AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Romantic love is the stuff of poetry and music, the plot of books and movies - the pursuit, the conflict, the resolution and the happily-ever-after. Except there's also this reality - love is work.
STEPHEN GROSZ: To me, we deceive ourselves about love. I think for psychoanalysts like myself - well, for most people - they know they've had experiences where they've not seen very clearly the who, what and why of who they love. They've come with great hopes or great fears. They get things wrong.
RASCOE: That's Stephen Grosz - yes, a psychoanalyst, and author of the new book "Love's Labour."
GROSZ: We have the ability to undo self-deception and to see clearly. And what I think of as love's labor is the work we must do to see clearly ourselves and the people we love.
RASCOE: OK. We already done got really deep. You tell stories about some of your patients, with their permission and with pseudonyms. How did you choose which stories to include?
GROSZ: Well, the book is really a collection of hard-won truths that I've arrived at with my patients over many years. I've been practicing for 40 years. And to me, they're about the difficulty of finding love and keeping love. So I wanted to convey some of the things we discovered. There's a wonderful thing Kurt Vonnegut wrote about - to writers about trying to teach them how to write. He said, write from what matters to you in your heart and you want to matter to people in their hearts. And these were the stories that really mattered to me. They got to me. These are the patients where I really felt, gosh, we learned something important here. And I wanted other people to learn those things, too.
RASCOE: I want to start with Sophie, and that's one of the...
GROSZ: Right.
RASCOE: ...First stories you tell. When she came to you, what did she need help figuring out?
GROSZ: Sophie was a woman who came to me. She'd spent the weekend with her fiance, addressing their wedding invitations. And on Monday morning, he went to the mailbox and posted his 60 invitations, and she couldn't post hers. She just couldn't put them in the mailbox, and she put them in a bag under her desk at work. And by Wednesday, her friend said, you better ring somebody. Here's a therapist to ring. And she came and saw me. I saw her on that Saturday. She would love this man. She wanted to marry him, but couldn't. And what we discovered was and what she helped me to see is that love means loss. She was an only child. She was really involved with her parents. She loved them. And she found it difficult to let go, which is a major theme of the book - that all love involves letting go of something to have the new thing.
RASCOE: That was interesting because she goes to you for, like, one session.
GROSZ: Yes.
RASCOE: Then she comes back to you years later. You find out she did go through with the marriage.
GROSZ: Yes.
RASCOE: And she's trying to figure out if she should divorce him now after all these years.
GROSZ: Yes.
RASCOE: What struck me from that was that Sophie thought she only had two choices - to stay or to go.
GROSZ: She came to me, like a lot of people do. There will be a crisis in a marriage. And in my chair, sitting in the room where I'm sitting, I'm thinking, can we turn this breakdown into a breakthrough? Can we learn something from it, and not just, should you stay or should you leave? Her husband was having an affair. It turns out, actually, she sort of thinks of his affair as her get-out-of-jail-free card. She could leave now, and no one would blame her. And slowly, we begin to realize that the way she'd been in the marriage was distant, and she had never really properly married her husband.
RASCOE: Yeah. I just pointed right there 'cause I'm not a psychoanalyst, but I...
GROSZ: Yeah.
RASCOE: ...Do believe that so many people will focus on whether they stay in the marriage...
GROSZ: Yes.
RASCOE: ...But you're not even together.
GROSZ: Yeah. Ayesha, we know them. You'll know people who are more married to their work than they are to their husband or wife, and by which I mean they find their work soothing. It enlivens them. It gives them so many things. The question with Sophie was, can she now properly marry this man?
RASCOE: Sophie's story seems to have a happier ending. But then in Ravi's story, it's kind of heartbreaking. He becomes your patient when he's convinced his wife is cheating on him, but it becomes clear that this is a delusion. This is...
GROSZ: Yeah.
RASCOE: ...Something he has made up.
GROSZ: And this happens. There are some sad stories in the book, too, where I'm not able to help people. That does happen. What that story's about, in a way, was - there's a kind of envy in him of her capacity for love. And his belief that she was having an affair was actually a way of spoiling something wonderful that he was being given.
RASCOE: It made her the villain.
GROSZ: Yeah.
RASCOE: Otherwise, it felt bad to him to be loved in that way.
GROSZ: I think it did, and it's sad. I think one of the things which was important about that story was it's hard to give up a grievance. I call it the ecstasy of sanctimony. He was just always right. He was - the way he looked down on her - it's hard to come down from that and to see yourself with your own faults and to see the other person clearly. That's why I call it love's labor. The idea is, if you really love someone, you're going to see things in yourself which aren't pleasant to see. And he wasn't prepared to do that work.
RASCOE: So how hard is it to be in your shoes, where you're like, just get some help, please?
GROSZ: Yes, it is hard sometimes. Sometimes, for various reasons, people are attached to their unhappiness. They grew up, maybe, in an unhappy family. It's more familiar to them than happiness or pleasure. And therefore, because it's more familiar, it's safer and more secure, paradoxically, than trusting and loving. So occasionally, I have people who are quite stuck. And the difficulty is that they've known that so long that it's really difficult to let go of that. They can sometimes even see it intellectually, but to emotionally change is really, really hard.
RASCOE: I want to ask 'cause, I mean, I do think that the hardest thing for a lot of people - that work of letting go, that work of fully allowing someone else to see them - you know, it's like exposing your soft underbelly. They could stab you in it, right? You know?
GROSZ: It is.
RASCOE: For the people listening who are like, OK, that sounds great - surrender - how do I do that? How do I let go?
GROSZ: Well, first of all, I think it takes time. It happens by thinking about things, by, first of all, looking at yourself honestly, being thoughtful and honest to yourself about your own feelings about who you are. How does someone make you feel? I think one of the things to look at is pain. I remember a patient that I saw not that long ago who told me how much she loved someone - that she loved them, this, that and the other thing. He had to go away, abroad to work for three months, and I noticed she didn't miss him.
Pain is maybe one of the best instruments we have for knowing our heart. Are we suffering because a person is putting us down, or because we miss them because they're not there and they make us feel good? When we speak to them in the morning, do they make our heart jump, you know, in a kind of - they put us back together when we're broken up about or upset about something at work or in other parts of our life? See, it's watching all those things, looking internally at our feelings and seeing how someone makes us feel.
RASCOE: That's Stephen Grosz. His new book is "Love's Labour." Thank you so much for speaking with us today.
GROSZ: Ayesha, it's a real pleasure talking to you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
