Abby and I fight from time to time; perhaps it’s often, perhaps not. How could we know? And why should we care? A couple introspects almost as poorly as an individual, absorbs and rejects ambient social standards of normalcy, ponders its viability as it ponders whether viability is a question of chance congruence —easy emotions expanding into one another’s moods and memories— or of conscious exertion, effort. Can we control our mutuality, the shape of our life together, the sort of couple we are? Are we perfectible and perfecting, or is our will as useless as it was when we were becoming our individual selves?

In a fight, you’re not yourself; you struggle to control yourself; but what are you and what controls you? A fight is possession, infection: something acts through you both, will not let you rest even when you want nothing else, draws you out again and again. A fight is about futurity: one becomes a vicious pedant, quibbles with a vengeance, adds punch to points with insults and dredged grievances, commits to total war because one believes that the correct resolution of some dialectical dispute will color the years to come. It is a matter of relationship policy. It is political, ends justifying means; it is absurd: there are no ends. Love is means.

Among the exhausting profusion of concerns in a fight are analytical, comparative anxieties. Is this typical, we wonder? Are we doing damage to one another? What is the extent of the failure here? Our fights support imaginary, dispositive commentary from the culture around us. Is our relationship: an idyll with rare, decent, minor interruptions? A healthy procedural fluidity with an appropriate concentration of quarrels? Clotted with conflict like a heart with thousands of meals’ worth of fat, our love the watery blood straining through the aggregating tissues? Or is it fatally combustible, conforming to patterns discussed with weary, head-shaking empathy by pop-psychologists on television?

We are ashamed to fight. Our love is what gives our lives meaning and an ugly, ordinary fight threatens to degrade that meaning, expose our love as hope, connect our private interactions to vulgar, public phenomena. A fight invites the presence of strangers, brings experts and cameramen and neighbors and relatives and hated classmates from long ago; they’re pressed against the windows, watching, soberly noting the various ways in which your fight just confirms all that they’ve always said. 

There must be defined types of relationships; technicians must publish classification systems for couples in different cultures, among different psychodemographics, with defined spectra and ranges for everything: % of ablutions conducted in anxious privacy; frequency of passive-aggressions, by partner; success rate of sexual propositioning divided by failure rate of last-ditch efforts at simulating forgiveness, or what scholarly pundits call –amongst themselves but also to reporters— “fucks per fight.” The instantiation of this academic knowledge in the consumer world will bring digital clarity: we’ll argue three times too many and a push notification will alert me that we operate outside the parameters of Apple’s relationship guidelines (developed in concert with NIMH, Oprah, and the editors of Self magazine; read your EULA for more detail). Integrated Facebook will frictionlessly announce: “Mills and Abby are no longer in a relationship.”

What sort of couple are Abby and I? The development of the identity of a relationship is the second sort of individuation we experience in our lives, and it is like the first: a process less than halfway controllable, a struggle with the unseen in ourselves and the unknowable in others, in the world. A self erupts; we try to manage its flows. One becomes oneself independent of one’s will, partly against it; one wakes one day —which day?— and has a personality, an emergence from interdependent mechanisms of defense and partialization, a tradition of judgments one maintains, then abandons, and eventually marvels to recall. One’s identity: attributes one inherited without assent, talents one doesn’t respect, weaknesses one considers immoral, features one doesn’t recognize, and a smattering of one’s own little efforts at self-creation. If the self is sharp peaks, hollowed domes, and trees blown sideways across a volcanic mountain, a relationship is an archipelago emerging and sinking in salty seawater, lava making the clear, cool ocean into screaming steam.

Why do we fight? I am volatile, casually insane, forever entranced by the notion that some idea or explanation will end the fight and eliminate our suffering if it is properly phrased, articulated, understood. Abby is also volatile, but she’s more grounded and decent. We fight for the reasons that everyone fights: no reasons, all reasons. We can overcome anything or be overcome by anything. At times it feels to me as though we’ve been weakened by something, as though our self-protective retreat into soft, controllable spaces has thinned our skin to molecules. We absolutely need whatever specialists presently say we need in sleep, food, and lifestyle structure; one lapsed bedtime, an errand awry, a vitamin deficiency, too few recuperative trips into cinematic natural spaces and we malfunction like rusted robots.

I worry, as I describe this delicacy, that it indicts us as people and discredits us as a couple. There is natural vanity in this —I want to tell you about how we fight rarely, how much we love each other, how happy we are, even as I despise myself for this needy tic— but there is also the great social terror: I worry that our relationship falls into the wrong category, has been described in the literature, is a malfunction in the eyes of researchers and the world. Are we an aberration? Are we white-trash? Are we defective?

I worry about these things, but I never worry about our love. How odd.

As typical humans, we share many moral disgraces; we are not saints, but those who have been -that is, those whom we consider qualitatively superior to us in moral reasoning and instantiated moral heroism- do not share one of our more universal, more pathetic failures as creatures of reason: our imbecilic concern for physical beauty.

A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows that it is not.

Note that Simone Weil doesn’t say that an ugly woman believes that it is not; she knows, and she is right: we are not our appearances, not at all. We are all aware that whatever physical beauty is, it’s not reflective of internal beauty, persistent beauty, the beauty we putatively seek when we long for another.

(In this sense, the ugly have an advantage: they don’t believe the self is bounded by beauty, while the beautiful often do; the same principle applies to all defects, and is the great leveling countermeasure to fundamental human inequalities).

Physical beauty as we understand it is

• defined nearly entirely by corporations, advertising, the lowest sorts of art, pornography, commerce, and the occasional vestigial evolutionary priority;
• ludicrously ephemeral, certain to decay with age in nearly every case, incompatible with all sorts of natural biological phenomena and inevitably to vanish as we enter senescence;
• outrageously hostile to the typical shapes, sizes, features, and natural configuration of almost every body in the world.

So: what we call physical beauty is arbitrarily defined for us, inherited by us from cultural sources who are neither aesthetically nor morally concerned with beauty as such but mainly with sales, and it tends to be fundamentally irrational in its demands, effects, and uses. 

Even beyond the obvious effects of this stupidity -the body dysmorphia, the self-loathing, the unhealthy beautifying practices, nightmares of high school- is the simple fact that nearly all of us cannot love someone as a partner unless they conform to these standards we didn’t devise and do not respect.

We all value physical beauty; we all long for it, seek it, exclude would-be lovers who lack it -no matter their tenderness, goodness, kindness, humor, generosity!- attempt to exhibit it at great cost. This insane stupidity is shameful; it is a moral lapse; it leads us idiotically astray as we chase what vanishes, what is unimportant, and turn from what ought to be the proper concern of love.

To return to Weil’s lovely formulation, we might say: not only is the beautiful woman fooled into thinking her appearance is herself, but so are we. Even though we know from history that physical beauty is nothing innate, is as faddish as fashions, we concern ourselves with it precisely as some do with money or social pedigree. And let us be honest: to allot love based in any way on attractiveness is not in any way different from allotting it based on wealth, standing, or fame. We are all gold-diggers.

But if it is not physical beauty we should love -because the book is not its cover, because it is not predictive of anything that matters in a relationship, because it will degrade and, if it was important to our love, so will the love itself- what should we love?

We tend to contrast the superficiality and arbitrarity of appearance with the qualities of the self, as we understand them: moral decency, kindness, humor, dynamism, etc. But, as Tragos noted, it is not difficult to extend the argument against valuing beauty to those qualities as well: to such an extent, all are the happenstance of genetics and environment, even if some are presumably less necessarily transient than beauty. For this, Weil has an answer which is harder to immediately understand:

What is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him… Our personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin.

What do we love when we love another? What should we love, or is “should” an absurd word to use in this context? Is it as ludicrous to cherish intelligence as beauty? If we value what seems to matter most for a relationship’s longevity, are we merely chasing a different, comparably reductive sort of goal as the one pursued by the gold-digger or the beauty-seeker?

What in a human is both distinct and worth loving in itself?

Waiting at a long light, his eyes defocused and his mind followed. How strange, he thought idly -as though lifting the idea from a table to examine it- that one’s eyes led one’s mind. Was it a curious isomorphism, an atavistic relapse into perceptual cognition, a visceral way of experiencing focus?

He thought of breathing and sex and every other corporeal force that, he felt, led his mind around as though it were a proud little dog on a leash. He had, it was clear, never been in command of himself.

His life seemed to him to have been a progressive encirclement. He -his true and indivisible self, his natural, haphazard, un-redacted assortment of impulses and memories and fantasies and fears- occupied a central zone on a topographical map whose features, though dramatically varied, were described by a uniform system of green, shaded hills and enumerated heights.

On this map, he imagined his true self surrounded by the concentric lines of various opposing, invasive forces: his career, his family, the politics of his time, prevailing tastes in film, the temporary demands of any given conversation. The map was fluid: his fondness for drinking might be completely overrun by the sudden emergence of an army -led no doubt by his wife- enforcing temperance at the end of a bayonet. Or his persistent longing for the heavyset Honduran who worked for his doctor would be at one moment perfectly reasonable to discuss with a friend, but could suddenly become -when the birth of his child pushed in decisively on his position- a dark secret he could share with none.

His sense was that he had behaved throughout his life as though his besieged, soon-to-be-subsumed self was shortly to be able to breakout and march on to some triumphant, dominant expression, or at least a pleasing freedom of movement. At seven, he hoped for a real friend, to whom he could unburden himself of his little dreams, the pains inflected by his parents, his curiosity about the hair adults had in places where he had none. Finding such friends, he was surprised at the retreat of that secret self into spaces darker and deeper than he could have imagined. Late into the night, they’d talk of pretty teachers with long legs, thrilling at the camaraderie of mutual confession, and for a moment just before his heavy eyelids would close he would feel fully illuminable. But by dawn, he was alone again: all their talk just stale, discursive prattle, all their camaraderie photophobic, evaporated.

At fourteen, he was humiliated by his erections and desperate for the girl with whom he might finally be free to explore the frenzied, lush, odious world of sex. The solitude of sexuality was, for him, expressed in a state of perpetual shame: he was certain of his clumsiness, stench, flaccidity. But by his third girlfriend, he was already stunned to find his mind wandering, his thoughts turning from her orgasm, from his orgasm, from even the borrowed bedroom in which they awkwardly fumbled, to things distant, trivial, unrelated, and this meandering stream of thought seemed to carry him away from congress completely: there was no connection. There could not be. He was by himself even inside of others.

Married at 27, he was not surprised that despite loving his wife he wanted to be somewhere far away from his marriage to allow the expansion of that dark, constricted part of his mind that thought of sitting in shallow waters, drunk and sunburned, fucking someone who didn’t speak English. He needed something like a confessor, but he wasn’t religious; instead, he thought of disposable vectors for his aggressive sexuality and resentment. A marriage was a fragile and precious thing; he dreamed of behaving recklessly, callously, of not caring about what was fragile and precious. He wanted not to feel as though he were restraining himself; he saw no reason to combat his avarice or lust except that he was, as it were, surrounded.

At 35, he fantasized that a great climatic catastrophe would save him: break apart all the inertial, undirected cultural forces which kept him behaving as he did, which is to say: as he wasn’t. Perhaps if his city flooded, his family were broken apart, his country dissolved, he might at last have some freedom, but then, he thought: men of his sort always found a way to be isolated and alone, always found a stronger force to constrain them. If he would ever be free, he would be free now.

All these things he couldn’t say but felt he must; he must say them or he would never have lived truthfully, as though their utterance were the decisive act, as though speaking them aloud would catalyze some vast change, would square him with the world, as though these were magic thoughts. He could feel them pushing his eyes outward, he thought, or perhaps he’d simply stopped blinking for a moment. He resumed, focused his eyes; the light changed; he drove on. He concluded, since these reveries needed conclusion, that it was simple: he would always be alone, just like everyone else.