We fall in love for a smile, a look, a shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope or sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character. —Marcel Proust, “The Fugitive”
This is true, isn’t it? Every time I’ve fallen in love with a person, it wasn’t precisely because of shared beliefs or similar ambitions. That may have been what alerted me to someone’s presence, but in the end, what enflamed my heart was something more like “the way he widened his eyes while telling a joke.” And after such an observance, in the quiet hours in my room, I imagined the interior of this person, what he was really like, and an affection took form.
Proust is a master at describing this process of the soul — and rather than regarding it as delusional or idolatrous, he sees it as a work of art, an act of craftsmanship, or a way of making constellations out of mere stars.
No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves. —from “Within a Budding Grove”
Is such love a selfish act, then? Not necessarily. “Projecting” something onto another person is usually meant in a negative sense: we see in someone else that odious quality that we, in actuality, possess. But Proust uses the term amorously.
The most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else … when we are in love with a woman we simply project onto her a state of our own soul. —from “Within a Budding Grove”
A quality we spot in another, and become consumed by, may be something that already lives in us which we are not quite able to unearth by ourselves. Therefore, we love in the other that which we already own but do not own, and this love becomes a conduit for our full grasping of such a quality.
We love only what we do not wholly possess. —from “The Captive”
The late psychotherapist Robert A. Johnson outlines this phenomenon in his 2008 book “Inner Gold.” “When we awaken to a new possibility in our lives,” he writes, “we often see it first in another person. A part of us that has been hidden is about to emerge, but it doesn’t go in a straight line from our unconscious to becoming conscious. It travels by way of an intermediary, a host.” This is something essentially healthy that offers “an advance in consciousness.” The only danger would be to fail to reintegrate the admired characteristic.
I have often wondered why I develop affections for people with whom it would make no sense for me to be romantically involved. In pop psychology, this sort of thing receives a facile diagnosis as “attraction to the unavailable.” But perhaps there is something deeper going on. To assume that being attracted to someone means that a relationship must follow, or that if a relationship is nonsensical, the attraction must be discarded, is to read our attractions in a fundamentalist and literalist way. These attractions are not useless. If a romantic relationship is like fruit that is eaten, a non-fundamentalist attraction is like fruit that falls from the tree and nourishes the ground beneath.
Sexual fantasy is a form of contemplation. In the long hours imagining a love, as Proust describes, we try to deduce from small details like someone’s laugh what he or she would be like in a close embrace. Reinforcing the novelist’s claim that desire arises from a fleeting moment (“a smile, a look”), a Princeton University study found that attraction can be recognized in 100 milliseconds.
One method for reintegrating a positive projection is to make a list of the qualities one notices in the admired other. Then, the aim is to begin living as though we ourselves had those qualities — in other words, to embody them, even if one at a time. When I performed this exercise recently, thinking of the last person who had inspired the pain of longing, the primary quality I could think of was “gracious.” I looked up the word, not fully knowing what it meant, although it instinctively made sense. “Marked by kindness and courtesy,” blessed with “tact and delicacy.” But then, farther down the page, a more archaic meaning: “Godly.”
Is it not typical, then, to be attracted to the God-like qualities in another? To a person’s dignity, gentleness, or stability? And does it follow, then, that what we are attracted to is not this person at all, at the deepest level, but rather God Himself? In mystical theology, an understanding of God which is gained through observing His creatures is called kataphatic knowledge. The idea is to look at what an attraction points to. The ultimate love is to be found in God, as the Christian saint John of the Cross implies when he exhorts spiritual persons to “flee from creatures.”
There is a religious impulse in positive projection. Perhaps we need to see something embodied in someone else, incarnated you might say, before we can believe that we, too, are capable of possessing that quality. When I have had a relationship with someone whose innate positive aspects I adored, it was often not until the relationship ended that I was able to integrate those aspects in myself and live them fully. For instance, in the wake of a breakup with an encouraging person, I found myself being able to encourage others deeply for the first time. It was almost as though the rupture had freed that person’s essence in my life. One finds an analogy in Christ’s statement to his disciples before the crucifixion: “It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Holy Spirit will not come to you. But when I go, I will send the Spirit to you.”
In a recent conversation about his new book “Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses,” Trappist monk Erik Varden says it is imperative to realize that we are not entitled to the satisfaction of our desires. Resting in the tension of desire is in fact salutary. The question is not whether an attraction is good or bad, but rather what it signifies. An object of lust is often someone who “reveals myself to myself,” he says. Our error lies in setting our ultimate gaze upon the object instead of what he or she points us toward. “What’s the meaning of this?” we should ask.
As Varden explains, to be chaste is to be complete, or integral, with a simple heart. Chastity does not necessarily mean celibacy, but something closer to the correct ordering of our sexual choices. He refers to the ancient saint Climacus, who reported seeing people “crazed for physical love” transfer that “same eros” to God, experiencing a conversion of desire.
Christianity and sex-positivity are rarely mentioned in the same sentence. The assumption is that serious Christians or people of faith must crush their longings or regard any extraneous attraction as something to be obliterated. But this is a profound misconception. Varden says it is in fact a “key Christian realization that the senses have their part to play also in the direction of the desire of our souls.” He explains that many desires which become sexually codified, because we have no other language for them, are expressions of the simple human desire to see and be seen. Once we grasp this, we can encounter the other as a true other, and respect his or her mystery. We’ll no longer need to make projections on an idealized canvas.
Chastity is peace. It is like snow falling on a landscape, creating silence on the warm earth underneath.