Marry Your Girlfriend

My review of Kierkegaard's "Either/Or"

The Return of the Prodigal Son by Guercino

Brother!

I have received your letter safe and sound. And what a letter! The heights, the lows, the sorrow – the despair. I have received your letter, and I understand you. I see you, for you are me, and we are the same. How you must recoil at this – I imagine it now – you sigh, lean back a little, you feel that I am trying, but know in your heart that no one can truly understand you. For you are different from all the rest. And yet, you feel shame and embarrassment to even think such a thing, to be so prideful as to set yourself apart. But I call you my brother for a reason: we are the same. I understand you.

In order to prove my sincerity, I shall take this letter as an opportunity to survey your character as one surveys the land. I shall prove my familiarity. I shall plot every point, every darkening ravine and windswept height, for a topographical map would do you and I a great good.

I can enumerate your good qualities for I know them all by heart. You are sensitive and kind to a fault; you are pleasant, you enjoy the company of others; you are not haughty and welcome all kinds of company. You want for other people to laugh; you want for them to enjoy themselves; you want above all that others are comfortable. You are intelligent, you read and write, you take the time to think and do not act brashly in life. These are admirable things of which you should be proud. But still you despair. Despite your intelligence, your sociability, something is wrong.

Though you are quite sociable, there is something amiss in every interaction. You can’t place it; each time, something feels off, something not quite right, a word unsaid, a phrase that did not turn out as it should have. Your sociability might stem entirely from a need to go back, to do it correctly, to try again. There is a lock somewhere between you and other people, an invisible lock. Continuously you fumble the key. The lock is stiff – it will not turn, the door won’t open. Life seems to pass by before you and around you, like a rock in a stream, and as much as you try to follow it you cannot seem to become caught up. And with each interaction you feel such immense pain that you feel like you must run away right there, never return. And still, people like you, people talk with you, and you have an enjoyable time – but they don’t understand you. For a piece is missing. They don’t see you, not as I do. For we are the same.

Thusly you believe yourself different. Not just different, but in your heart of hearts you fearfully believe yourself to be wrongly turned out, to be matter wrongly configured. Your difference is not justified, you have not the pride nor the power to stand apart, and so instead it acts as a thorn, a constant reminder, a continuous letdown. Since your difference cannot be justified you are mired in constant anxiety. The possibilities of the world float vaguely before you, you look at one, then the other, you cannot choose. For a week, a month you take to some activity with nervous energy; you commit yourself, drive yourself into the ground with some newfound hobby, something, anything by which to prop up your existence. The energy dissipates; you give it up. But now, an even greater embarrassment – for you could not help yourself – you told others about your new hobby, perhaps even spoke at length about it. You felt shame then, you felt the falseness of your position – this new thing isn’t “you”, you are only playing, only acting. But now when your friends ask, when your mother happily questions you over dinner, you must look into your plate, mumble something quietly – “I haven’t really been doing much lately” – and at night you lie awake, unable to rest, anxiety gnawing at your gut; you have been found out.

Sometimes you are suddenly struck by a moment, a feeling, a mood, an aesthetic; you feel, for a brief second, like things are changing. But always the same result – the mood disappears, the feeling dissipates, and you are left completely alone. You hate genuine activity and yet throw yourself into it in an attempt to feel, to touch the face of life. You can’t reach; nothing makes an impression. You are always ahead of or behind yourself, never truly there. You are always thinking and imagining other things, other places, other deeds. You relate to no one and nowhere. Nothing for you has reality.

Worst of all, you understand all of this. As I said, you are intelligent - you know your actions to be vanity, you feel the falseness of your position. You know something is terribly wrong and yet you cannot change it. You strike out, try to find something to hold on to; everything slips away. You sometimes act cruelly, act with irony, say things that others could never understand so that you might laugh to yourself. But even this is another desperate attempt – you hope above all that suddenly, your false words will awaken something in them, that they will finally see, that they will understand you. You want someone to acknowledge your pain, you are ashamed to need such acknowledgement; you lash out with irony, hope others will somehow say “he only acts this way because he is hurt” – and then finally you could rest in having been understood.

As social defense you say things that are meant simultaneously to repel and attract. You take up obnoxious positions, you act in foolish ways. You leave out just enough to mark a distance between yourself and another, you refuse to explain a single point, a single piece; you give intentionally the impression that something else is there. This draws people in. You give impression that there is some depth hidden inside you that others can never find out – you give the impression intentionally that you are different, unique. Coward that you are you hope that others will bridge this gulf and soothe your heart. And then, when you are rejected, when they do not come closer but stay at the limits you yourself have set, you are made all the more bitter. Your defense fails. You are left even more exposed to your own shame. You fall to despair, for no one wants you enough to cross that gap – but of course no one wants you – you refuse to give yourself up.

So you fall to despair. All your activities are mere distraction, for like a man employed in a superfluous position if you are not always frantically moving you immediately feel your own uselessness. The fundamental error of your way of life is that you refuse to see yourself plainly. You refuse to look at yourself. You allow yourself to be consumed by a mood, an idea, a feeling so as to avoid looking directly at yourself. And this is what is contemptible in you, and in me. For we are the same. We feel, secretly, that we amount to nothing. We cannot look at ourselves without – shame.

Am I incorrect in my map? Is this not all familiar? But now, the path becomes more treacherous–

You like to believe that your despair stems from the fact that you do not know how to escape your shame. You cannot find a way of living where you can look upon yourself without feeling ashamed. You feel as though you barely live at all. You think you despair because you cannot change, but it is quite the opposite: your despair is that you know exactly how to overcome your shame but cannot bring yourself to do it. The task has become visible. You have come to the very end of the aesthetic, for you are an intelligent man and could not live within the aesthetic forever. The next step is just beyond your vision, and you are happy to keep it there. Whenever it begins to intrude into your conscience you expend a great deal of nervous energy creating all manner of distractions so that you must not look upon it directly. A feeling, a mood, an aesthetic – anything will do.

Despair is only seized upon by those who see the task. You have come to the great chasm, and rather than leap, from fear you instead fly backwards into the aesthetic, but it is too late, it cannot sustain you, you know its falseness. But you must choose to take the leap yourself. I cannot force you; I cannot convince you; it cannot come from necessity. You must choose yourself, choose yourself absolutely, choose yourself in all your concretion, choose yourself in complete and utter freedom, and from there everything will follow. But you – like me – have not the strength required. So then humbly I offer you another route, perhaps a means of escape:

Marry your girlfriend!

Often you complain to me of women. Though not the subject of your most recent letter, but still in passing, a woeful cry: “I’m not going to make it.” How often have I heard these words pass your lips? And yet you are no leper; I see you, here and there, taking a beautiful young girl to the dance, speaking to her at a party. You’ve clearly the charm, the wit. But in every case your relationships progress in precisely the same way, and though she may not notice until it is far too late, I do, for we are the same, and I understand you.

Imagine you have before you a beautiful girl, a kind girl, filled with wit and spirit and gaiety: imagine her living freely in the world and all the beauty that comes with that. As you might say, her soul is integrated, her teleology within her; she wants for nothing. You want her, for who does not want such a girl? And let us imagine that by fortunes provenance you can have her: you meet her, acquaint yourself, becomes friends, become lovers, and in a matter of days and hours all the world becomes justified. You are in love. Nothing is more beautiful.

You are in love. The whole world stands still. Nothing is needed anymore; you are absorbed, taken up with this girl who has become the whole world. Your meaning has been acquired, that for which you are willing to live and die. But like all things after some time love becomes repetitive, habitual. After some months, love becomes boring. Each day is the same, each night no different. Passion strikes intermittently, never as powerful as those first few wondrous nights. Still, you enjoy yourself. Life is warm and dull. Each night when you return from your work you find comfortable arms in which to rest. Sometimes you contemplate breaking up with her; not for any fault she has made, but merely out of boredom. Sometimes you pass a girl on the street who ignites your passion, and the temptation becomes nearly irresistible. But you never do it. Why ruin a good thing? And so, life goes on.

You tell me, your relationship is casual, you are merely dating, that nothing serious appears to you. It’s a bit of fun. It would be embarrassing to take your relationship too seriously. She is quite content with this arrangement, too, and isn’t it nice to have someone else with whom to share parts of your life, even if only for a short while? Perhaps it’s even romantic; it may not last forever, but that it happened is what counts. All flowers regardless of their beauty must someday wilt.

All of your relationships follow the same path. In each you play an intricate game of chicken. Who can remain the shallowest but still immersed, who can remain the most aloof, who needs the other least? You and she are together by perfect accident, by mere proximity, by happenstance, and you may fall out of orbit as fast as you entered it. Attachment is temporary and you like it that way. By this method you avoid the danger of loss. You avoid the danger of heartbreak. And have we moderns not improved the relationship by this method? All the excellence of love without the danger of despair? All the beauty of marriage without the commitment?

Of course, you are far smarter than this. I would not insult you by arguing these points as though you would have made them. For you, too, understand there are tradeoffs to every method. The advantage of your method is this: by leaving out commitment you are always left with a way out. You always have a line of flight, a means of escape. You skim lightly across the surface of your relationship, never having to go deeper, and in this way you are safe. But there is a tradeoff. If you are careful and avert your eyes you can remain blissful, but on occasion an image of reality slips through and you are filled with despair. You know your relationship to be completely abstract. It is empty, mere pretending, relationship for relationships sake. Beneath the surface, if you dare to look, is nothing. The relationship has no internal history; it can be wholly accounted for by summing the hours spent making love and the hours spent at the theater. Nothing has been developed. And each night, though you sleep in her arms and bury your face in her neck, you are still horribly alone.

You know this. You lament to me, what should I do about this girl? She is by no means ideal. She is not the material for a serious relationship, merely for something casual. But is it not true that in such a relation a horrible anxiety is bred? Is it not true that at every minute you are thinking, perhaps there is another, a more suitable girl; perhaps I am wasting my time? Perhaps there is a girl with whom I will be more fulfilled, more alive, more in love. This question dogs you, holds you back from giving yourself to her truly. You cannot fully invest in her and yet you cannot escape either, for what you have is good, and there’s no sense in ruining a good thing. Your visits with her take on the strange quality that every minute is an anxious eternity, and yet, when the visit ends, you feel guilty at having left so soon.

Leaving her is a waste of your past, staying with her is a waste of your future. In both cases regret. But if you are not lying when you say you love her, consider her situation for just a moment. Think of her truly, and see that you are killing her as fast, perhaps faster, than you are killing yourself. You treat her always as though she is merely another step on your life’s way, a temporary stop, that you can have her as long as you want her. Your love for her exists on a conditional. It exists on the expectation that she remains interesting. You stay with her so long as it remains amusing to you, so long as you are not bored. Do you think she does not know this? She knows it exactly. She knows that her time with you depends on how interesting she is, knows her most important relationship has no depth. Every date, every dinner, every conversation tells her that she is not truly a part of your life but prone to abandonment as any of your other aesthetic attachments. Her life is marked by constant anxiety that you might leave her if she is not interesting enough; but also despair that no matter how interesting she might be, her love means nothing. You have dragged her headlong into your own despair. And though you look at one another your eyes never meet for fear that if they do, the whole of your world will collapse.

What does one do about such a girl? What does one do about such a relationship? My answer is steadfast.

Marry your girlfriend!

I hear your protest and I understand it. You are too young, it is too early, too fast. And with this, you may be surprised, I agree. For what have you to give her yet? And what has she for you? Between you there is no true history. I am not so foolish as to tell you to drop on one knee the moment you finish with this letter. I ask of you something much simpler – I ask only that you repent.

I ask that you repent your sins against her. Repent that you could take someone you proclaim to love and treat them with such callousness. Repent of your cowardice before her and God. Look, look and see what your relationship is – perfectly abstract, a nothing, an empty variable – look at it and despair. Despair for the time wasted. Despair for the opportunity lost. Look upon the life you have built and see it for what it is. She has risked everything for you, by loving you. She has given herself up to you and you owe her at least the courtesy of being honest. So be honest with her, be honest with yourself, and despair.

Here is the critical point. The excellence of despair is that it is only chosen by one who has seen clearly, and it engenders a further choice: an either/or. Having seen your relationship for what it is, having looked with transparency and honesty, you must now make a choice in your absolute freedom. If you wish to escape your despair and your shame, you must now choose absolutely. You are not choosing this or that, the girl or not the girl – for either choice would be merely a return to the aesthetic – the point you have been driven to is the choice of responsibility. You are responsible for this girl. Leave her or stay, you are responsible. Love her or not, you are responsible. You were always already responsible for her, but now, in choosing this responsibility, the responsibility is made concrete. You must choose her; you must choose her absolutely. In choosing her you must choose her entirely, choose every part, every perfection and likewise every fault. Nothing can be left behind, nothing forgotten, nothing cast aside – every part is necessary. And, having chosen responsibility, having chosen her absolutely, your love may now, finally, begin.

The task now before you is possession. What you have done in your love life until now has been only to conquer. You see, love, speak, seduce – and then, when first loves passion has disappeared, you abandon, or else enter into a meaningless relationship which by design can go nowhere. I do not quote philosophers as a rule, for quoting a foreign name alienates the reader, but here nothing else will do, for Kierkegaard is the expert in this case:

“If I were to imagine a conqueror who had subdued kingdoms and countries, then he would indeed also possess the provinces he had subdued; he would then have large possessions; and yet one would describe such a prince as a conqueror, not a possessor. Only when he ruled those lands wisely in their own best interests, only then would he possess them… To conquer, one needs pride; to possess, humility. To conquer, one needs to be violent; to possess, to have patience. To conquer, greed; to possess, contentment; conquering calls for eating and drinking, possessing for praying and fasting.”

Imagine a garden that has come into full bloom. Each man who passes views its beauty with awe. But to the gardener who has tended the garden this beauty has an entirely different and higher meaning. The blooming is external, and therefore belongs to the aesthetic – but the development of the garden, known to the gardener alone, is internal, and he knows every hardship, every inch of the terrain, every plant leaf for leaf. He has seen the plants unfurl from the ground, he has stood by them in the cold and the stark sunlight of the early morning and given them the water they require. He watched each grow through time, and thus this bloom, beautiful to the passerby, acquires infinite depth and meaning to him and him alone, for with it he shares an internal history. It is his garden. The beauty of each flower is referred to this history of growth, so the beauty of the entire garden stands not alone in the immediate but in reference to its entire history. The garden for him takes on the historical.

Love is not the blooming of the garden but the daily tending of the plants, the watering of the soil, the pulling of weeds, in short, all that must happen each day for months and months to arrive at the bloom. The garden is the gardener’s task, the gardener is responsible for the garden, and the development of the garden can only occur in time. He awakens each morning and sets directly to work. Time for him becomes beautiful, he has lived in time, he has fought with time and won by constant effort. And for the passerby who awaits the beautiful bloom, they long only to hasten to the moment, to kill time – but for the gardener time is no longer an enemy but a friend, and each moment within the garden is as infinitely valuable as the peak of bloom. In each moment what is originally there increases, the garden is further developed – and even as winter approaches, when the gardener is preparing for the cold, even this moment is of infinite meaning for it too is in reference to the continuously developing history of the whole.

You see now, to conquer, to seduce a girl, this means nothing. For it is only after the conquering that the story begins. You must tend to your love like the garden, you must develop it, it must acquire an internal history. You must commit. You must decide to love this girl, this particular girl in all her flaws, you must choose her absolutely. Love is not an adjective to describe a condition of the soul but rather a verb, a matter of will, a matter of effort and work. In this way you may finally exit the accidental and enter into the universal. You too may be as every man, for it is the universal to love and to be married, and by this path may enter into the joy and beauty of all humanity. In choosing to despair, then choosing to love, to love absolutely, everything becomes possible. Though the world may be lost, though the enemy may have destroyed all that is good and holy in the world, the ethical man has his task before him. For he who chooses and chooses absolutely, it is never over, it cannot ever be over, the world might crumble and still he at once sees his task and at once sets to work. For he has made himself responsible in his choice – his future, the world itself, are up to him – and thus the whole of the world, all of life, is his.

You may see plainly that what I speak of applies not only to relationships but further, that choosing absolutely applies not only to love but to the self as well. As in choosing to love, he who chooses himself absolutely also chooses responsibility. But this responsibility is not for another – this responsibility is for the self. You become responsible for yourself – you demand of yourself that you become who you are. The man who chooses himself absolutely chooses himself in his entirety, every part, everything good and everything bad. He has himself as his task and his most beautiful goal. But this letter is far too long already. All this is discussed in far greater depth by Kierkegaard in his “Either/Or”; if any of what I have said today strikes you as true, I urge you to pick up a copy.

I hope I have helped you in some way. If you will indulge me, once again I will break my own rules and quote a foreign author. I leave you with something from the letters of Anton Chekhov, written to his brother Nikolai when Nikolai was lost in despair. I call you my brother as well, for we are the same, and I feel the same urge to help my brother as Chekhov did so long ago. I hope I have succeeded.

“What is needed is constant work, day and night, constant reading, study, will.... Every hour is precious for it.... Come to us, smash the vodka bottle, lie down and read.... Turgenev, if you like, whom you have not read.

You must drop your vanity, you are not a child ... you will soon be thirty. It is time!

I expect you.... We all expect you.”