Relationships are the greatest creative work of our lives. Like all creative endeavors, they are a process that requires both systematic intent and dedication. If we show ourselves to that process boldly and consistently, it will surprise us, disturb our comfort, take us to places we never thought we could go if we followed the vector of our preconceived plans.
The most rewarding relationships come in the form of creative breakthroughs that happen – not as a well-thought-out conclusion but as a revelation, breaking the momentum of our thoughts about what is possible and what is right, rising like a mountain from the fault line that we expect to change the nature of our lives.
Just as the most compelling creative work tends to blur the boundaries between subjects, between materials, between genres, the most expressive relationships tend to blur the boundaries between common categories of connection, with all the confusion and frustration that entails – nowhere more confusing than when a friend becomes a lover.
HG Wells (September 21, 1866–August 13, 1946) explores the value and reward of this blessing of dissolution in his 1911 novel. The new Machiavelli (public domain) – a story written in detail, for which Wells paid a high price, but which he must have felt could provide a compass amid the confusion of the complex but common human experience. (All writers write about their personal experiences, no matter how many levels of citation they may be reduced to. Great writers make a personal doorknob to the universe so that others can enter the secret chambers of their own experience, those places in our lives we are too afraid or confused or alienated from ourselves to visit, those places where we finally find out who we are and what we want.)
In the course of his well-planned life, the main character meets a young Oxford student named Isabel. The two are quickly magnetized into an extraordinary intellectual connection. But as they nurture each other's minds in heated, rising conversations, beneath their awareness, the body silently begs to participate:
At that time, I think we both suspected the possibility of lust lying like a coiled snake on the road in front of us. It seemed to us that we had the strangest, happiest friendship in the world… Such friendships are rare today – among simple, free-minded people. For the most part, there is no kind of harm, as people say, to them. The two people involved should never think of a burning love that comes too close to friendship, or if they do, then dismiss the thought. I think we kept the thought in exile forever like any other person. If it comes at odd times in our heads we pretend it wasn't there.
One day, in one of those small, unexpected moments that change everything, something changes during one of their drunken conversations:
I answered Isabel's voice, and saw her raise her face, her cheeks, nose and forehead all blotted out from the sunlight and the shadows of the trees behind me. And something – an endless sensitivity, pierced me. It was a deep physical sensation, like nothing I had ever felt before. It had a teardrop quality to it. For the first time in my narrow and focused life another person entered my body and really captured my heart… Our eyes met with confusion for a rare moment… From that moment on I realized that I loved Isabel very much. However, it is interesting that it didn't even occur to me for a year or so that this became a love affair between us.
Suddenly, the “long and frank intimacy” between the two friends turns into a “strange intimacy of friendship and compassion” that combines passion as naturally as poetry and philosophy:
The change came so completely without warning or purpose that I find it impossible now to tell the order of its stages. The disturbed stone started an avalanche I can't track. Maybe it was just because the boundaries between us and this aspect of life that was hidden by the mask were crumbling and invisible… It was as if we had stripped away something that was blocking our view of each other, like people who don't want to talk easily in a masked ball.
This great realization is why Tom Stoppard might describe love as “a mask slipped off the face,” but there's a reason we walk the world covered – nothing is more vulnerable than the naked face of the soul. Emerson knew this: “There is no fear like being known,” he wrote when he fell in love with his friend Margaret Fuller and resisted it.
So, as Wells' characters both sense the power between them, they resist it, using the combined power of their terrifying minds to prevent it from involving the body:
A quick leap of his mind roused a flash of joy in me like a response to a call of induction; his way of thinking was like watching the sunlight from the small waves on the side of a boat, it was very bright, moving, faithful in various ways and easy in its law. In our minds we both had a firm belief that making love is full of joy, beauty, tenderness, and exciting possibilities, and we had to discuss why we shouldn't be lovers of the ultimate level.
That way we feel safer with negative certainty than with uncertainty, preventing the possibility of losing what we desire by walking away from it on our own will or by convincing ourselves that we don't want it in the first place, they think of their reservation list:
There is a phase in all love stories, a kind of heroic hysteria, where death and destruction are the only positive additions. It gives the business gravitas, dignity. Shy people may hesitate and shrink back in a vague natural fear of the magnitude of the opposition that challenges them, but neither Isabel nor I are shy people.
Waking up from their Cartesian sleep, they discovered that what did not seem possible, that what did not belong to their culture or their previous knowledge, could not really exist: a love that does not take away all life but adds to it endlessly, that does not predict a relationship of devotion between the relationship and their individual work, a love that is completely integrated when the passions of the mind, the passions of the growing body are nurtured.
It wasn't like we could throw everything aside for our love, and have what we wanted. A love like the one we bear for one another is not everything, or especially, the thing itself – it is mostly the value placed on things. Our love was united with all our other interests; to go out into the world and live alone seemed to us to kill the best parts of each other; we loved seeing each other in good shape and form, we got to know each other better as jobs.
As they become lovers, they enter a magical world where all new lovers enter – an island away from the continent of their familiar lives:
For a short time we were like two people in a magic cell, cut off from the world by magic and filled with its light, then we began to see that we were not cut off at all, that the world was around us and oppressed us, limited us, threatened us, and began to be with us again.
All unconventional love needs constant vigilance and protection from the pressures of the ordinary, trusting that its truth is deeper and bigger and stronger than the so-called real world. In the end, the main character finds that despite the deep restructuring of life that his relationship with Isabel demands from both of them, it is worth the effort – because it is all worth it. Wells writes:
Nothing defines the authenticity of love. The circumstances of things are nothing, the real events are nothing, unless somehow light comes upon them and a miracle… No one can say love—we can say the ugly truths of love and its consequences.
With all relationships that redirect life, that restore the place of consent and possibility for both people, the question remains the same: What is the higher value – the value of results or the value of life without such love? And the answer is always reached in the same way: the courage to live.
