Love Requires Lies

Mystery and deception are necessary ingredients in love.

A menagerie of lies

Love asks more of a person than they can ever do. Love asks more of a person than they can ever be. For this, love requires lies.

There are lies of glamour: We spend extra time getting ready to maintain in our lover’s mind the impression that we always look so put together. We dress up our behavior and cosmeticize our flaws to convince them we’re just a little bit better than we actually are. The early stages of love are all finery.

Is romance not but an act of persuasion? Fancy restaurants and fancy dress, witty retorts and incisive observations, gifts and flattery are all designed like the props and costumes on a stage to carry off a pleasant deception. Yet, romance is falser than theater. In a romance, there is no curtain to drop; we only remove our costume when we have grown too apathetic to maintain it. To be sold a dream and never be undeceived, this is the height of romance.

There are the lies of comfort: those soft embellishments for the sake of a lover’s feelings and self-esteem. Here we find the omission of some flirtation with infidelity from the description of one’s day, as to not dredge up painful jealousy; or the compassionate misleading of one’s beloved about an insecurity or source of embarrassment, reassuring them that it is not as it seems, though in reality it is exactly as it seems.

Is a merciful lie any less of a lie? When we seek to hide something from the ones we love because it would cause them pain, are we not adding to their ignorance just the same as if it were done with malicious intent? When we restrain our tongue from speaking cruel truths, and instead speak a kind lie, which of the two is truly unkind? It is a harmful benevolence opposite a helpful malevolence. It is more often hardship and hard truths that spur our growth; comfort and softness feel better but only for a time, for in the final settling they only serve to stunt us.

Finally, there are the big lies that both can sense, which leave them feeling as if they were reaching out to each other from opposite sides of an uncrossable gulf, even when in reality they are in each other’s arms. Both know the truth, but for fear of unraveling the dream, they never give words to what their eyes communicate in full.

There is such a fine sensitivity to the human mind that it can pick up the slightest degrees of extra pressure in a touch, the nearly nonexistent emphasis on certain words, and the whisper of a hidden motivation in every act, so that the lie permeates everything, and every movement of the body and every expression of a thought is accentuated by some added significance. Just as the moon touches everything with a silvery glow, the lie becomes an outline on the silhouette of all things they share.

Which of the people who love you did you not ensnare with a facade? Those who claim not to lie to the ones they love are only lying to themselves as well. It is a dereliction to not deceive a lover. In love, it is a betrayal not to betray. There is nothing less lovable than a completely unvarnished person.

Maintaining the mystery

There is a chasm of mystery between any two people. Love is the desire to cross it. It is not the act of crossing that chasm but the yearning to. The aim of a journey is to reach some far off place; love, instead, is an adventure, where the voyage itself is the purpose. Love is an exploration of another’s soul, with the hope that each day will bring some new discovery, but that that place will never be known in full.

Passion is just another name for desire, and we only desire that which we have yet to secure. Thus, we can only form an enduring desire for what is restricted, denied, and withheld, or what we fear may be taken from us. To expose all of oneself as a fact seen in full is to extinguish the passion of love. What greater betrayal is there? Each of us should maintain some shadowy unknowns, wherein a dream has space to exist — this dream being an imagined picture of perfection, which a living, breathing person can never truly embody.

To love someone is to hungrily explore them. We cannot love what we know in full, for then it assumes a size that is less than infinite, and those we love must always be infinite. There is no size to the unknown. The subtlest mystery can contain a universe within it. Having some part of them that is forever unreachable, a new depth always ready to be explored, is the duty of all faithful lovers. The ideal lover is unknowable.

It is impossible to love those whom we know or to know those whom we love. In truth, one never really sees their beloved. We only ever see an image of them existing in our mind, one embellished with an aura of love and allurement. Our impressions of the one we love are clouded by emotions.

It is the deepest lamentation of unrequited love that the rejected person feels they were never seen in full — that, in fact, they were not rejected but only some false image of themselves. “If only they really knew me” is the slogan of attraction without reciprocation. Yet, it is more often being known too well that makes one unattractive. It is a common theme to see two people who began as friends, and presented themselves to each other with the nakedness of friends before friends, finding a transition to romance impossible thereafter. They come to know each other too well to become lovers.

We refuse to look for long into the being of those we do not love, and we are incapable of looking into the depths of the ones we do. The story of human love is one of running away from the knowledge of one person and towards the mystery in another. It is for this reason that our curiosity for one another is only ever superficial, and that no one is ever really known. Every man is an island.

The day when there is nothing left to hide is the day love dies. It can continue as a love of habit, or a love of comfortable inertia, but it cannot continue as love for a person. It is the hallmark of the human condition: There is nothing we love but dreams and deceptions.

We love ourselves, so long as we never look at our failings head on. We love our future only because it doesn’t yet exist. We love one another because something in us tells us to; it coats them in a beautifying aura and gives us a high in their presence — and so we love beauty and highs — though neither of these things belong to the object of our affection; rather, they are built into our mind.

Love, like life, is just a dream we’ve no desire to wake up from.

Martin Vidal is the author of The Ambition Handbook: A Guide for Ambitious Persons