Confessions of an eternal romantic

Presents 'Confessions of an Eternal Romantic,' by Michael Ventura.

By Michael Ventura, published on March 01, 1997

During my last big breakup, with its accompanying crackup, I headed for an old friend's, a man I've known for 40 years. He's been married for about 30 of those years--two people with two kids who seem, no matter what the strain, to weather every crisis and remain deeply connected. Long after my friend had gone to bed, I sat in his living room, drinking his wine, wondering why he could and I couldn't sustain such a life. (Six years is my record for being with someone; usually it's been more like two.) I sat in that living room where I'd always been welcome no matter what state I was in--gazing at the fireplace mantle that my friend had built, the photos of their family going back three generations, the books on their shelves so very different from mine--and realized that they had lived in this house for two decades while during that time I had lived in at least 15 places. There was an irreducible difference in our natures, in their innate capacity for stability and my overpowering restlessness. And I got hit with this insight: These friends have never had to discuss, not for one hour, the meaning of all the important words--God, work, love, money, child, home, risk, safety, intellect, past, future, responsibility, politics, sex. Those kinds of words.

Their agreement hasn't been matter of intention or negotiation. Rather, their very metabolisms agree, and always have. As for passion and intimacy, they've had good years and bad, but, the meaning of the words we build our daily lives around had not substantially changed for them. Me, I'd felt terrific passions for several people, but our definitions of most of those words had always been different. (As someone told me, metaphorically, of the woman of my last big breakup: "You two pray to different gods.") So when our passion was in trouble, as passion will be, there was not much else to sustain us. The friends for whom this room was truly a "living room" trusted their shared values and each other. I seemed only to trust the journey, the search itself, and you can't share a search for long.

Maybe the key to longevity between two people is wanting the same things, which means defining the crucial words in the same way. Up until about 50 years ago (the time I was born), most of these definitions were supplied externally and people had little choice about them. It took a lot of hard work to survive. Very few people (and virtually no women) attempted to survive on their own. Society wasn't fluid--economically or geographically. It was very rare, even in America, for people to advance in affluence beyond their parents or to socialize with people outside their community (Even as a boy in Brooklyn, I knew people who, in old age, still lived in the tenement where they'd been born.) Life expectancies were drastically shorter. In the time of Jesus, the life span of a Palestinian peasant was 29; in the year 1900, in the United States, most people could not expect to live past the age of 44.

This was the civilization that invented the form of marriage that we still adhere to--a relationship based on shared definitions more than passion. Tales of passion were told all the time. But whether the lovers were Launcelot and Guinevere, Orpheus and Eurydice, or Romeo and Juliet, their passion inevitably led to unmitigated disaster, both for the lovers and their communities. Everybody suffered when individuals let their passions run wild. It was as though the voice of collective humanity was saying: We recognize that passionate love is a wonder, but if you give into it you'll upset the delicate balance that allows us to survive. Passion seemed so threatening that, in virtually all cultures, and until fairly recently, most marriages were arranged.

We should also remember who was telling the stories, and whom they were about: the aristocracy. Even folk-tales told by peasant peoples were about doomed princes and princesses, because who else but the elite could have the time for adventures of the heart?

Very few of us would have been among that elite. To follow our passions would simply not have been among our options.

This has been a century that changed all the terms. Two world wars liberated all our passions. The first war ushered in an era of technological advances, demolished old definitions, opened new possibilities--five-day weeks and 10-hour days started becoming the norm, and mass-produced goods began to give people what seemed to them an enormous amount of free time. The movies were redefining intimacy--human beings had never watched each other kiss every week and in close-up. The mass appetite was being whetted for passion.

In the 1930s, between the two wars, E: Scott Fitzgerald, in Tender Is the Night, defined love as "a wild submergence of soul." What five words better describe the thrill, joy, fear, and uncanny suddenness with which our entire beings seem transformed during the time of falling in love? But the human soul, as Fitzgerald knew, is wild, powerful, ravenous. It doesn't seem to care about our happiness. It's hungry for experience--hungry to open all its doors and let every angel and demon out into the open, simply to be lived.