Monthly Archives: April 2016
Many people go about finding love in the wrong way. We meet; we do our best to please and impress our new companion. We tell jokes, laugh at his jokes, try to make ourselves interesting. We keep things light, talk about extraneous things like movies, music and musicians, sports, politics. We discuss our favorite television shows. This has some merit. At least we discover whether we have similar taste and things in common. We avoid being intrusive, by which I mean asking substantive questions that go to the heart of a person’s character. In “Dancing in the Dark” Jennifer is made a bit uncomfortable by Jacques’ probing questions. He wants to get to know her, and she finds that she is doing something usually outside her comfort zone. She is revealing significant facts about her life, in particular her relationships with her mother and father. Eventually she follows suit and questions him about his life. This chapter provides an example of how to get to know someone in an authentic and realistic way. At the end of the evening Jennifer and Jacques learn more about each other than some couples, together for years, ever learn. This I know from decades of work with couples.
Loving someone in a deep and true way requires knowledge. Who is this person that I think I love? What is his character about? How did he come to be the person he is? What do I feel when I am with him? How much do I trust him, his integrity, his veracity, his sincerity? Is he open about himself and does he let me in? If you can’t answer these questions then your knowledge of your lover is superficial, and you have more work to do. It is not enough that he makes you laugh and he is fun to be with. It is not enough that the sex is great, and you can’t take your eyes off of him. Over time other things will emerge that become more important. Can you depend on him when the bad times roll in, as inevitably they will? Is he a good father, patient, understanding, and loving with the children? Is he able to control his temper when he is angry with you, disagrees with you, or is cross about something you said or did? Does he continue to show concern about your needs, about your feelings and wishes, or is he selfish and thinks only about himself? And when there is a conflict, do you both make an effort to listen to one another, and eventually to resolve the conflict in a way that allows you to be intimate again? These are the things that truly matter in a lifetime relationship.
“Dancing in the Dark” is about the struggles of two couples to fight their way through misunderstandings, conflicts, and deeply embedded ambivalences to enduring and genuine love. The barriers and impediments are many, and they all must face the ultimate choice: to embrace or retreat from the availability of love.
“Dancing in the Dark” is quintessentially a novel about the search for love, and the myriad obstacles that couples confront along the way. As a psychotherapist working in the field for over three decades, I have dealt with these problems practically every day of my professional life. But why do they occur with such common frequency? If we all want love, why do we throw up so many impediments that thwart our hopes? The novel seeks to shed light on this mystery. In the two love stories that run side by side throughout the pages of “Dancing in the Dark”, the author endeavors to illustrate why things go awry. No one in love is born yesterday. We bring to this love a long evolution of our character; childhood development, family relationships, friendships, previous loves are all part of the amalgam that comprises the “me” of who we are. Unconscious fears, self-doubts, ingrained attitudes, expectations are all part of this person whom we have become. Relationships with significant others, good or bad, either prepare us to love or not. And what if our earlier experience of love has been unfortunate, or even tragic? How will that affect our capacity to love again?
“Dancing in the Dark” is a psychological novel revealing the inner conflicts of its protagonists. Death and divorce appear to be causative in the difficulties each character experiences throughout the pages of the novel. Unless our lives have been consistently sunny and free of strife, we are likely to enter an intense love affair with a degree of ambivalence and anxiety. We must effectively break free of these emotions or lose the full capacity to love. It is the central drama of love, and of the individuals who dance through “Dancing in the Dark”. The author finds both pathos and humor in the struggles of his creations. Every effort has been made to render them as real people, who demonstrate courage and cowardice, who inspire and infuriate, and, above all, who never bore.
On a clear, sparkling Sunday early in the month of June, a small group of bright and sophisticated young women were seated in a circle on the high roof garden of a doorman building in Manhattan. It was Jennifer Slater’s building, and it was Jennifer’s engagement party for Meg and Dan. As Jennifer’s capacity for preparing food was limited to boiling water, the party was catered. The festivities began at two in the afternoon. By four, most, if not quite all of the invited guests had arrived. About fifty guests sat or stood in small clusters scattered along the length and breath of an extensive roof. The area was fitted with groups of wooden chairs, which surrounded large coffee tables. Each cluster of people, chairs, and tables were separated from one another by a space of approximately thirty feet, far enough in the open air to provide a modicum of privacy to each group. It was the perfect setting for a party, with spectacular views of Central Park and the line of stately buildings that graced Upper Fifth Avenue on the East Side.
The circle of friends consisted of Jennifer and Meg, Hillary and Daryl, and Annie Giraud. With the exception of Annie, introduced to the others by Meg a year earlier and still on the periphery of the circle, the friends had known one another since college, or even earlier. They were familiar with each other’s tics and idiosyncrasies; in short, it was a quite comfortable group of intimates. It was perfectly natural and even expectable that at some point during the party they would congregate and lose themselves in a discussion that, as often as not, would involve men. For the last few minutes the topic of conversation that engrossed the five young women was: why are men afraid of commitment? Annie, the youngest member, happily in her midtwenties, sought information from the one member of the group who wore the mantle of “expert.”
“How did you do it, Meg? How did you convince Dan to commit?”
“It’s a long story,” Meg said in a voice suggestive more of levity than seriousness. “Dan did put up the usual guy resistance. You all know the dreary story—all the crap about needing ‘space.’ Then the answer came to me in a flash—you know, one of those eureka moments. Why not out-phobe the commitment phobe? So I began to ask for more space than he wanted. You see, girls, guys love a challenge. They go for the kind of girl who’s hard to get. The harder she is to get, the more they prize her. After a while I had the poor man in a complete daze. So that’s how I bedazzled him.” Meg deliberately mispronounced the word bedazzled to rhyme with daze.
“But that’s so unromantic. That’s gamesmanship,” Hillary protested. Hillary was the idealist of the group.
“Romance is an illusion,” Jennifer retorted. “It all comes down to power.” Jennifer was the group cynic.
“You’re a cynic,” Hillary said.
“I’m a realist. It’s all about who has the upper hand.”
Annie requested an explanation.
“It’s simple; someone is going to be needier. That’s the person who doesn’t have the power.”
“So why don’t we just withhold sex? That way the guy’s got to be the needier one,” Daryl suggested.
“You withhold sex?” Jennifer said. It was a strictly rhetorical question.
“You know, we never have gotten around to answering the original question,” said Annie. “Which is why men fear commitment.”
Jacques Giraud, long-legged and lanky, stumbled into Harry’s office and marched toward his chair (not the couch) like a man on a mission. Harry was fond of Jacques. In particular he was impressed with the young man’s intensity and how seriously he took the work they were doing together. He was pleased by the obvious influence he had with Jacques, how the young man struggled to absorb the lessons of therapy, which, although not always successful, revealed strong motivation. He liked Jacques’s character; he was not only intense, he was also deeply honest and good at heart. In a world of narcissistic men and women, self-involved and self-aggrandizing—the world that Harry’s profession compelled him to navigate—here was a different sort of human being.
Jacques sat upright in a leather chair opposite Harry. He was so tall his knees were virtually at the level of Harry’s eyes, perhaps partly accounted for by the fact that Harry rarely sat up straight. Jacques arrived with good news. He had just received notice of his promotion to associate professor and his tenure at Rutgers University. Harry offered his warm congratulations.
“You’ve worked hard for this, and you truly deserve it. Even though I know you had your worries, I never actually doubted that they would give you tenure. They were not going to let someone with your ability go.”
“I’m happy about it, of course, but you know, it’s not where I really want to be.”
Harry knew that Jacques had spent his undergraduate years at Harvard and his graduate years at Princeton, and he was motivated to reach higher. “I know that, Jacques, but it’s a significant achievement and a good omen for your future.”
“Well, it’s an achievement. I’ll call it a ‘significant achievement’ when I get to the kind of university I want to be at.”
Minimizing his success was an old, bad habit of Jacques’s, as Harry well knew. “Raining on your parade again? Only a week ago you were fearful of being passed over and having to leave without another position in hand.”
“That’s true. I am very relieved.”
“And Jacques, it’s not Podunk Community College; it’s a state university, and it’s your first tenured promotion. So how is it not significant? Congratulations, man, well done!”
Jacques smiled. “May I change the subject?” he asked.
“No, you may not. I want you to stay with the feeling, ‘Associate professor, tenure, yes!’ At least I’m going to celebrate it.”
“Okay, Harry, let’s open the champagne.”
“Small triumphs are important,” he told Jacques.
“Duly noted, and I do feel happy. But I’ve been thinking.”
How many times had Harry heard Jacques begin a sentence with those words? Harry wished the man would think less and feel more.
“About my relationships with women.”
“Yes?” Harry leaned back in his chair, the fingers of his hands laced together, as if preparing for a long slog.
“I’ve never been close to anyone, not once, not with my stepmothers or any of my girlfriends.”
“You never felt close to Barbara?”
“I suppose over two years there were times … but there was a hell of a lot more propinquity than intimacy. You pointed out how much she resembled my second stepmother, giving me the feeling that I wasn’t her priority, that work, friends, and whatever came before me. Why didn’t I see that? I wasted so much time. “
Harry listened and tried to read between the lines. What was the underlying message?
“Should I have been more direct with you?”
“Why are you always blaming yourself, Harry?”
Actually, he wasn’t. It was a question he could have directed to Jacques.
“No, it wasn’t your job to tell me how to live my life. I just kept right on ignoring what I was feeling, missing the handwriting on the wall, chasing a foolish fantasy that she would eventually come around. My head was up my ass and my brains followed.”