Whose Interest Does the Magic of Love Serve?

You know the oldest question asked of a new couple at a crowded table: “So how did you two meet?” I love listening to the answers; listen yourself at the next gathering. What is told is almost always an accident. “I wasn’t even going to go that day.” “My friend called at the last minute; I couldn’t say no.” “If the rain hadn’t come down, I would never have walked through that door.” The greater the coincidence, the more esteem the story earns; the table nods “it was meant to be,” and the teller collects his share of the applause. Even those who came together by thinking, by asking, by getting to know each other attach a small accident to the tale; as if saying “I looked, I knew, I chose” would diminish the love, as if effort would spoil the taste. No one is lying, really; everyone is reciting the same lesson. The lesson is this: love is something that happens to us, not something we do.

Our language has kept the same record. Look at the verbs we use for love: to be struck, to be smitten, to be seized, to burn, to be swept away. All five are passive. There is not a single verb in which you are the agent; in every one, something is done to you. The English say it no differently: there, too, one falls in love. Falling; the foot slipping, the will switching off. Language is a nation’s clerk of centuries, and according to the record, love is an incident with no known perpetrator: something happens, it happens to you, and you had no hand in it.

The stories endorse the record. The old Greeks told love with an arrow: it comes from wherever it comes, the archer knows whom it will strike, the one struck does not. Recall, too, the famous tale told in Plato’s Symposium: man was once whole, then was split in two; ever since, everyone has been searching for their other half. A lovely tale. But notice; in this tale there is finding, not building; the half waits ready somewhere, and the whole work lies in chancing upon it. The lesson of our own lands is no different: Mecnun falls to the desert; they call him back, he cannot return. Ferhat bores through the mountain. Kerem burns and turns to ash. And have you noticed, they all end in catastrophe. Among the great loves our culture has us memorize there is not one couple that grew old. No epic was ever written of a love that was attained and sustained, that set a breakfast table, that kept vigil at a sickbed. When the whole curriculum is accident and fire, people come to take love for a weather event: something like lightning; it comes if it comes, it strikes if it strikes. Opening an umbrella occurs to no one; a lover with an umbrella does not suit the story.

So why is this myth so durable? I see two reasons, and one accomplice.

The first reason: magic. What effort cannot explain looks divine to us, and what is divine is not to be touched. When you set out to understand love, to question it, to manage it, you seem to have entered a forbidden zone; a quiet fear starts working inside; what if I miss my destined share? That is why “if it is written, it will come” is both consolation and instruction: wait, and do not interfere. Waiting is easy; not interfering is easier still. Besides, no one calls the waiting to account; no one can, for no decision was ever made.

The second reason is exactly that: comfort. You cannot be held responsible for what you do not govern. If you loved the wrong person; fate; if you were not loved back; fate again. If the choice was not yours, neither is the fault; you owe an account to no one, least of all to yourself. This immunity is sweet, and hard to give up. My observation is that two groups cling to this magic with particular devotion. The first are those who do not wish to labor at this work; the magic exempts them from the toil. The second are those who once tried and could not do it; the magic converts their defeat into impossibility. I cannot be angry at the second group; I even understand them: saying “it cannot be done” hurts far less than saying “I could not do it.” But that something proved hard for you does not show it to be impossible; it shows only that it did not happen that day, with that knowledge, in the state you were in.

The myth also has an everyday form; the place where it stops being belief and becomes an excuse. How many times have you heard the sentence “it’s the heart, it won’t listen”; how many times have you used it yourself? The cover thrown over the unanswered message, the unkept promise, the eye that looks where it should not, is always the same: it is beyond me. Notice that this sentence is never built for good deeds; no one says “I can’t help it, I treat them kindly every day.” Helplessness always pleads for the defect. This is the most concrete return on declaring love uncontrollable: a ready-made excuse; it opens every door and settles no account.

The accomplice is the market. Love in its uncontrolled state sells very well. First sight lasts three seconds; it fits into an advertisement. Harmony is the work of years; it fits into no campaign. Have you ever noticed where romantic films end? At the moment of union. The credits roll exactly where the real part; the part where two lives are tuned to one another; begins; because that part is not watchable and cannot be bought. The moment is sold; the process is not sold, it is built. The uncontrolled lover is, moreover, a good customer: he buys the make-up gesture, the reconciliation dinner, the “starting over” holiday. A day is set on the calendar, a flower price is written on that day, and the proof of love is tied to something displayable; and the displayable is always the purchasable. You need not be an economist to see what the order that narrates love as an accident earns from that narration; looking at the shop window is enough.

Now you will say: “So that first glance, that leap inside us; is it all a lie?” No. Nobody says that, and I never do. The feeling is real, that electricity is real; without it this work has neither taste nor name. The point is not to deny the feeling; it is to take back the responsibility that was heaped on its shoulders. Let me sum it up like this: love delivers, affection hosts. Your rule over who will knock on your door is limited, that much is true. But opening the knocked door, inviting them in, building a house one can stay in; none of this is the lightning’s work; this is your work. Culture set only the deliverer to song and never even saw the host. Yet the deliverer comes and goes; in a house where no one receives him, a guest does not stay.

One objection remains, the strongest: “If we understand it, won’t the magic break?” It will not. The rainbow did not turn ugly when we learned it was nothing but the bending of light; the knowing eye admires that arc no less than the unknowing one. Knowledge does not break beauty; knowledge breaks fakery. If there is a magic that dissolves upon understanding, then it was never magic; it was a blindfold; let it dissolve, and so much the better. Not everyone may be able to manage this work, granted; the magic suits some people better, and I respect that. But for one who could do it to hide behind “it cannot be done” is a pity; a pity for himself, and for that person he never got to meet.

Let us return to the table one last time. Telling an accident in answer to “how did you meet?” is a pleasant custom; let it continue, I will not meddle with anyone’s story. Only, next time you listen to the story, lend an ear to this as well: who narrates what came after the accident? Grant that lightning delivered the moment of meeting; what, then, kept those two people together for years; was that lightning too? Lightning rarely strikes the same place twice; yet that home is set up anew every evening. Someone, then, has been working in the untold half of the story. My objection is not to the story but to the story’s becoming a verdict: since love is an accident, the verdict runs, asking, understanding, preparing are futile. They are not. One of the most decisive choices of your life; whom you will live with; stands entrusted to an archer’s whim, and for centuries this trust has been called romance. Do not pass without asking: is this really romance, or is it habit? And when the arrow misses, who gets the bill; the archer, or you?