Authors: Lynne Segal
Potential lovers have something resembling rights, it would seem, even if it is only the right to live in anguish with or without the presence of the beloved. Outside the couple, the question of who one is allowed to love, painfully or pleasurably, is far less clear. What claims can be made in the name of friendship? How do we know what expectations are allowed here? It is hard to answer. There are no agreed codes of practice at all.
A friend can always simply take their leave, whatever our needs or expectations. One of the most distressing letters I have
ever received was from a new friend, whom I was still getting to know when the letter arrived, having spent much of the previous six months in my friend’s company. This friendship had brought a delightful, unexpectedly fresh energy and beauty into my life. But the letter conveyed sharp resentment at my expression of regret at the abrupt nature of the departure when this friend left for an extended period away. On my friend’s side my distress sparked sudden anger, being interpreted as unfair accusation and unwarranted entitlement; on my side, there was simply the raw pain of what felt like cold dismissal. Who knows what histories of intrusion and rejection were being played out in that scenario; the point was that there was probably little that could be done by either of us to avert the clash within the shifting understandings of friendship. In most such instances there will be scant knowledge, on either side, of the largely unconscious dynamics in play.
I know that this conundrum over being allowed any ‘right to intimacy’ can seem a perpetually unresolved one for those living outside the confines of coupledom or close family ties. It creates formidable uncertainties over any form of entitlement. I have noticed that many single people keep their distance from any type of new close friendship to protect themselves from the possibility of any such hurt, whether caused by hoping for too much, or giving too little. Of course, everyone knows that there are so many different kinds of love, but they are perhaps less likely to reflect, as Jeanette Winterson wrote on Valentine’s Day in 2012, that all our relationships are based on love of different kinds: ‘If we could try to experience love as a quality – like compassion or courage – and focus less on love as an event, something that happens, then love would belong to us, rather than being dependent on us belonging to someone.’
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In his conversation,
In Praise of Love
, the philosopher Alain Badiou echoes some of Winterson’s thoughts, though reinstating the couple as the site of ‘love’. Disdaining what he sees, rather oddly, as the ‘risk-free’ commercialization of love in internet dating, Badiou affirms the truth of ‘love’ in the movement from the chance encounter to the challenging commitment of an enduring recognition and acceptance of ‘difference’ between two people, as each negotiates a shared encounter with the world, no longer ‘from the perspective of the One, but from the perspective of the Two’.
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Love may indeed be best seen as a quality of commitment, acceptance and enduring negotiation, but there is surely a little more to add when Winterson or Badiou, in line with many others, object to the commodification of ‘love’ today, certified by those flowers and chocolates expressing dedication on Valentine’s Day. This is because, even when free from the taint of commercialism, love is surely shadowed by various forms of envy, dread of abandonment, and more, on the one hand; and constraint and fears of suffocation on the other.
This underbelly of love persists, whether we see ‘love’ as a type of event (the expression of desire, the occurrence of sexual activity, the declaration of strong affection); or alternatively as a quality of lasting attachment and care (trying to be always dependable, supportive, comforting, responsive, in sharing one’s life with another). In a very brief meditation on the risks of love, Judith Butler agrees that ‘love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision’.
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The archetypal bond of love, that of a child for its mother, conveys it all; soon enough the child will be caught between need and flight, even as the mother was perhaps once caught between
fear and flight at the initial total dependence of the infant on her ceaseless ministrations. We could all love each other more, even that passing stranger, and the world be a far better, an unrecognizable, place. But who dares ask for love without fear of rejection?
As I see it, it is not just a horror of the pitying smugness of the securely (or insecurely) coupled that single people often experience. More importantly, it is a fear that any expression of love coming from those seen as old, however platonic, will be perceived as inappropriate, especially by new friends or acquaintances. For me, the safety of the couple lies very much in the protection it can offer from this sort of humiliation. The visible partner provides a shield that so many older women live without, however creatively they use their time.
The New York journalist Susan Jacoby recently reported writing an article that none of the magazines who usually gladly accepted her work would publish. It was called ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Woman’, and concluded: ‘Loneliness is considered somewhat shameful – one of the last social taboos in a country where people are willing to appear on television and talk about nearly every other form of intimate unhappiness.’ In the subway and later in a farmers’ market, she describes watching and subsequently chatting to a seventy-seven-year-old woman, whose husband had died three years earlier, whose children lived hundreds of miles away, and whose friends had moved to Florida or Arizona after retirement. This woman’s loneliness was so profound that in attempting conversation with strangers she ‘was willing to risk one small rejection after another for even the briefest moment of human contact’.
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Solitude can be wonderful, so long as we have some sort of community that will welcome our return.
Fears of Dependency
We all need some sort of community to return to, if only because old age sooner or later increases the likelihood of new forms of dependence, even if only on the doctors or hospitals who monitor the functioning of our well-worn vital organs. As I indicated in my opening chapter, forms of dependency are a part of the human condition, and we only gain any sense of ourselves through our ties to others. Yet it is just those ties of dependence that we tend to repudiate entering adulthood in cultures such as ours, where what we are taught to value is the notion of autonomy and self-sufficiency above all else. Indeed, more than ever in these neo-liberal times, the idea of dependency has mutated into notions of psychological inadequacy, incapacity or ill health.
My friend Sarah Benton grimly confirms the shameful outcome. She was once deputy editor of the
New Statesman
, but due to multiple sclerosis has been largely denied paid work since her mid-forties, twenty years ago. She is sharp as a whistle and clear as a bell, pointing out that when you are seen as ‘dependent’ you are always in danger of being ignored, patronized or pitied, seen as having no secrets – this last, having secrets, being a rather essential quality of selfhood. A keen etymologist, she points out that the origins of the word ‘selfhood’ are ‘to separate, divide off’, to be an ‘independent person’, which is the clue to those ties between secrets and individuation, and the valid fear of loss of individuality if seen as dependent: parents / teachers / tyrants allow no secrets. As Bob Dylan once sang harshly: ‘You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal’.
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It is this noxious slide between old age, dependency, inadequacy and invisibility that is surely one of the reasons why old
people so forcefully insist that they ‘do not feel old’, making ‘old age’ something to be disavowed whatever our age. Yet the idea that ‘dependence’ may be a collaborative process is rarely mentioned. Nor do we often hear that it is quite possible for old people who require care, much like young dependent people, to give back as much as they receive, a situation best seen as interdependence. However, it is true that the process of role reversal – as the daughter or son who was once cared for must switch, usually in middle age, to become themselves the carer of an aged parent – can trigger complicated and troubling feelings. These will be all the more challenging if the earlier relationship with the parent was tense or ambivalent, as is quite often the case.
For those in need of care, there are often deep levels of shame, guilt and resentment if they find themselves in situations of extreme dependence on partners or children, when they may feel simply a burden on those very people whose wellbeing was always dearest to them. ‘She is still young, healthy and at the peak of her career; she doesn’t want to be looking after an old man of “ninety” ’, an ageing friend of mine (in his early eighties) laments. He is someone who has always been and remains hugely loved by those around him, a man of extraordinary charm, authority and charisma, but being at times barely able to walk of late, he can be moved to tears as he speaks of his dependence on the ministrations of his much younger, caring wife.
Challenging, even distressing, as these domestic situations can be, including the tough decision of deciding if and when home-based care can no longer be provided, the borders usually maintained between ‘dependency’, ‘care’ and ‘autonomy’ remain extremely porous. It may indeed sometimes be hard to see
what recipients of care might give back to their carers, although very often the situation is more complex. As was evident at the close of
Chapter 4
, rewards may lie in unsuspected places in such relations. This was manifest, for instance, in Elinor Fuchs’
Making an Exit
, where she describes the final years of caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s disease as the best years they had spent together; just as Ruth Ray suggested that her few years with her very old, incapacitated lover with Parkinson’s disease provided the best loving she had known. Two leading social scientists studying the work of caring, Michael Fine and Caroline Glendinning, discuss these complexities in their essay, ‘Dependence, Independence or Inter-dependence?’
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As they and others before them have commented, politicians determined to make welfare cuts since the Thatcher and Reagan years have done much to extend and amplify the pathologization of notions of dependency, as well as the anxieties of those in need of care. In Britain, John Moore, Secretary of State for Social Security at the height of the Thatcherite drive against state dependency in the late 1980s, exemplified the move: ‘A climate of dependence can in time corrupt the human spirit. Everyone knows the sullen apathy of dependence and can compare it with the sheer delight of personal achievement.’
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Such is the pervasive, pejorative rhetoric around dependency that some men – it has usually been men – have found a market-friendly audience in publicizing narratives of old people’s remorseless decline into second childhood. We see this in a book by the American legal scholar, Bill Miller, simply entitled
Losing It
, which brusquely dismisses any and all possible affirmations of old age. Although himself generally fit, still at the peak of his university career, exercising regularly and often visiting his astute and relatively healthy mother, in her nineties,
Miller noticed that he is more easily distracted by ambient noise, and more forgetful, on reaching the age of sixty-five. Like Larkin, Roth, Amis, and other men before him, this leads Miller to insist on the unmitigated disaster of ageing. He labels those who mention any possibility of greater wisdom, contentment or wellbeing in old age as either ‘culpably moronic’ or purveyors of ‘swindle’. One of the chief causes of Miller’s lamentation is that ageing turns men into women, or at the very least ‘neuters them’: ‘which is what old, even middle, age effectively does to males anyway’.
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The ‘culpably moronic’ whom Miller names are almost all women who, like Laura Carstensen, are determined to ‘pretend’ that there can be a certain positivity in old age. They refuse to acknowledge the realities of ‘demented’ oldies with their ‘sagging, rotting bodies’, or to accept that to become old is to become ‘dimwitted’. The merely moronic are those ‘deluded souls’ who reported in Carstensen’s surveys that they had shifted from ‘the learning of new things’ to activities with others that ‘deepen existing relationships’ and enable them ‘to savor life’.
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For Miller and his kind, the culpably moronic would include all those humanistic gerontologists whom I have mentioned in this book, men and women alike. They are all equally guilty of trying to ‘delude’ us in their concern with issues of well-being in old age, failing to insist upon the inexorable miseries of cognitive and bodily decline that so agitates these men. In particular, it would include his compatriot, the feminist scholar Toni Calasanti, who reflected a few years ago on her own career as a sociologist and gerontologist. Always self-reflexive, she pointed out that she had not only had to keep battling against ageism in society and in her own two disciplines, but has even had to combat it in herself. When first teaching a course on ‘The
Sociology of Aging’, she later reflected, she had avoided using the word ‘old’, encouraging her students to see ‘older people’ as just like themselves. She only later realized that she had constantly emphasized sameness rather than differences between the old and the young, reminiscent of the once familiar way of ‘praising’ a woman for being ‘just like a man’. It seemed as if the only way to overcome ageism was to suggest that old people were not ‘really old’, but could be seen in some sense as ‘still young’. In contrast with her previous practices, Calasanti now argues that such deliberate ‘age-blindness’ is itself a more subtle expression of age prejudice.
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