the essence of love is... annoyance?

Odile Redon, Les Landes, c. 1875

For everyone who’s participated in the matchmaking experiment—I will be sending out your matches tonight or tomorrow morning, thanks to Sophia’s hard work :) To everyone who didn’t get in this round: we will do another batch soon!!

When you’re enmeshed with someone, both their flaws and their positive qualities become your whole life. This is, I guess you could say, the downside of intimacy. Seen from afar, someone might look like a house you’d like to promptly move into—pretty, spacious, great wood floors. But when you’re actually living inside them the sound of construction coming from the upstairs window and the leaky ceiling make you crazy. How could you have known? Should you have known?

I find myself wondering how other people feel in relationships, or how they desire to feel. Jackson told me about the “bored or annoyed” test a few years ago—some people prefer to be bored in intimate relationships, and others prefer to be annoyed. I was noodling on it this morning, wondering why I'd always rather prefer to be annoyed. And then I realized: the essence of love is annoyance.

The bored and annoyed test is actually a question about closeness: would you rather be far enough away from someone to feel peace, or would you like to have your psyche entwined with theirs, with the downside of constantly being exposed to all their flaws? I remember talking to Daria about this guy I was seeing, saying that the circumstances of his life seemed overwhelmingly complicated to me. And she said, well, people with complicated internal lives often have complicated external lives. Seen that way, feeling annoyed is a gift from god.

Of course, there is such a thing as too much annoyance. One summer, I dated a guy who seemed smart, kind and attentive. Then we had our first disagreement. He was patronizing in a way that made my eyes pop out of my head. I realized that I couldn’t date someone who spoke like that when we argued. In relationships, there’s some kind of balance you have to strike that’s personal to you—you want to be able to tolerate significant annoyance, because every person you can be truly intimate with is going to come with their own particular set of downsides, but you don’t want to end up in a state of permanent exasperation.

*

Generally, the people who are most capable of expressing love are soupy, gushy, and disorganized. Their structurelessness can be unsettling—when I’m around them, I feel like I’m submerged in a warm and comforting swamp. But nevertheless a swamp! Too long, and I crave the solidity of dry land. But people who are more organized and structured have a far greater number of internal partitions. It can hard for them to be as present, as soft and consuming and close.

Someone’s best qualities, through a squint, are just their flaws. When I was younger, I thought that love occurred as a result of comprehensible, desirable qualities. Like, I fell in love with him because he’s tall and beautiful and kind. In reality, I find that there’s some of that, but mostly we fall in love for reasons that have little to do with our partner’s virtue. It’s more that something about their way of being hooks onto us—their attachment style is similar to our mother’s, or the way they listen makes us feel deeply understood. Love is not earned—it’s something we crash into. Being flattered that someone has fallen in love with you is sort of like being flattered by an automobile collision. Really, most of the time it’s an impersonal accident.

The violence of romance can feel threatening. It is threatening. The older I get, the more I understand why many people choose partnerships that are not particularly romantic. Romance is annoying. It exposes our vulnerabilities, our worst qualities, the patterns we like to pretend we’ve outgrown. Romance teaches you that what you claim to value is not what you actually value. I often think of the narrator of Jeanette Winterson’s Written in the Body, a rampantly romantic book, whom we find at the beginning of the novel in a relationship with a woman he’s not in love with.

I didn’t desire her and I could not imagine desiring her. These were all points in her favour. I had lately learned that another way of writing FALL IN LOVE is WALK THE PLANK. I was tired of balancing blindfold on a slender beam, one slip and into the unplumbed sea. I wanted the clichés, the armchair. I wanted the broad road and twenty-twenty vision.

My friends were more circumspect than me. They regarded Jacqueline with a wary approval, regarding me as one might a mental patient who has been behaving for a few months. A few months? More like a year. I was rigorous, hard working and … and … what was that word beginning with B?

‘You’re bored,’ my friend said.

I protested with all the fervour of a teetotaller caught glancing at the bottle. I was content. I had settled down.

‘Still having sex?’

‘Not much. It doesn’t matter you know. We do now and then. When we both feel like it. We work hard. We don’t have a lot of time.’

‘Do you look at her and want her? Do you look at her and notice her?’

Noticing someone, wanting them. Who has time for that kind of intrusion? When there’s books to read, work to do, Pilates classes to attend? Historically, people didn’t look for passion in the same place they got their security. But some of us are better at living without passion than others.

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What thrills me is intimacy, the exposure of it. From Intermezzo: "Where did it come from, then, this word ‘passionate’? She knows where. From that so firmly suppressed feeling, present all along, that when he looks at her, when he speaks to her, he is addressing not only the superficial but also the deep concealed parts of her personality – without meaning to, without knowing how not to.” In love, I hope to find the hidden person underneath the public one, the submerged, shameful child-self.

But then—oh man—the challenge of coexisting with another person. With a sentient adult, who you’re not only sharing a roof with but striving actively to remain close to. Everything gets mixed together. Their thoughts contaminate yours, their feelings contaminate yours. Their bad habits disturb any semblance of peace you once had. It’s relatively easy to remain calm around a pet or a child, because we don’t expect them to know better. But an adult knows better! How can it be that they are intelligent, capable, fully possessed of free will… and yet they use their free will to be annoying?

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In my opinion, we are not sufficiently prepared for it. We are given aphorisms like “No one is perfect” and “relationships are hard.” We are given diagnoses like codependent and avoidantly attached and “the day-to-day entanglement of marriage is fundamentally opposed to the mystery that sustains sexual attraction.” Well, in trying to come up with my own theory of love, I’d like to submit: closeness is fundamentally annoying. I believe this is what Heather Havrilesky’s wonderful memoir of marriage, Foreverland, is about: the unavoidable friction of making it work with another person.

Closeness is annoying because it’s about the surrender of control. You’re trying to fall asleep, and beside you your partner is snoring. You lightly push their jaw to the side so it’ll stop. Two minutes later, the snoring commences again. You lay there in the dark wondering how you got here. Oh, right: three years ago at a party you saw someone and thought they were very beautiful.