Reciprocity

I asked heaven, like Sade, to please send me someone to love, and heaven, in its infinite wisdom, sent me a man who lived in a different city. It seemed like a cruel joke to be playing. I was tempted for a while to demand a replacement. Then feelings won out over facts.

You rarely read happy love stories. For good reason maybe — they are not very interesting. In the third act of every romance novel or film, disaster swoops in to muddy the waters. The true romantics persevere, either because they believe in the total immovability of fate or because they cannot imagine a life after love or because they are terrified of the void. The reasoning does not matter very much; the outcome is ultimately the same. 

I am about to turn 30 and I wondered at times if my urgency to partner up was simply driven by a fear of getting old, by all the songs and all the movies and all the fairy tale romances you read about. It is very pleasant to be loved. You tend to forget when no one is loving you how it can shift your entire universe, subtly, but with the force of an earthquake. Still, this did not seem a good enough reason to partner up. I did not want a love that was contingent on all the things that traditional middle class partnership prioritizes: wealth, prestige, social standing, good temperate habits, ambition. I did not want a marriage of convenience in other words. I wanted someone who could share or at least sympathize with the way the world appeared to me, very cruel and very beautiful, who was driven by an unshakable desire to figure out how to live well, which is to say, while inflicting the least amount of harm possible, who was not shaken by my darkness and who could be moved by my joy, who also wanted very desperately to lead a happy little life but who could not turn away from the world.

Most of my dates felt like more filling out a resume. There’s a part in The Furrows by Namwali Serpell where the protagonist describes love as a rapture, as if it were obvious, as if love could be anything else. “As if there’s any correlation between this force, this feeling, and dating.” 

The distance seemed like a test of this principle. Despite myself, I started imagining it as an incalculable debt system, one that defied the conventions of human measurement. This man had come from far away for our first date and I went stupidly to the wrong place and kept him waiting for over forty minutes. In a cab on the way there, I decided that he would hate me from then on. I was thorny, on the defensive, trying to salvage something that seemed already ruined before it had even started. I had had some inkling that this might be a Thing. It seemed right and different in ways that I couldn’t really identify. My grandmother used to say that she knew as soon as she saw my grandfather that he would be her great love. Everyone was smoking and the air was so hazy, in her retelling, that she couldn’t even see his legs. I didn’t even know if he had legs, she would tell me when I was little, priming me for a belief in fate, but it wouldn’t have mattered either way. 

My grandmother only stayed married to her great love for around a decade. He had affairs and they had terrible fights. It was not the kind of marriage you would hold up as an example of anything. A fated romance is not necessarily a happily ever after. The third act does not always resolve. Sometimes it decimates your life. 

Some of the purest love stories are the ones where that decimation happens and where everyone goes on living. In Anna Karenina, one of my favorite books, Levin asks Kitty early on to marry him. She says no. She thinks she will marry someone else, a narcissistic but simple man called Vronsky. With Vronsky, her future seems clear and simple and predetermined. With Levin, who is anxious and antisocial, who obsesses over philosophy and social liberation and Russia’s class politics, her future seems cloudy. She cannot imagine exactly what it will look like. It destroys Levin psychologically but he perseveres. Hundreds of pages later, sensing reciprocity, he asks her again. They play a mysterious game called secretaire, where each writes out the first letters of each word in a phrase and the other somehow deciphers the meaning. The phrases are very complicated, but somehow they get to the bottom of it and agree to marry.

Before they get married, Levin gives Kitty his diaries because he wants her to know him completely, thereby revealing that he is an atheist and also that he has had multiple sexual relationships. Kitty is horrified and ashamed by the revelations, but ultimately, she accepts him in completeness. They marry and mesh uneasily into each other’s lives. There are ups and downs. They keep loving each other.

For a long time, I thought I might die young. It was a comforting idea mostly, that I would not always have to get up and go to work, not always have to carry around my deep well of undefined sadness, not always have to negotiate with this world which is in many ways antagonistic to our thriving. The future seemed cloudy to me altogether. Although I had been exceptionally well set up for life overall, I came into adulthood saddled with student debt and worked a series of low-paying prestige jobs over the course of my 20s, for the privilege of which I took on more debt. This was a personal choice and so often seemed obscene to complain about. Many people are trapped in low-paying jobs with no possibility of upward mobility and no social safety net.

But on the other hand, it was not really a choice. I can do tedious or repetitive work pretty easily and daydream at it, but I could not really imagine doing something that conflicted explicitly with my personal values. A lot of the white collar, well-paying jobs that people I knew drifted into seemed like cynical forms of gambling, always tilted towards the worst possible outcomes. Betting, in other words, on our failure to thrive. There is a kind of necrotic frenzy around the acquisition of wealth that frightens and depresses me. You can feel it in the air in New York City sometimes. Everyone is measuring human life as value, time units as fungible, calculating their relative status and relative chances of success. It creates cruelty and scarcity everywhere. It exploits and eats away at the lives of people indentured to its rhythm. It is a ghostly system that intimately links melting permafrost, flood and wildfires, displacement, and abused workers into one upward flow of money.

This is a dramatic way of conceptualizing debt, but it also helps me understand my own personal situation. It is sometimes helpful to contextualize your private burdens as generational experiences. Money is so fraught, so shameful, it touches every aspect of your life. Dispassionately understanding how debt functions and how it compounds upon itself and how it is inherited across generations is a worthwhile project. It makes you feel better, or at least less alone. I first learned about how debt worked from my parents, whose debt seemed abstract and incomprehensible to me, and then from The Big Short probably, which I read as a teenager, and then from Capital, which I read in graduate school, and then from Debt: The First Five Thousand Years by the great humanist David Graeber. One of my favorite essays is about debt. It was written for The Baffler in 2018 by M.H. Miller and it describes a middle class family’s descent into a debt trap nightmare, resulting from predatory student loans, medical bills, and the intense downward mobility of the 2008 financial crisis. It is a surreal story, dry and humorous even though it’s so sad. At a certain point you have to laugh about it.

Miller’s situation is infinitely worse than mine. But there is a universality to the spiral he is drawn into. He finally refinances his debt so that his aging parents are not cosigners on it. “Sharing the burden of my debt with my spouse instead of my parents was a small, depressing victory,” he writes, “a milestone perhaps unique to members of my generation, one that must have carried a similar significance that purchasing a home and having a mortgage had to my parents.”

I am mostly resigned to my debt now. I have learned financial tools to manage it and keep it somewhat in check. It does not keep me awake at night anymore the way it used to. But my hope for the future is colored by it. Risky financial choices, like having a child or going back to school or uprooting my life somehow, often seem foreclosed. My life sometimes seems bounded by this logistical concern, and at other times, increasingly, it feels totally irrelevant to my life, so distant from my spiritual being that it might as well belong to another person entirely.

One of the most optimistic and hopeful stories I have read, strangely, is one about extreme repression. It’s a beautiful little book called (fittingly) Miriam by Kate Riley. It’s about a young woman called Miriam who grows up in a cult like anabaptist community, cut off from the world. She is not abused. She is mostly bored, chafing to make something of herself, to experience more, and more fully and more deeply than her structured everyday life of labor and prayer offers.

Miriam is a quiet story and its effect creeps up on you. You half expect this to descend into a Women Talking kind of nightmare, for Miriam to run away and try to start her life anew somewhere else. Instead, she gets married as a cure for her restlessness. It doesn’t really cure her restlessness but growing up does maybe. Or makes it more bearable. She finds pleasure in small things, in the routines of chores and agriculture and community service which she previously scorned.

So what is unusual about Miriam then is that it finds the sublime in everyday life. It is a story about growing into yourself and becoming happier not because your life circumstances have substantially changed in some wild and unrealistic way, but because you have learned to care about something, and that caring has given a shape and meaning to your life.

I was by the ocean earlier this year, on a small dark strip of land off the East Coast, and when I looked up at the sky, I, an incurable city girl, saw so many stars that I thought I must be dreaming. I wondered stupidly if the sky had always looked like that, although of course it does. It felt like an experience of glimpsing the divine, in the way that people sometimes describe it. This vast unknowable universe, full of light that is able to travel across unimaginable distances and unimaginable eras of time to shine on us. How small you are in such a universe, how ephemeral your worries.