Anxiety about her dull and boring life, about missing out, about always waiting for “something to happen,” propels Madame Bovary—eponymous heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s great novel—to seek the passion and rapture of adulterous affairs. And then the disappointments that ensue—the dissipation of rapture, the cooling of passion—induce her to retire from the game, jettisoning the “numberless desires that had disturbed her” in exchange for a quiet and tranquil life. Which soon enough grows dull and boring.
As anyone might, then, she fantasizes about finding a lover who will give her excitement so unending that she will actually reach a state of permanent calm: the calm that would come from knowing that she will never have to recommence the chase. “A man,” she asks herself: “should he not know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries?” Should a man not only be outrageously witty, physically magnetic, financially successful, romantically charismatic—the usual list—but also profoundly learned in everything from physics to history to mathematics to literature, deeply knowledgeable about every nook and cranny of the world from first-hand experience, nonpareil at chess, cards, dancing, and horsemanship, a champion at badminton, billiards, fencing, and marksmanship, and sophisticated in tastes for everything from art and music to wine and food and homes?
Emma Bovary wants her ideal lover to display more qualities and talents than any single person could humanly possess. Even she, when trying to envision such a creature, finds that he is but a “phantom,” lying beyond her capacity even to “imagine…clearly.”
Anna Karenina, eponymous heroine of Leo Tolstoy’s novel, is nineteenth-century fiction’s other great romantic fatality. Anna doesn’t have to strain to imagine the man of her dreams. Vronsky is real. He exists. But the problem is that Anna wants him to combine qualities that lie beyond not simply human but even logical possibility.
Think, for example, of one of Vronsky’s strongest desires: his wish to start a family with Anna. How does Anna feel about that? Not all that thrilled. “His desire to have children she interpreted as a proof that he did not prize her beauty.” After all, childbearing would take a toll on it, and thus on his love for her as a woman. Of course, a desire not to have children with her would have been interpreted in the same way: as evidence that he was not attracted to her, and did not prize her beauty. These are the Catch-22s we pose to our lovers; we want them to combine logically incompatible yearnings—desires that would negate each other—such as desiring to have children with us and not desiring to have children with us, since either can be interpreted as a sign of love. It’s reminiscent of a joke—I heard it first in the form of a story about Jimmy Carter and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin—in which Begin presents a gift of two neckties to Carter. When they next meet Carter, to show his appreciation, is wearing one of them. “What’s the matter,” Begin asks, “you didn’t like the other one?”
Or take another example. One evening Anna instructs her maid to tell Vronsky that he is not to disturb her if he arrives home after ten o’clock. Duly informed by the maid when he returns late, Vronsky, respecting Anna’s wishes, retires to his own chamber. But for Anna, “[r]espect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.” Vronsky should have disrespected her wishes and come to see her if he really loved her. But of course, isn’t respecting someone’s wishes also a sign of love? How is Vronsky to know when it is and when it isn’t?
Anna seems to pit two versions of Vronsky against each other—the one that respects her wish to be left alone and the one who barges lustfully into her room; the one who desires her as a woman and the one who cherishes and respects her as the mother of his child. So the two must seemingly fight it out to prove which one loves her the most. But it is no more possible for Vronsky to be both than it is for Jimmy Carter to wear two neckties at the same time.
While two of the most tragic female characters in literature come to woe by longing for men with combinations of qualities that defy human or logical possibility, two male protagonists in equally distinguished literary works come to grief by desiring women in whom they seek qualities that would be psychologically or physically impossible to combine.
The young protagonist of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, falls tragically in love with Charlotte, the wife of another man. As Werther steals moments with her here and there, he begins to project onto her characteristics that are temperamentally at odds with each other. He marvels that one woman can combine “so much simplicity with so much understanding.” He wonders at how she can be “so mild and yet so resolute.” He sits in awe of “a mind so placid and a life so active….” These combinations are neither logically nor humanly impossible—all are ordinary characteristics, unlike the ones that Emma insists upon—but they do seem psychologically impossible to sustain in delicate equilibrium. No wonder that Werther, in projecting them onto Charlotte, finds that he cannot do so for more than “a moment.” And yet his unrequited love for such a gem drives him to end his own life.
Ryabovitch, the soldier (anti)hero of Anton Chekhov’s “The Kiss,” represents a further variation on the theme of impossible loves. Surprised by a passionate kiss from an unknown woman in a darkened room at a party, Ryabovitch repairs to the salon and begins to survey the guests, desperate to determine who it was. But he fails because no one woman strikes him as sufficiently attractive. At a loss, he “takes the shoulders and arms of…one, adds the brow of [another] and the eyes of the one on the left of Lobytko,” and so forth, trying “to gather together the floating images in his mind and to combine them into one whole.” His imagination fails to meet the challenge of combining that medley of physical features. Those shoulders and these arms, these eyes and those brows, that waist and that other bust, could never physically cohere in one and the same desirable woman. She would look, perhaps, like someone in a funhouse mirror or a figure in a cubist painting.
The long nineteenth century produced remarkable works of fiction showing how the impossible ideals of lovers lead to tragic, if not absurd, outcomes. Fast forward to our twenty-first century, when the lessons of those great literary works would seem to have been rendered moot not only by the arrival of virtual-reality liaisons and relationships with robots but also with the invention of polyamorous arrangements and sophisticated role-playing games. So have we, in this bravest of brave new worlds, attained what the great writers of past centuries considered foolish to attempt and impossible to achieve?
Consider those virtual-world romances. They promise, for contemporary Emmas, a lover who indeed combines all manner of humanly impossible endowments, from the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound to a talent for performing incredible acts of wizardry, from the force of character to command great armies to the power to sprout fur and horns at will—among countless other desirable qualities. Thanks to a host of tech triumphs, the avatar of a virtual lover, often representing another real person, can morph as you wish, assuming a repertoire of bespoke characteristics far exceeding normal and human capacity. In virtual reality, we can find in one and the same lover all manner of superlative human or even superhuman traits. Just what Emma seeks, it would seem.
As for romantic role play, it allows the Annas of our time to combine in their lover all types of logically incompatible qualities. One moment, at your behest, your role-playing companion might assume the part of a stolid breadwinner who wants to start a family. The next, he will personify an ardent swain who wishes only to worship your body. Ten minutes later, he will take on the pose of a compliant gentleman who respects even your tiniest wish that he plump the bed pillows. And immediately thereafter, he will be a swashbuckler who tears down the house to ravish you. “It was so difficult for a woman to find everything she wanted neatly packaged into one man,” Alfred Hayes writes of the (anti)heroine in his semi-noir 1953 novella In Love; “she wanted everything: the proper marriage and the improper love; the orderly living room and the disorderly bedroom….” An impossible dream, even only as far back as the 1950s. But now, with romantic role play, a woman can find such a neat package in one man, as long as that lover pretends to take on the guise of many different ones. Perhaps adopting a role-play practice would have sorted things out for Anna and Vronsky.
Robot love, for its part, offers any modern Ryabovitch the possibility of combining all conceivable physical features, no matter how incompatible, in one lover. Today’s Ryabovitch can indeed order up a robotic partner who has this one’s shoulders and that one’s brow and the other one’s eyes. A “blonde, brunette, and red-head all in one night” would be within his reach, as an article in the British tabloid, Daily Star, notes. All he would have to do is order a new part. Robots, one “sexbot” enthusiast declares, promise “untold thousands” of physical “configurations.” Ryabovitch would have had a field day.
And finally, for today’s Werthers, there is polyamory. Every conceivable combination of psychologically incompatible traits—one lover’s charming simplicity today, another’s intellectual sophistication tomorrow, yet another’s rock-solid stability the next day, and still another one’s wild energy the day after that—becomes available to him. He can “relate to each lover around a specific quality,” as Elizabeth Sheff says in The Polyamorist Next Door, loving each for the handful of characteristics that most make her attractive. Polyamorists are “free to switch it up over time,” the philosopher Carrie Jenkins writes, “going back to the buffet to add something new to their plates or remove something they didn’t like.”
For the polyamorist, each partner is loved not for his or her full individuality but for a small selection of his or her choicest traits. Polyamorists view the possessors of those diverse traits, when combined, as the equivalent of one single and all-satisfying lover. A contemporary Werther might well be satisfied—and thereby spared a tragic fate.
We are looking here at just one strand in the culture—the strand of romantic love that seeks all manner of different and desirable qualities in one and the same lover. If that theme seems to have persisted from the great writers of bygone days to our own time, we must ask whether today’s innovations provide what the heroes and heroines of yesterday were unable to secure.
Ultimately, while neither Emma nor Ryabovitch is able to find—or even imagine—a single real lover who combines all the traits that each desires, today’s role players or polyamorists find their ideal combinations only through relationships with an assortment of role-players or polyamorous partners. And while the qualities that Anna and Werther project onto their lovers are not realistic ones, even less so are the endowments—such as the ability to wage intergalactic war, or possession of flawless silicon skin—that today’s virtual-reality or robot fanciers seek in their lovers.
We all project onto our lovers qualities and features we imagine them to have, not all of which any living human person alone could possibly possess. Such excursions of the imagination are part and parcel of romantic love. But at least the qualities most of us project onto our lovers are real ones—or come in some kind of combination that a real person could have. Many of us may also fantasize about lovers who are not present in actuality, sometimes even when we are with one who is. Such fantasies are bound up with romantic love, fantasies we could not entirely banish even if we wanted to.
But those of us who remain tethered to reality do not require our lovers to pretend to be a succession of role-playing fantasy lovers; nor do we expect our fantasies to be satisfied a by procession of polyamorous partners. Perhaps many virtual-reality, robot-loving, role-playing, and polyamorous lovers believe they have found fulfillment—and grant them their satisfactions. But whatever their other rewards, as Goethe, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and others suggest, such forms of romantic questing risk falling short, not of the ideal, but of the real.