So, right, nothing to worry about.
Opinion was not unanimous on that point. “She said that? On your birthday?” a close woman friend made a point of asking me sternly a few days later. And I’ll admit I did have some transitory doubt about where she was going with that second question, but I was much more caught up in the first “question”—“Why do I love Ron so much?”
As to the second question, I thought to myself, a little too quickly, “That’s not entirely fair” (as if fairness was the issue). I felt compelled to take issue with the summation of my checkered past in that second question. I had a defense.
“Wait,” I said as the waiter placed the check on the table and she grabbed it and began searching for an appropriate credit card in her purse. “That isn’t entirely fair. What about my marriage—three years after a year getting to know each other.”
The next question she had written was: “Why is it that Ron’s relationships never last longer than two years?”…Not exactly my idea of a “present,” even in conjunction with the first question, but it didn’t trouble me unduly at the moment—I didn’t see the implication for our relationship—although I rarely saw the end coming when it roared toward me like I was Anna Karenina on the tracks.
I later calculated that there were the nine times I had been in love for as long as a year, almost evenly divided between the relationships where I left and where I had been left. All of this cumulatively an answer to question number 2 in Lodge that night. Nine times. Over decades (by now). Was that too much or not enough?
I would like to say that I got better at it, but I’m not sure. I recount these stories because love in a way has its own learning curve. I’d like to say I didn’t make the same mistakes, anyway. But it took me years of learning before the love I’m in now, which has lasted (as I write) more than seven years. It took me that long, that many ultimately broken entanglements, before it dawned on me why the previous nine had ended.
A word about the specificity of “nine.” I have spent considerable time thinking about it since that night when I was asked about why my relationships rarely lasted more than two years. There always seemed to be a good reason. It took me a while to realize the underlying reason for all of them.
But ultimately, years later, while writing this book, in fact, the penny dropped, as they once said. I believe I found an answer to question number 2: Why so often? Why so (relatively) brief? To put it shortly, I realized at last I was a loner at heart. Or let’s say a self-deceiving loner. Believing each of the eight previous loves could be forever because I was so ecstatically happy sharing love when it was good, I neglected something about how brief that period of unadulterated bliss could be.
But—I think, like Maya—many of the women involved sensed what I thought of as permanent would only be temporarily permanent. Sensed I was not ready to give up permanently my freedom to do what I wanted with my time. I’m not asking you to admire it but to understand it. I know I’m not the only one afflicted with this temporary stars-in-the-eyes blindness, but some men (and some women) hide it better than others.
Now that I’ve had time for productive introspection, my response to the Second Question that night is no longer as defensive as it initially was. But more melancholically realistic. Alas, I later realized she had a point. It was a legitimate question: why there seemed to be a built-in sell-by date. Something that required a serious answer. Especially in a book called In Defense of Love.
I would like to say that I got better at it, but I’m not sure. I recount these stories because love in a way has its own learning curve. I’d like to say I didn’t make the same mistakes, anyway. But it took me years of learning before the love I’m in now, which has lasted (as I write) more than seven years. It took me that long, that many ultimately broken entanglements, before it dawned on me why the previous nine had ended.
The realization I came to in the years after that night at Lodge, the answer to the question, was not unimportant. Maya was right, I realized, to ask that second question. What I learned about myself since then paved the way for what I now regard as my final attempt at permanence, the one I’m involved in now as I write this. Made me realize what a treasure each moment could be, not a prisoner serving out a sentence, a prisoner, yes, maybe, but a prisoner of love looking hopefully at the possibility of serving a life term.
What brought me to the realization was something I figured out about a commonality between my relationship with Maya and the one I’m in now. Both were with women who, as it happened, had children and were beginning new lives as single mothers after having been disappointed by men, by husbands. And both had boyfriends (me) who were to some extent loners, happy to spend time reading when they didn’t have time for me. I was in a polyamorous relationship with the woman and the printed page.
But I had the privilege of seeing the love they bestowed on the kids in their custody. A love I could not ever presume to, or want to, compete with, it was so beautiful. It decentered me in the relationship, you might say, while bringing me into a larger, more intense orbit of love. Not having to feel responsible in a way for being the sole object, the sole bringer of love into their lives, the way their kids were, as well as living tributes to their skill and wisdom. I have lasting images of them tending to a sick kid, just holding and calming them. My God, it was so beautiful. Not presuming to be the only object of their affection but a sharer in it made a difference. I think this current arrangement works because she has other things to think about than me. And I have no grounds for demanding more of her time than she can give and still be fully loving and attentive to the kids and her work. And I have plenty of time to myself.
Of course, it was knowledge not accessible to me in my youth, a knowledge of a love inextricably entwined with responsibility, not just to the woman in question but to the souls of the children I would always in some way feel responsible for: It was love no longer solipsistic, narcissistic, or not primarily those things.
Maya was a very smart woman.
I believe you can deeply love a person but not be a good, comfortable fit with each other's desires, habits, distractions, absences... Some people are best in the position of 'once removed'. Whether you are positioned outward by a significant other's children, their job, their geographical location, their spouse - it doesn't matter until those things fall away and that person wants more of you. I'm excited to read the book!