To me, part of the thrill of romance is the mutual pursuit of the parts of a person that are so internal, so private, nobody could ever really see or touch them. I spoke briefly about this in my last Substack, especially Kristen Dombek’s analysis of the private parts of persons from her book, The Selfishness of Others. Knowing that we can’t access these parts of other people, and that others can’t access them in us, doesn’t deter the lover. The romantic lover, after all, doesn’t give a shit about rationality. As Lauren Berlant wrote, “Love is always about violating your own attachment to intentionality, without being anti-intentional. I like that love is greedy. You want incommensurate things and you want them now. And the now is important.” Love, romance, call to mind the childlike impulse to demand without logic, without understanding necessarily where the demand comes from or even where it’s going. To know that you can never access certain parts of another person but to desire it anyway — is that the thrill of romance?
In Before Sunset, the second of the culty Before trilogy, Jessie and Celine meet again in Paris after 9 years apart. Specifically, Jessie is in Paris on a book tour, and Celine shows up at his final talk. Jessie’s book was about the singular day he spent in Austria with Celine 9 years prior. The second movie, like the first, follows the conversing lovers on a long walk through Paris, their conversation traversing topics and, like a good lover, demanding the viewer have their mind changed more than once. The scene I’ll focus on here is the one where Celine and Jessie take a boat ride along the Seine, and Celine muses about heartbreak:
“I feel I was never able to forget anyone I’ve been with. Because each person had their own specific qualities. You can never replace anyone. What is lost is lost. Each relationship when it ends really damages me, I never fully recover… It hurts too much. Even getting laid, I actually don’t do that because I will miss of the person the most mundane things. Like I’m obsessed with little things… I see in [people] little details so specific to each of them that move me and that I miss and will always miss. You can never replace anyone because everyone is made of such beautiful, specific details.”
What comes of this intense attachment? A few minutes later, in a cab, Celine declares that she doesn’t “believe in anything that relates to love, [she doesn’t] feel things for people anymore.” She gets very upset, and after declaring that “Reality and love are almost contradictory to” her, because every time she dates a man and they break up, he gets married immediately after, she attempts to get out out of the car. “Why didn’t they ask me to marry them?” she asks. “I would have said no, but at least they could have asked.”
Celine’s desires (romantic) are incommensurate with her desires (personal). Possibly, this very fact of non-alignment is the condition of possibility for either, as Celine is left suspended and longing. She loves deeply, possibly irrationally, which causes her to foreclose connection through her non-belief. We never meet her boyfriend in the movie, but she shares that she enjoys that he is away for work so often.
I guess what I’m trying to understand is if we can love without projections or intentions or investments — if we try to subvert longing by adopting a strict attitude of fun, possibly in an attempt to not have our hearts broken, would that also neutralize the thrill possessed by a relationship’s potential, flattening romance? I once loved a love that left my lying in wait, but now I don’t wait for anyone, or I very rarely do. I don’t have much anxiety when I go on dates anymore. I speak freely about my interests, my dreams, my past, with anyone. It feels like something is missing and I can’t tell if it’s missing in my orientation to romance, to love, or if it simply can’t be found in every or even most connections.
I guess that’s the trouble with critiques of the “romance myth,” which essentially reject normative ideas like having a soulmate. I appreciate these critiques for the ways they call for expanding our capacity to love and be loved. But I also do think that romantic connection can be quite rare, that the irrational illogical fire that has informed centuries of romance poems plays novels letters etc. is rare! Or maybe I’m just feeling cynical today.
That said, all flames die eventually, and even a flame requires a couple different things to go right before it will light. It seems to me like narrative arcs of romance may be useful in attempting to organize the day to day chaos that is love, always changing form and shape such that we are constantly trying to locate ourselves within it. Narratives, like all boundaries and containers, present opportunities for transgression, subversion, or obedience, servitude. But can we allow ourselves that?