Love trumps aesthetics: of books, music, desire, and dealbreakers (Reprint)

On hiatus until April 5. Reprinting oldies, this one from April 2008.

Jill and Amanda both had posts up on Monday about the “Pushkin Problem”: the issue of love, disparate literary taste, and “deal-breakers”. Their posts were inspired by this Sunday Times piece: It’s Not You, It’s Your Books. It begins:

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast.

As of this morning, there are 114 comments below Jill’s excellent reflection, and twice that many below Amanda’s. And all of this has me thinking about deal-breakers, both past and present, when it came to dating or marriage.

I didn’t have my first real girlfriend until I was 17 and a senior in high school. Before that, I spent a great deal of time talking with my friends — and fantasizing to myself — about what the “ideal girl” for me would be like. I’m not talking about physical attributes, though that sort of fantasizing was not absent from my reveries. I’m talking about taste. Like so many teenagers, I cared a great deal about books and music. It was the early-to-mid-1980s, after all, and I was in perhaps the only stage of my life where music (this meant records and tapes) was hugely important. I went back and forth between listening to Sixties folk-rock and early ’80s pop-punk; Joan Baez and The Clash were indispensable components of my adolescent soundtrack. And sometime in 1983, before I had even been properly kissed, I declared, with puerile self-righteousness, that “I would never date a girl who likes Duran Duran.” As best I can remember, this was the first of many “statements of exclusion.”

My first girlfriend didn’t like Duran Duran. But she did like heavy metal, which was enormously problematic. I was listening to obscure bands like Jodie Foster’s Army; she was entranced by the Scorpions. Of course, my hormones and my heart trumped my aesthetics, as they generally do, and I started listening to Dokken and Ratt and Iron Maiden. At least, I comforted myself, she didn’t like Culture Club. And darn it all, nearly a quarter century later, I don’t listen to Jodie Foster’s Army anymore. But I still like the Scorpions.

In college, where we were expected to have at least an outer veneer of seriousness, the “deal-breakers” did indeed become literary. Like many late adolescents, I discovered Ayn Rand. Unlike many adolescents, I found her infuriating from the start, so infuriating that I issued a new edict: no dating women who found The Fountainhead inspirational. I’m happy to say that throughout a colorful sexual and marital history, to my knowledge I have never been involved in anything approaching a serious relationship with a Rand devotee. I have kept so few of the promises I made to myself when I was young, but that one I have honored assiduously.

Though I find him almost unreadable now, I fell in love with Italo Calvino when I was at Berkeley. Starting with his magical Cosmicomics, which probably had a bigger impact on me than anything else I read as a spotty undergraduate, I devoured his work. I remember that at the start of my sophomore year, while I was living in a student co-op at Cal, I started one of those typically undefined “friends-with-benefits” relationships with a housemate. We talked a lot, and one day she mentioned she was reading Cosmicomics in her Comp Lit class, and “didn’t get it.” I was horrified, and instead of letting it be, insisted on waxing eloquent to her about Calvino’s genius. The one effect the discussion had was to annoy her immensely, and any chance that our relationship would progress towards something more serious was abrogated at that moment.

I’ve been married four times: to Republicans and Democrats, Catholics and Buddhists, vegans and carnivores. I’ve lived with women who loved to exercise as much as I did, and with others for whom sweat anywhere outside the bedroom was anathema. I’ve dated, lived with, and married women who loved to watch television — and with one who wanted us to have no TV at all. I learned, especially as my teens turned into my twenties and my twenties into my thirties, that all the things I had thought were deal-breakers weren’t, and those that I thought weren’t, were.

I discovered that for me, shared politics were not particularly important, at least not on most issues. Cancelling out my beloved’s vote every election day doesn’t trouble me, and indeed, the friendly arguing about presidents and policies adds a certain spice. (This is, of course, symptomatic of privilege. If I lived a life closer to the margins, perhaps I would be less willing to share a life with someone whose politics were diametrically opposed to my own.)

I discovered too that shared musical taste was not essential. My wife and I both love Emmylou Harris, but when she’s in control of what comes on in the car, she’s fond of the likes of Luther Vandross, Keith Sweat, and LeVert, all of whom make me want to pull my hair out.

But I still have my deal-breakers, byond the obvious things like honesty: I don’t think I could be married to someone who wasn’t a feminist. I couldn’t spend my days arguing against traditional gender roles in public and then live a private life with a woman who embraced a “separate spheres” ideology. While specific theology isn’t important, I don’t think I could be married to someone who didn’t believe in God and a life to come. My wife and I both lost our fathers within the past two years; we each reassured each other that there would be, someday, a happy reunion with these dear men on the far side of the Jordan. I can’t imagine having gone through those losses whilst being with someone who thought that comforting certainty was a childish fantasy.

I couldn’t be married to someone who didn’t love animals; having non-human living creatures in my care is a key component of my happiness. My views on animals have evolved to the point where I live a vegan lifestyle, as does my wife; should I ever be single again (God forbid), I would have a very hard time seeing steak in the family refrigerator.

But perhaps above all, even more important to me than faith, feminism, and compassion for animals, is something else: desire. I’m not talking about libido alone, though that is surely part of it. For me, the absolute sine qua non of committed relationship, the indispensable quality that my partner must have, is a driving ambition to change the world. Someone who says “I just want a little house with a little yard and a little comfort” — gosh, that terrifies me! The great fear of my life, as I head into what I like to think of as an energetic and exuberant and exhausting middle-age, is that I will not achieve what I was called into this world to achieve. There is so much to do — books to write, lives to touch, people to help, places to see, experiences to be had. That Gemini ENFP-ness craves novelty, not in the form of new lovers but in new challenges. I am here to love my wife and push her hard; she is here to love me hard and push me harder. I could not, would not, be with someone who didn’t believe that that process of mutual challenging was the very essence of what it means to love.

That means that if my wife reads Jodi Picoult and listens to Mos Def, I can live with what I consider to be serious aesthetic failings. In the end, we have love — and more than love, we have a common sense that we are called to something extraordinary, something we can do better together than apart. It’s hard work, but she and I both love to work hard. Were it not so, our deal would indeed be broken.