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O Tell Me the Truth About Love!

Eric Selinger

There’s a charming poem by W. H. Auden–one of his “Twelve Songs,” from January, 1938–that’s been on my mind throughout the past week. “Some say that love’s a little boy,” it begins, “And some say it’s a bird. / Some say it makes the world go round, / And some say that’s absurd. / And when I asked the man next-door / Who looked as if he knew, / His wife got very cross indeed, / And said it wouldn’t do.” That last bit always strikes me as a joke about the poet’s homosexuality–but whatever it’s meant to wink at, coyly, it also suggests that there’s something just a little odd, a little unnerving, about anyone who goes around saying, “O tell me the truth about love.”

The poem popped into my head when I began a longish email conversation with a literary critic I’ve been trying to lure into studying popular romance. He’s a scholar of what he calls “literary erotic romance,” a genre that seems able to include poetry, fiction, and film (he mentions Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O’Connor, David Lynch) as long as it concerns what he calls “the impossibility of gratifying our desire.” We want too much, and are overwhelmed; we want the wrong things, and they destroy us; we want what we can’t have, and are left hungry; when we get what we want we don’t desire it anymore, or it leaves us behind. This, says he, is “the truth about love,” or at least the truth about eros.

Now, this “truth” has a lot of famous names on its side–not just Oates & Co., but a bevvy of philosophers and poets, from Plato to Shel Silverstein. (Remember that children’s book, The Missing Piece, with the little Pac-Man character who sings about looking for its missing piece until it finds one, at which point it discovers it can’t sing anymore, or enjoy life as fully? Ah, the ’70s.) The older and longer-married I get, though, the less patience I have with this “truth,” which strikes me more and more as a half-truth at best. Hearing it makes me want to burst into song, like Maria in West Side Story:

It isn’t true, not for me,
It’s true for you, not for me.
I hear your words
And in my head
I know they’re smart,
But my heart, Anita,
But my heart
Knows they’re wrong…

Not that West Side Story has an HEA, of course. But it strikes me that the “Anita” voices out there need to hear some counterpoint, and that my students definitely need to hear both sides of the song.

I’m not sure whether I’ll ever convince my colleague that romance fiction also tells a “truth about love”: one that may not have the intellectual pedigree that his does, or the rhetorical grandeur, or the cachet, but that deserves a hearing nonetheless. But I did take some comfort from this little nugget in the news last week.

Evidently, psychologists at Stony Brook University have been comparing brain scans of people who have recently fallen in love with those of couples who’ve been together for decades and say that they’re still passionately in love.

In the first group, says the piece, “regions of the brain associated generally with reward and motivation - the same regions that light up when cocaine is taken - activated when the subjects were shown pictures of their beloved.” (These are, the researcher notes, “not the same as those associated with sexual arousal.” So much for “love ain’t nothin’ but sex misspelled”!) In the second group, who said they still felt the same way? Guess what: “their MRIs showed activity in the same regions of the brain as those who had just fallen in love.”

So far I’ve only looked at the press coverage of this, but it does suggest that for some percentage of couples–the Sunday Times says 10%, the Newsday article I linked to above hints at 35%, neither citing any data–those well-worn “truths” about desire don’t apply. (The scientists have nicknamed those couples “swans,” says the Times, since they mate for life. I’d have gone with “grey foxes,” myself!) In popular romance fiction, the percentage is considerably higher–but that’s no more unrealistic than the considerably lower figure–none at all–in the high art version my colleague prefers.

No grand conclusions here–so let me send you off with a bit more of that Auden poem:

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I’m picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

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