Love, lust and lying: can Christians respond without jerking their knees?

A recent THES publish and interview with the author of Love and Lies, Clancy Martin. I've put the book on my 'to get' list. Meantime there is the interview to go on and which has raised issues for me which I'd like to explore a bit more 'out loud' as it were. The article tells us that basically the book

"argues that the double-dealing at the core of every great swindle is also at the heart of erotic love. "

I think this means that loving people implies lying to them, necessarily. Of course, this is a hard idea for Christians (and others) to swallow. We are, ostensibly:

those who would rather believe Thomas Merton’s claim in Love and Living that “the beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image”

 Doubly so, because it is based in apparently good research and some extended thinking.

to confront with chilling clarity the sociopathy that silently underpins most of our average lives. “The sociologist Erving Goffman identified that in his famous book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” Martin says. “We are always playing roles. // So the good liar and the good lover “must be able – or must strive – to see her- or himself through the eyes of the person she or he will come to love”, Martin continues. “The kind of mind control they practise is the same: it’s not strictly coercion; it’s seduction. It’s convincing the person who is the object of the mental manipulation that he or she wants to participate in the illusion being created. Long-term committed erotic love will evolve into something different, something still more complex. But falling in love depends on these kinds of artistic illusions.””

I don't think that I see playing roles as negatively as that. I don't think that it is duplicitous. It's not duplicitous because, as I understand Goffman, the point is that there isn't some other 'real' us hiding behind the masks: we actually are the different roles we play: there's no neutral inner-self observer who hides a true identity by acting a part. We are the collection of roles. The task is for us to integrate them. Of course, this is a bit idealised: sometimes we do fake and lie and deceive. But what I'm saying is that such is not inherent in role playing. We can learn to 'play ourselves' in different situations. We should also recognise that we are who we are in relation to other people which means that we are formed in our relationships -with all that implies in terms of self-presentation; learning to trust, beginning to disclose more of ourselves etc. We do all of these processes a grave disservice if we interpret them simply as mendacious and therefore morally reprehensible. Or, alternatively, because there is a degree of less-than-full-disclosure that this means it is somehow okay not to attempt to be integrated and to strive for honesty and transparency.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that the research as presented perhaps pays too little attention to what love actually is.  Surely the point of the quote from Merton, above, is to critique some versions of 'love' by reference to agapaic love. And so, I think that the point raised in the next quote is very interesting because it does seem to make that point to some degree.

Love allows us – requires us – to envision possibilities that at one point seemed impossible: the possibility of becoming a person who is capable of making promises that stick, the possibility of creating a lasting home of our own, the possibility of understanding another person’s inner life. But at the beginning of love, none of these possibilities has been actualised so we work together to create the illusion.

Is "illusion" fair? I'm not sure that it is. In other areas of scholarship we might talk about "shared imaginaries" which function to draw people together to create a different (hopefully better) future and in co-ordinating effort and desire to form us/them: change us to become more like what we would see to be desirable.

But my mother never harmed me or told me that she wanted to do so. Instead she lied to me. She told me, quite convincingly, that I was loved unconditionally, always. (“A very common, very useful lie that parents tell children,” Martin reassures me.) I lie to my daughter not out of some diabolical plan for her, or even a well-meaning paternalism. I lie because I want to maintain the story that we are somehow better, more patient, more loving, than we actually tend to be. Some things are better left unsaid.

I think that perhaps this does not give enough credit to both the desire to be and to become the loving person and the power of the story to achieve that to some degree. Of course Christian traditions also contain a strong critique of human love which would very much also want to say that we do fall short of our narrated ideals, that we do indulge in self-deception. But that, I contend is not quite the same as simply saying that we are lying. We are both trying and lying. We need to both continue and be self-suspicious. However, we need, the Christian tradition tends to contend, to bring together our narrative with that of the loving God in whom that faithful unconditional love finds fulfilment and source, embodiment and force.