What do you know about your lover? What secrets might he be hiding? Or maybe this is more important: What does your lover know about you? Which of your sins does she know yet keep silent about? For that matter, what do you know about love?
“Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love,” Clancy Martin’s spirited attack on standard notions of romantic love, argues that most of us know little about this coveted emotion. Love isn’t, Martin argues, a refuge of crystalline honesty. What love is, at best, is mutually assured deception — and deep satisfaction. The satisfaction depends on the deception, and we ignore that at our heart’s peril. Make no mistake, Martin believes in the power of love. Deceit just interests him more.
“To claim that when we love, we lie, is almost tautological,” Martin writes. “What’s more interesting, perhaps, is that we are so insistent on the connection between love and truthfulness.” To illuminate this, Martin, a novelist and philosophy professor, offers a mash-up of philosophy, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and raucous personal anecdote. In chapters anchored to the philosophy of deception, childhood, first loves, mature love and marriage, he argues against the blind faiths of people deeply enthralled by love..
On one level, Martin’s argument is so true as to be silly: The smile you give your partner despite the irritation you feel when they are, say, audibly chewing is mild domestic deceit. Martin touches on such banalities but reserves the bulk of “Love and Lies” for deeper deceptions and self-deceptions. Some of this is the lying that aids affairs — those about inappropriate emotional attachments to a sexy friend, about where you go at night. Yet more corrosive than this — what initially destabilizes relationships — are the stories we tell our partners and ourselves about our relationships’ perfection. Love often seems all or nothing, and when the illusion of perfection fractures, Martin thinks that most of us feel like love is lost. Honesty won’t resolve that, so we need more self-aware deception. As he writes, “Let’s be honest about our lying. Then we will be better able to love.”
What does that mean?
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