May I Suggest #7: Enter the third dimension
If you have a question for ‘May I Suggest,’ send to: studio@bymariandrew.com
The question:
It was one of those perfect dates: where everything mundane feels magical, and even the most typical things are romantic and you don't remember exactly what you talked about because you were smiling so much and left with so many more things to say. But what if the mundane is no longer magical when it's just a Tuesday in a string of Tuesdays? So much of the romance and the intrigue of 'whatever this relationship is' is romantic and intriguing because it's the potential for 'whatever this relationship becomes.' How does one make the jump from the potential to the actual, without watering it down nor setting unrealistically high expectations?
The suggestion:
Last night I rewatched Before Sunrise, the first in a trilogy that I consider a three-way tie for my favorite movie.
In Before Sunrise, we meet the protagonists we’ll follow through the years, Celine and Jesse. They meet as young twenty-somethings on a train through Europe and spend a whole night talking through lantern-lit alleyways and in smoky bars and on beautiful bridges. The movie is entirely that: watching them chat while the city of Vienna seems to have constructed their own magical backdrop.
Celine and Jesse have an easy chemistry and weave their discussion in and out of the profound and the superficial while playing pinball and listening to records, all before their trains depart in the morning and they’ll be separated for who knows how long.
I’ve watched the movie many times and always find something new in it, but last night I couldn’t even finish it.
The word tedious came to mind. As my friend Henry says, it feels like watching two people talk on a dorm bed for two hours. I admire how much perceptivity it takes to write dialogue like that, but now I find it boring: on par with hearing about someone’s long dream or thoughts they had when they were high.
After an hour, I’d had enough. And, truthfully, I was only watching Before Sunrise to get to the ten-years-later sequel Before Sunset, and, ultimately to my favorite, the last in the trilogy: Before Midnight.
Before Midnight follows up with Jesse and Celine, now together in their forties and parents of three. They’re still great conversation partners, but their back-and-forth now includes scheduling concerns and parental disagreements—a far cry from the first film when everything seemed so consequential but without any real consequence: a trademark of youth.
Now they also infuse their car ride discussions with a lot of sweet persiflage, showing us the familiarity they’ve developed over the past decade since they reconnected in Paris together ten years ago.
One might say that the portrayal of a longterm relationship as they approach middle age is less romantic but more real. This accepted dichotomy—that romance is the opposite of real—upsets me. If that’s the case, then why would I aspire toward a long-term relationship? In that universe, I’d rather have romance than reality.
But in this rewatching, I observed something different: The setup of this potential relationship didn't intrigue me. Observing two people connect and begin to fall in love was actually quite dull. As someone who finds pure possibility and lanterns to be very romantic, my reaction surprised me.
I couldn’t wait to jump ahead to Before Midnight, thinking, “Okay NOW this is getting interesting.”
Friend, you’re far from alone in fearing that the romance and intrigue of a relationship will diminish once the potential becomes actual. Your delight in the effervescent potentiality of the relationship and concern about the hard thump of reality makes perfect sense for how the human brain works. Let’s take a short detour into psychology:
Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote about the allure of ‘objet petit a,’ the unattainable object of desire. It’s an ever-changing ideal that we fantasize about only because we know we can’t get it. Humans love an unattainable dream so much that we will put obstacles in our own way precisely because we know that the act of dreaming is more pleasurable than having attained it.
Aren’t we goofballs?
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek elaborated on objet petit a, comparing it to a concept that 19th-century Christian creationists constructed to argue against Darwin’s theory of evolution: Those who believed that God literally created the earth in six days proposed that God made fossils simply in order for the earth to look old.
Žižek compares objet petit a, the thing that we want that is out of reach, to these fake fossils: They can connect us with the real experience, but they are just vague ideas of reality.
Žižek concludes that what we say we most want is just a figment of a fake fossil; as soon as we attain our goal, we think, “Hm, this LOOKS like what I wanted but it can’t be it, because what I wanted would be so much more satisfying”…and then we move on to the next goal. The experience of attaining is never as fun as the experience of wanting, so we are in a constant cycle of making things difficult for ourselves just for kicks.
In other words, humans really love struggling for something they can’t have. It sounds like you intuitively know that, so much that you’re actually nervous and resistant to getting what you want: fulfilled potential with this guy. Congratulations, that means you’re by all accounts very normal!!
Moreover, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re an artist or writer. Why? Because artists and writers LIVE for potential! We love setting a scene with a lot of potential: twinkle lights, cobblestones, wondering if he’ll really show up, questioning what will happen next, hand-wringing over what to say, watching our phones the next day. It’s all so exciting!
You’re entirely correct to note that it’s much less intoxicating to meet the person you’ve been dating for two years at your regular cafe, already knowing what you both intend to order, with no real incentive to put your best foot forward because you’re certain that you’ll do the exact same thing next week.
Alas, we’re in a bit of a pickle here. You want to see where this relationship goes, but you’re afraid that if you find out, it will lose its romance and magic. I’m pretty sure Lacan, Žižek, every pop singer, and every poet would be on your side.
So, how can we Twinkle Light Enthusiasts can think about healthy, long-term relationships: turning the potential into the actual without sacrificing all the sparkle?
For starters, here’s the tea: Initial romance is actually quite boring.
Hear me out—When I was watching Before Sunset, I thought about how we’re meant to believe that the two characters have a special connection, when really the appeal of this tedious conversation is that we’ve probably all experienced a connection like that—friendship or romantic or somewhere in between. It’s not at all uncommon to, at some point, meet someone you have an instant bond with for one reason or another.
Celine and Jesse aren’t particularly extraordinary; they happened to have been on the same train going through a beautiful city, and they both think a lot about death. If a different guy had been on the train instead of Jesse, Celine might have had a similar evening. Maybe instead of thoughts about death, they would have bonded over their interest in ecofeminism or jazz manouche.
I was thinking about all the good dates I’ve heard my friends recount over the years, and how the ingredients were basically the same:
1. a dimly-lit setting
2. a commonality that leads to a good discussion
3. potential for a future meet-up
Optional ingredients: moonlight, candles, a string of twinkle lights (light is really important in the romance recipe).
This recipe almost always works, and it would probably work with most people.
What we learn as we get older is that relationships don’t work with most people.
A first date is quite simple; a relationship is super complex.
So even though all this potential SEEMS very exciting because of the way we’re wired for desire and because of all the mystique, it’s the boring part.
You could project the same fantasy on just about any roughly attractive person, roughly your age, with roughly some same things in common. The potential would be the same. It stays in the first dimension.
I was telling my therapist once that I equate romance with unavailability, uncertainty, and pure potential. I was so scared of getting into a longterm relationship and not knowing how to keep my partner enchanted—or, at least, mildly amused—by me, because I thought that I could only maintain my attractiveness if I were as mysterious and beguiling as a stranger on a European train.
“Can I say…that’s a one-dimensional view of love?” replied my therapist.
Potential is one dimension; how about the other two? Can we call them “discovery” and “expertise,” perhaps? Can we maybe agree that we’d rather read a book written by someone who had expertise on a subject, rather than a cursory knowledge of the subject’s potential to be interesting?
When you bring your relationship to a NEW dimension, that’s when the zesty part really begins. You might lose the butterflies (which are most likely a response to fear), but it will be the difference between examining a fake fossil, and meeting a real dinosaur.
Another reframe: While potential may seem more filled with discovery, in fact it’s more certain. You already know what all your hopes and dreams with this guy are. Even though it could go either way, you have a clear idea of what you hope this relationship will be.
The real mystery is who this person is, and that can only unravel over a lot of time together, perhaps in a string of Tuesdays.
As a writer, I worried that people would only ever want to read about potential. What happens if I get married? They don’t make many rom-coms about laundry and doing the dishes; there aren’t a lot of movies about mundane Tuesdays.
But let’s reconsider what’s actually intriguing and actually romantic…
Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe is a fantastic study in the thrill of potential and no doubt an absolute bop, but it’s not a very…interesting song.
All we know about the subject is this: Your stare was holdin' / Ripped jeans, skin was showin' / Hot night, wind was blowin’
So, we know this person:
wears ripped jeans and
has the ability to stare.
Compare that with Brian Doyle’s Prayer for My Lovely Bride of Twenty-Seven Years:
May you never again in this blessed lifetime put milk on to heat for your coffee and turn the burner on high and wander away and get absorbed in something else and have to shriek and sprint into the kitchen as you have every! single! morning! Since I met you thirty years ago.
May you always be as selflessly engaged and fascinated by other people and unabsorbed by yourself as you are today.
May you always have those arresting blue-gray eyes exactly the color and potential fury of the sea.
Two totally different genres and writers, but my observation remains: People get a lot more interesting when you get to know them.
Before Midnight is a much more complex, fascinating, and dare I say romantic movie than Before Sunrise, precisely because the mature relationship now has a unique life of its own.
You’re right to be nervous. Entering the third dimension is a lot more work than staying in the first, just as staring at a photo of the Turkish Aegean Islands (something I do a lot of these days) is definitely easier than actually navigating a foreign language, a time difference, and travel disruptions. But, I don’t have to tell you what the payoff is.
Maybe those “unrealistically high expectations” aren’t something to fall down from, but to enjoy for now, knowing that they may soon morph into complexity.
Could “unrealistically high expectations” stay on the same plane in your mind, but transform into even more memories, reason to admire this person, shared dreams? All that potential and all those expectations don’t have to disappear; they can turn into something even more exciting: co-creating a reality that didn’t exist before.
We think of potential as the mystique, and a committed relationship as the known, but last night I realized it was more likely the other way around: All potential relationships are basically the same; all actual relationships are distinct.
When a relationship exists only in its potentiality, yes there are many directions it could go, but something they all have in common is that they exist in your brain.
When a relationship becomes actual, it exists in an unpredictable world, in much-less-certain real time, and with another evolving person. It doesn’t descend into acedia, but rises into something alive.
What if realizing the potential of this relationship could mean magic PLUS growth PLUS love PLUS comfort? Maybe not all at once, but in different seasons, in different dimensions: your own trilogy in which you still have so much to say years later?
What if “a string of Tuesdays” and “a string of twinkle lights” weren’t in opposition, but close companions?
May I suggest: Be brave enough to enter the third dimension.