HOW TO TELL LOVE FROM PASSION
At a certain point in every person’s amours, the question arises: “Am I
in love, or am I merely inflamed by passion?”
It is a disturbing question. Usually it arises at some inopportune
moment: at the start of a letter, in the middle of an embrace, at the
end of a day in the country. If the person could supply a direct,
simple, positive answer—if he could say convincingly, “I am in love,”
or, “This is not love, this is passion”—he would spare himself many
hours of mental discomfort. Almost nobody can arrive at so simple a
reply. The conclusion a man commonly arrives at, after tossing the
argument about, is something after this fashion: “I am in love, all
right, but just the same I don’t like the way I looked at Miriam last
night.” Or, “Mirabel is a tidy little wench, and in that case why do
I waste time composing a quatrain for her, to be sent with a crushed
spray of lilac? Why don’t I just go right over?”
[Illustration: “_At a certain point in every person’s amours, the
question arises: ‘Am I in love, or am I merely inflamed by passion?’_”]
One reason a man has trouble telling love from passion is because
neither term has been clearly defined. Even after one has experienced
love, one finds difficulty defining it. Likewise, one may define it and
then have all kinds of trouble experiencing it, because, once having
defined it, one is in too pompous a frame of mind ever again to submit
to its sweet illusion. By and large, love is easier to experience
before it has been explained—easier and cleaner. The same holds true
of passion. Understanding the principles of passion is like knowing
how to drive a car; once mastered, all is smoothed out; no more does
one experience the feeling of perilous adventure, the misgivings, the
diverting little hesitancies, the wrong turns, the false starts, the
glorious insecurity. All is smoothed out, and all, so to speak, is lost.
The word “love” is used loosely by writers, and they know it.
Furthermore, the word “love” is accepted loosely by readers, and _they_
know it. There are many kinds of love, but for the purposes of this
article I shall confine my discussion to the usual hazy interpretation:
the strange bewilderment which overtakes one person on account of
another person. Thus, when I say love in this article, you will take
it to mean _the pleasant confusion which we know exists_. When I say
passion, I _mean_ passion.
[Illustration: _UNCONSCIOUS DRAWING: PLATE III._
_This is the work of Grace McFadden, aged 11, of Bucyrus, Ohio
(R. F. D. # 3, Bucyrus 6021, Ring 3), and was drawn on the day
that Principal K. L. Mooney, of the Paulding County Concentration
Grade Schools, was married. Here the Pleasure-Principle and the
Wish Motive are both overshadowed by the Bridegroom Fallacy._]
I have mentioned that the question of deciding whether a feeling be
love or passion arises at inopportune moments, such as at the start
of a letter. Let us say you have sat down to write a letter to your
lady. There has been a normal amount of preparation for the ordeal,
such as clearing a space on the desk (in doing which you have become
momentarily interested in a little article in last month’s _Scribner’s_
called, “Plumbing the Savage,” and have stood for a minute reading
the first page and deciding to let it go), and the normal amount of
false alarms, such as sitting down and discovering that you have no
cigarettes. (Note: if you think you can write the letter without
cigarettes, it is not love, it is passion.) Finally you get settled
and you write the words; “Anne darling.” If you like commas, you put a
comma after “darling”; if you like colons, a colon; if dashes, a dash.
If you don’t care _what_ punctuation mark you put after “darling,” the
chances are you are in love—although you may just be uneducated, who
knows?
Now, you have written the words “Anne darling” and have put a
punctuation mark there. You pause for just a second, and in that
second you are lost. “Darling?” you say to yourself. “Darling? Is she
my darling, or isn’t she? And if she _is_ my darling, as I have so
brazenly set down on this sheet of paper, what caused me to take such a
long, critical look at the girl in the red-and-brown scarf this morning
when I was breakfasting in the Brevoort? If I can be all aglow about a
girl in a red-and-brown scarf in the early morning, is Anne my darling,
or am I just kidding myself?”
Then follows a brief estimate of the comparative beauty of Anne and
the girl in the scarf, with the girl in the scarf coming out half a
length ahead. This is followed by a short dialogue which you hold with
yourself.
“What if she _was_ prettier?” you say. “What does that amount to?
I’m not a child. I know there’s more to the story than mere physical
beauty.”
[Illustration: _AMERICAN MALE POSTURES: PLATE I._
_American men, more than any others, permit the complexities of
the psycho-physical world to get them down. Often, while down,
they will pass each other going somewhere, and exchange a small
greeting._]
“What more is there?” you quietly demand, testing yourself out.
“Oh, there’s quality of mind, and community of interest, and chemical
attraction (chemical attraction is a term you’ve picked up recently
from reading books on sex and life). When I get right down to it, if I
were to meet that girl in the scarf, I probably wouldn’t like her.”
“No, but you want to meet her, all the samey, don’t you?”
“Well ... I mean ... a man can’t; I mean....”
“Yah, you know you want to meet her!”
“Aw, shut up!”
Having got nowhere with that theme, you again bend to the mighty task
of writing the first sentence of the letter. A minute or two of quiet
brooding and the truth comes to you that you have nothing to say, that
you wrote all the news yesterday, that you consider it pretty silly to
be writing another letter so soon, and that if anyone were to ask you,
you don’t really want to write Anne a letter at all.
“Well, so that’s the way the wind blows!” you say to yourself,
contemptuously. “So _that’s_ the way things are between Anne and you!
Not wanting to write her. So it’s come to that. Well, it’s about
time you got wise to yourself. If you don’t love Anne it’s certainly
high time you found it out, in justice to both Anne and yourself. In
other words, you never loved Anne at all—you merely gave in to an
infatuation. You were thinking about the physical side of the affair;
yes, sir, you _desired_ Anne, that’s what you did. You _desired_ her!
Why, you dirty, low-down, two-faced old voluptuary you....”
The utter shame of this situation breaks your spirit and you lay down
your pen, light up a cigarette, and pace up and down the room. Suddenly
you dash to the desk, with a look of woeful determination, seize the
pen, and write (after the words “Anne darling,” which are good and dry
by this time): “I have been wanting to tell you something for a long
time. We must look things straight in the face, Anne.” You then look
things straight in the face for ten minutes, during which you don’t
write a word, and end by tearing the letter up and quickly dashing off
another, which reads: “Anne, I’m awfully tired tonight, nervous, etc.,
and if I wrote you it would just be a bunch of hooey, so think I will
wait till tomorrow before writing. Love, Bert.” This you mail at the
corner and spend the rest of the evening trying to read “Plumbing the
Savage,” which results finally in sleep—sleep troubled by dreams of
savages wearing loin cloths of a familiar red-and-brown material.
This vexing disbelief in one’s own illusion of love is experienced
most alarmingly by persons of literary inclinations. Yet with them
the reaction comes in quite the opposite manner. Writing is a form
of sexual expression (Zaner goes further: he says writing _is_ sex),
and it takes just as much out of a person. Thus, a person with a bent
for creative literature approaches the task of writing a love letter
with an excitation of the spirit surpassing anything in the realm of
pure eroticism. He anticipates it for hours, mulling over in his mind
the possible material, enlarging on anecdotes, rounding off pledges
of affection, sharpening similes, sharpening pencils; he comes to the
writing of it with immense zeal and a rather nice control of lyrical
prose; he ends on a splendidly poised and correctly balanced note of
tenderness and faith and love; and then, having signed, sealed, and
posted the missive, is suddenly overcome by the realization that by
the very act of composition he has annulled the allure of the subject
herself—cares no more about her, for the moment, than he does for an
old piece of butcher’s twine, which, all in all, is so alarming a
discovery that he usually gets a little bit sick thinking about it, and
has to go out somewhere and hear some music.
I have seldom met an individual of literary tastes or propensities in
whom the writing of love was not directly attributable to the love of
writing.
[Illustration: _UNCONSCIOUS DRAWING: PLATE IV._
_The mood captured in this drawing is a rare one indeed, and Dr. Karl
Zaner considers the sketch the finest in his collection. Here the
masculine sense of Ironic Detachment rises superior to the Love Urge
and can take it or let it alone. The drawing was sent to Dr. Zaner by
Mrs. Walter L. Mouse (née Kathleen Schaaf), recently divorced wife of
the author of the drawing, Walter L. Mouse, of Columbus, Ohio._]
A person of this sort falls terribly in love, but in the end it
turns out that he is more bemused by a sheet of white paper than a
sheet of white bed linen. He would rather leap into print with his
lady than leap into bed with her. (This first pleases the lady and
then annoys her. She wants him to do both, and with virtually the same
impulse.)
UNCERTAINTY IN THE MIDDLE OF AN EMBRACE
There is no more disturbing experience in the rich gamut of life than
when a young man discovers, in the midst of an embrace, that he is
taking the episode quite calmly and is taking the kiss for what it is
worth. His doubts and fears start from this point and there is no end
to them. He doesn’t know whether it’s love or passion. In fact, in the
confusion of the moment he’s not quite sure it isn’t something else,
like forgery. He certainly doesn’t see how it can be love.
Let us examine this incident. He has been sitting, we’ll say, on a
porch with his beloved. They have been talking of this and that, with
the quiet intimacy of lovers. After a bit he takes her in his arms and
kisses her—not once, but several times. It is not a new experience to
him; he has had other girls, and he has had plenty of other kisses from
this one. This time, however, something happens. The young man, instead
of losing himself in the kiss, _finds_ himself in it. What’s more, the
girl to him loses her identity—she becomes just anyone on whom he is
imposing his masculinity. Instead of his soul being full of the ecstasy
which is traditionally associated with love’s expression, his soul is
just fiddling around. The young man is thinking to himself:
“Say, this is pretty nice now!”
Well, that scares him. Up to this point in the affair he has been
satisfied that his feeling was that of love. Now he doesn’t know what
to think. In all his life he has never come across a character in a
book or a movie who, embracing his beloved, was heard to say, “This is
pretty nice,” except that character was a villain. He becomes a mass
of conflicting emotions, and is so thoroughly skeptical and worried
about the state of his heart that he will probably take to reading
sociological books to find out if it’s O.K. to go ahead, or whether,
as a gentleman, it’s his duty to step out before he further defames a
sweet girl and soils her womanhood.
The medical profession recognizes two distinct types of men: first, the
type that believes that to love a woman is not to desire her; second,
the type that believes that to desire a woman is not to love her. The
medical profession rests.
This young man whom I’ve just mentioned (the rogue who found himself
having a good time in the midst of a kiss) now takes seriously to
books. Matters go from bad to worse. Hoping to find, in sexology,
some explanation for his conduct which would indicate that, if not
decent, it at least was not without precedent, he searches relentlessly
until he comes upon a chapter on “The Theory of the Libido.” (Note:
it makes any young man a little mad to discover that he has a
_pleasure-principle_, but there it is just the same.) On page 464 he
finds this paragraph:
“The ideal healthy outcome is to find the child in whom the process
of repression has been accomplished with no fixations of interest at
lower stages of adaptation, in whom the Œdipus complex has passed into
a ‘normal’ phase of the castration complex inhibition, and in whom a
free-movable libido is developing sublimation in active interests free
from paralyzing inhibitions or anti-social tendencies.”
[Illustration: _This peculiar posture was discovered by Dr. Tithridge
in a patient who for thirty years, boy and man, had been unable to tell
love from passion and who allowed it to prey on his mind. Drawing from
the Tithridge collection of American male postures._]
This brings the young man to the point where he thinks maybe he better
lay off altogether. He just wasn’t cut out for kissing, he guesses. So
he writes his girl a letter apologizing for having been a beast, breaks
the engagement, and goes out to Oregon, where he raises fruit fairly
successfully and with no anti-social tendencies.
I have taken up the question of Man’s uncertainty about love and
passion in two different circumstances—at the start of a letter, and
in the middle of an embrace. It was originally my intention also to
show how this uncertainty overcomes one _at the end of a day in the
country_ when a man is so tired that he not only can’t distinguish
love from passion, but has all he can do to distinguish one station on
the New Haven railroad from another and often gets out at 125th Street
by mistake. I say this was my intention; but thus far I have been so
unsuccessful in explaining the difference between love and passion that
to go on would be to lay myself open to criticism. The fact of the
matter is, it’s very difficult to tell love from passion. My advice to
anyone who doesn’t feel sure of the difference between them is either
to give them both up or quit trying to split hairs.