‘Maybe another reason it’s so difficult to hear or read about someone falling and being in love is that the experience is extraordinarily subjective. The whole thing’s a hugely complex and intricate emotional scenario that's exquisitely and intensely beautiful, but also personal, while the language we have to describe the experience functions by reference to a shared or public understanding of the meaning of words. Not to mention that being in love is for any one person a comparatively rare experience, so most of us don’t have a lot of practice describing these feelings.
‘Q.’
‘So for example, think seriously for a moment about the level of abstraction involved in explaining how it feels to be ‘in love’. It’s basically impossible to do without using a metaphor or simile – It feels like… – in which case you’re already once removed from the substance of the experience you’re trying to describe, and instead describing some other experience that’s more or less like the experience of being ‘in love’, at least for you.
‘Q.’
‘Even if we just agreed on a definition – the OED defines ‘love’ as ‘a feeling of intense affection’ – and said that’s what it means/how it feels, well then how intense and what counts as affection and you can see where this is going.’
‘Q.’
‘I’m not saying that it’s impossible for two people to mean the same thing when they both say they are ‘in love’ – that we could never be sure that what you’re feeling is the same as or at least similar to what I’m feeling – just that the feelings at play are so intense and unusual and overwhelming and… sublime, that it’s extremely difficult to articulate the feelings in a way that makes them clear to another person, let alone ourselves.
‘…’
‘So of course what ends up happening is that we face-off against the dual threat of bewildering empathy and vertiginous abstraction and just fail utterly. We fall back on the stock and hackneyed phrases that blight Valentine’s Day cards and movie scripts – You mean the world to me or I love you from the bottom of my heart – which are to varying degrees sickeningly sweet and cloying and are in fact so hyperbolic that it actually is impossible for two people to mean the same thing when using these phrases. Which means that using these phrases not only fails to describe our emotions with anything close to perspicuity, but also allows us to not even try to describe our feelings in the first place.
‘…’
*****
Another way to think about Fench’s problem, basically, is that he’s having a hard time figuring out whether his desire to continue to be on the receiving end of so much wonder and envy [FN8] is making him unusually accommodating of his current girlfriend – indeed, Fench can’t even figure out how he could even figure out… etc ad infinitum – in which case Fench envisions himself as possibly having fallen into one or maybe even both of the following scenarios, neither of which is really very appealing at all:
(A) It’s possible that Fench is trying in some way to be ‘On’ whenever he’s around his girlfriend, or talking to her on the phone, or even just sending her a witty and mildly flirtatious email, which emails he sometimes revises three or even four times before sending, and which phone calls he often begins with an affectionate salutation that he has previously worked-out in his mind if only a few minutes before making the call. By ‘On’ Fench means however he must have been on the night he met his girlfriend at his co-worker’s birthday party, which co-worker was also friends with Fench’s girlfriend. The party was held in the radio station’s multipurpose room, which room is spare and exceedingly functional, with white walls stained like plaqued tooth enamel in the corners and along the drywall seams, and carpet the colour and texture of crushed gravel. The only furniture in the room were two folding tables with veneered tops and metal legs, which tables were both pushed up against the wall opposite the multipurpose room’s only door so that you had to walk through the whole crowd to get a drink on arrival, which was a thinly veiled attempt to encourage socializing amongst the radio station’s normally recalcitrant and introverted staff. [FN9] One of the tables was for chips and nuts and popcorn and vegetables with salad dressing dip, the other for beer and wine and store brand vodka and gin and big two liter bottles of store brand cola and soda water and juice, and red plastic cups, and there were no chairs whatsoever because the radio station’s GM thought that meetings (which is what the multipurpose room was mainly used for) were much more productive and efficient when attendees had to stand, especially as those attendees were recalcitrant and introverted. [FN10]
Or,
(B) That Fench is more or less compulsively laughing with and encouraging and agreeing with whatever his girlfriend happens to think or say, as appropriate,[FN11] again in order to keep her interest and enjoy all the ancillary benefits of her attention to him.
In either case, Fench knows from the kinds of adolescent experiments that all average looking guys inevitably conduct when they find themselves, inexplicably, the fancy of some unusually beautiful classmate or neighbour and they (the guys) really like all the attention they now get from their friends and peers and so basically just do whatever it takes to preserve or maintain the girl’s attention, that this semi-conscious but very real subterfuge ends up being either horrendously tedious – because even if the girl is unusually cosmopolitan or intelligent and so always has brilliant or incisive things to say or hilarious jokes to tell or really avant-garde and hip ideas about what to do during the lunch period or after school, that everyone else will shortly start to copy and imitate, eventually a guy just gets tired of going along with someone else’s suggestions and longs to strike out on his own – or spectacularly difficult to maintain – because being ‘On’ all the time just wears a guy down, not to mention it’s hard enough to remember and be consistent in your own positions on current events or books or the latest homeroom relationship gossip or what you generally find funny or interesting, let alone what someone else might think or say or find funny or interesting, which latter is required for anyone trying to impress or ingratiate themselves with some other person.
Plus, not only does Fench know these paths become progressively dark, lifeless and debilitating, by which time he may be so far along that it’s impossible to turn around or extricate himself with anything that could be described as ease or painlessness, he also knows that it would be horribly demeaning and awful to tell his girlfriend that he loved her when he was reasonably unsure about whether he meant ‘love’ in any standard use of the term, because even though the meaning of ‘love’ is notoriously slippery and indeed fraught, it pretty clearly doesn't gesture towards anything like ‘I love you because of the way you make me look in the eyes of others’.
*****
[FN11] More solid data backing up this strategy, this time from the field of organizational behavior and various sub-fields of sociology, that people tend to like other people who agree with their own views, find their jokes funny (N.B. this is not the same thing as just laughing at the person’s jokes, which is a fine but critical distinction the maintenance of which makes being an effective sycophant much more difficult than most people seem to think), encourage their ideas, etc.
‘Q.’
‘So for example, think seriously for a moment about the level of abstraction involved in explaining how it feels to be ‘in love’. It’s basically impossible to do without using a metaphor or simile – It feels like… – in which case you’re already once removed from the substance of the experience you’re trying to describe, and instead describing some other experience that’s more or less like the experience of being ‘in love’, at least for you.
‘Q.’
‘Even if we just agreed on a definition – the OED defines ‘love’ as ‘a feeling of intense affection’ – and said that’s what it means/how it feels, well then how intense and what counts as affection and you can see where this is going.’
‘Q.’
‘I’m not saying that it’s impossible for two people to mean the same thing when they both say they are ‘in love’ – that we could never be sure that what you’re feeling is the same as or at least similar to what I’m feeling – just that the feelings at play are so intense and unusual and overwhelming and… sublime, that it’s extremely difficult to articulate the feelings in a way that makes them clear to another person, let alone ourselves.
‘…’
‘So of course what ends up happening is that we face-off against the dual threat of bewildering empathy and vertiginous abstraction and just fail utterly. We fall back on the stock and hackneyed phrases that blight Valentine’s Day cards and movie scripts – You mean the world to me or I love you from the bottom of my heart – which are to varying degrees sickeningly sweet and cloying and are in fact so hyperbolic that it actually is impossible for two people to mean the same thing when using these phrases. Which means that using these phrases not only fails to describe our emotions with anything close to perspicuity, but also allows us to not even try to describe our feelings in the first place.
‘…’
*****
Another way to think about Fench’s problem, basically, is that he’s having a hard time figuring out whether his desire to continue to be on the receiving end of so much wonder and envy [FN8] is making him unusually accommodating of his current girlfriend – indeed, Fench can’t even figure out how he could even figure out… etc ad infinitum – in which case Fench envisions himself as possibly having fallen into one or maybe even both of the following scenarios, neither of which is really very appealing at all:
(A) It’s possible that Fench is trying in some way to be ‘On’ whenever he’s around his girlfriend, or talking to her on the phone, or even just sending her a witty and mildly flirtatious email, which emails he sometimes revises three or even four times before sending, and which phone calls he often begins with an affectionate salutation that he has previously worked-out in his mind if only a few minutes before making the call. By ‘On’ Fench means however he must have been on the night he met his girlfriend at his co-worker’s birthday party, which co-worker was also friends with Fench’s girlfriend. The party was held in the radio station’s multipurpose room, which room is spare and exceedingly functional, with white walls stained like plaqued tooth enamel in the corners and along the drywall seams, and carpet the colour and texture of crushed gravel. The only furniture in the room were two folding tables with veneered tops and metal legs, which tables were both pushed up against the wall opposite the multipurpose room’s only door so that you had to walk through the whole crowd to get a drink on arrival, which was a thinly veiled attempt to encourage socializing amongst the radio station’s normally recalcitrant and introverted staff. [FN9] One of the tables was for chips and nuts and popcorn and vegetables with salad dressing dip, the other for beer and wine and store brand vodka and gin and big two liter bottles of store brand cola and soda water and juice, and red plastic cups, and there were no chairs whatsoever because the radio station’s GM thought that meetings (which is what the multipurpose room was mainly used for) were much more productive and efficient when attendees had to stand, especially as those attendees were recalcitrant and introverted. [FN10]
Or,
(B) That Fench is more or less compulsively laughing with and encouraging and agreeing with whatever his girlfriend happens to think or say, as appropriate,[FN11] again in order to keep her interest and enjoy all the ancillary benefits of her attention to him.
In either case, Fench knows from the kinds of adolescent experiments that all average looking guys inevitably conduct when they find themselves, inexplicably, the fancy of some unusually beautiful classmate or neighbour and they (the guys) really like all the attention they now get from their friends and peers and so basically just do whatever it takes to preserve or maintain the girl’s attention, that this semi-conscious but very real subterfuge ends up being either horrendously tedious – because even if the girl is unusually cosmopolitan or intelligent and so always has brilliant or incisive things to say or hilarious jokes to tell or really avant-garde and hip ideas about what to do during the lunch period or after school, that everyone else will shortly start to copy and imitate, eventually a guy just gets tired of going along with someone else’s suggestions and longs to strike out on his own – or spectacularly difficult to maintain – because being ‘On’ all the time just wears a guy down, not to mention it’s hard enough to remember and be consistent in your own positions on current events or books or the latest homeroom relationship gossip or what you generally find funny or interesting, let alone what someone else might think or say or find funny or interesting, which latter is required for anyone trying to impress or ingratiate themselves with some other person.
Plus, not only does Fench know these paths become progressively dark, lifeless and debilitating, by which time he may be so far along that it’s impossible to turn around or extricate himself with anything that could be described as ease or painlessness, he also knows that it would be horribly demeaning and awful to tell his girlfriend that he loved her when he was reasonably unsure about whether he meant ‘love’ in any standard use of the term, because even though the meaning of ‘love’ is notoriously slippery and indeed fraught, it pretty clearly doesn't gesture towards anything like ‘I love you because of the way you make me look in the eyes of others’.
[FN8] (…most of which comes from guys, but Fench is also very much aware of the increased female attention he seems to be getting now that word is out about his transcendently beautiful girlfriend. For reasons already given this attention causes Fench no end of discomfort and complex anxiety, as it now seems a real possibility that e.g. the cashier at the grocery store will reach around the debit card machine and unzip his trousers, which of course Fench fantasizes about continuously but in reality has not one sweet clue what to do if it actually happened. In fact, there was recently an incident where Fench became so unnerved by the amorous stare he was receiving from a particularly lithesome and comely cashier that he accidentally entered his PIN code incorrectly and had to ask the cashier, now practically hyperventilating with lust and desire for Fench, to cancel and re-enter the transaction, which procedure required the cashier (whose name was Clarice and whose braces had alternating blue and yellow elastics in support of her high school football team’s regional championship bid) to reach around the debit card machine and enter a special cancellation override code, at which point Fench nearly lost it in about four different ways and has since made it a point to pay cash for his groceries.)
[FN9] Why do you think they worked in radio?
[FN10] The point being not so much that Fench was particularly ‘On’ that afternoon and evening when he had literally bumped into the smolderingly attractive woman who was now his girlfriend at the drinks table, making himself a gin and soda whilst she was getting a beer (!!), but rather that he’s constantly got to be some particular way whenever he’s with his girlfriend, instead of just being with his girlfriend without thinking about being with his girlfriend, as it were, in order to sustain her interest and so keep open the taps of chest-swelling pride and accomplishment. In actual fact, the whole first meeting is a kind of blur to Fench: after they bumped shoulders at the drinks table, Fench said ‘hello’ very politely and she smiled and said the same and that her name was A--- and Fench said his name was ‘Fench’, which of course sparked a bit of a conversation about the story behind his name. As you might imagine this is a story that Fench has much practice telling and indeed he has over the years crafted something of a minor epic so far as name-related stories go. The story of Fench’s name got his now girlfriend laughing in a friendly way and asking him questions about certain parts of the story that seemed particularly fantastic or interesting, for which Fench also has reasonably polished and witty responses and on it went from there; although do note that Fench’s now girlfriend asked for his number at the end of the night and called him later in the week to suggest dinner and generally took the lead on most of the early relationship-type activity. This included initiating the first kiss after more-or-less dragging Fench to the rooftop of her condo building, which rooftop has a very nice communal deck space, and dutifully walking around the perimeter twice to give Fench a chance to make his move under the stars including long-ish pauses to admire the view and looking over at Fench during same until she decided to take matters (i.e., Fench’s face) into her own hands, to Fench’s great relief.
[FN11] More solid data backing up this strategy, this time from the field of organizational behavior and various sub-fields of sociology, that people tend to like other people who agree with their own views, find their jokes funny (N.B. this is not the same thing as just laughing at the person’s jokes, which is a fine but critical distinction the maintenance of which makes being an effective sycophant much more difficult than most people seem to think), encourage their ideas, etc.
