Puppy Love

Remember those days of late childhood and adolescence when, suddenly and without much warning or cause you were head over heels in "love" with someone you'd seen maybe daily in your classes but had talked to once or twice and never but never had any real encounter?  Puppy love, they called it, and dismissed it as nothing more than childish foolery that would pass away with no real consequence.

I'm old now, past retirement age though working still because the prospect of vacant days constricts my heart as if I were suffering an infarction.  And I am honestly and sincerely in love with the woman whom I married forty years ago, and love my son and soon-to-be daughter in law, and love my students, mostly, and my job, mostly.  I have and have had a life that most people would envy.  To be sure, I've known none of the flash and angst of the high-flying academic at an Ivy League college, and so I know nothing about fame, even the limited fame that comes with being a high-flying academic at an Ivy League college.  I am renowned, as it were, among so limited a set of people that I might as well be Mr. Anonymous.

I am content, then—no, more than content, happy, living in the middle of fortune's favors.  And yet—surely you knew there would be an "and yet"!—there are moments when like a twelve year old in middle school I fall in "love," puppy love.

The cause for the surge of "love" is different now than it was back when, in fifth grade, I fell for Sally the lovely queen of the elementary school I went to.  Back then it was—I don't know what it was because that kind of love is difficult to define beyond positing the irrationality of the adolescent human heart.  Now, however, I know precisely why I fall in "love" with people I do not know.

The "love" is not a sexual thing—let me begin apophatically.  It is the contrary of sexual, in fact, unless you would like to make a sort of pathetic, narcissistic nostalgia the equivalent of sexual attraction.  I am, I think, in love with what I used to be before I became this old fart, or with what I imagine I used to be.

Two instances of this "love" may clarify the point.

My first sexual experience, "love" in a more conventional if not exact sense, took place in college, my freshman year.  As often happens in the case of such experiences, the whole business was at best a mixed bag.  The young woman was wonderful; the young man was an idiot.  But my joining with that wonderful young woman was, for me, a revelation of what an approximately real companionship could be like.  It was an opening to the world outside of myself that I had never experienced before.  I hope my language here suggests why the relationship was bound to fail.  Yes, I felt wonderful, but the wonder was about the "I," not about the young woman.  In short, my narcissism brought the whole thing to an end.  Ever since, when I think of what might be called a peak experience, I think with nostalgia, equally narcissistic, about that first joining that showed me both what was possible in relation, and what a self-centered idiot I was.

That's not exactly puppy love, perhaps, but it has the characteristics of puppy love in the sense that there really is no connection between the young woman, now as old as I, and myself, now an old fart.  There is obviously as much chance of actual contact with that past as there was of dweebish me connecting with Sally in that fifth grade world of puppy love.  What I "love" in that memory of the past and that young woman is the sense of newness, of innocence touching innocence, of potentiality.  And to the extent that that experience made it possible, ultimately and after much maturation over a great gap of time, for me to move beyond self-centered narcissism and fall in love, in real actual fully expressed love with my wife—to that extent the memory that leads me to yearn for the past as I yearned for Sally in fifth grade is really about what I now have, not what I never really had in the past.

The second example is perhaps closer to puppy love because it is based entirely on some unsubstantiated notion of what an other person is or represents.  In this case, it is a star of screen and television, and so falls very much in the left field of star crushes that animate the prepubescent and adolescent heart—puppy love, in short.  That the star in this case is male, as I am, gives the affair an interesting turn—but I hasten to say that although the possibility of a gay frisson would be welcome because of the social cachet of homosexuality, in point of fact I am decidedly heterosexual, and so the "love" for this actor is not in any sense sexual.

What is it then?  Well, the actor in question is, or seems to be, the spitting image of what I used to be—or what in my imaginary of myself I fantasize that I used to be.  Certain things are absolutely the same between him and me, to be sure.  He is awkward, as I was; socially inept, as I was; a marginal character in the worlds that he enacts on screen, as I was; sexually beside the point, as I was.  Or at least that is what the personae that the actor enacts, in show after show, seem to represent.  The character he plays is always a representation of what I think I used to be.  Sometimes the representation is more extreme than what I might have been—I am not so socially inept as someone on the spectrum often is, for instance.  But on the whole the actor hits again and again at the plight, if I might be dramatic about it, that I used to find myself in.

There are other aspects of the characters enacted by the actor that are much more dubiously like what I used to be.  Again without exception, the social marginality of the characters make it possible for them not simply to observe the world around them, but to understand that world from which they are excluded by their own awkwardness, and then to use the understanding to tweak the world, to make it more tolerant, more embracing of difference, more humane than is usually humanly possible.  I recognize, of course, that the dynamic of marginal person converting the world to tolerance is a filmic trope, indeed a pretty sentimental filmic trope.  But this actor deploys the shtick marvelously well, and so convinces me, at least, that he is exactly what I would imagine myself to have wanted to be—the removes from reality of that sentence reflect, perhaps, the removes from reality of the actor as himself vs. the characters he enacts.

What attracts me about the actor, in other words, is the illusion he creates of a person who I imagine myself to have wished to be.  He is an image of myself young and hopeful and uncynical.  He is everything that I wish I could still be, even knowing that this decrepit age of mine is tied to me as to a dog's tail.  Given the wonders of modern social media, I also can see that the actor himself, although not even close to being marginal in his world, and absolutely not inept in his relation to others, is nonetheless a kind, caring, considerate, humble young man.  Or at least that is what he seems to be like because, as is always the case with puppy love, I have no actual contact with the young man, so all I know is what I observe at a distance, as was true with Sally in fifth grade, with whom I spoke perhaps once or twice in my life.  I am in "love," then, with the image of an ideal person that, perhaps having no bearing on reality at all, nonetheless represents the ghost of the person that I think I might have possibly been had circumstances been different from what they actually were.  He is, finally, what Freud would call my ego ideal.

So I am in "love" with an image of myself that never existed other than in my imaginary reconstruction of what I never was.  That is exactly the same thing as happens in regard to the young woman of my freshman year in college and as happened in regard to Sally back in fifth grade.  I didn't know Sally any more than I know the afterlife of the young woman or the life of the actor.  I do know what I project from myself and see in Sally, and in the young woman, and in the young actor.  And that is what puppy love is all about.  It is, in fact, simply narcissism writ simultaneously large and small.  It is large because the feeling is enormously powerful.  I absolutely want to connect—with Sally, with the young woman, with the actor—in so overwhelming a way that, in the midst of the desire, I am sometime made desolate in knowing that such connection is both impossible and, in fact, silly to want.  It is small because, after all, puppy love is childish foolery with no real significance beyond the revelation that, old fart though I am, I am still self-centered, if not always then at least sporadically.

Maybe I will fully grow up some time before I die.