Leaving London Quietly - NOT!

My departure from London this last year was actually the cheeriest part of my whole visit there. I met “one of my most memorable characters” then. She was Lila, the housekeeper at the hostel-like place where I stayed. It was a bare-bones cubicle of a room that I'd rented. I had initially found good reviews of the place on the Internet. But then after I had booked, I looked further and found a batch of much less flattering reviews – with some people calling the place a “hell-hole, rat's nest, roach motel,” and more.

Oh dear. Also, some people said they had experienced odd prejudice when they'd checked in. One individual reported that he'd been asked his nationality. When he said he was “English,” the apparently Middle Eastern proprietors had yelled at him and said, “You're lying! You're Turkish!”

Well, this was discouraging, but as I say, I had already booked and felt committed. Actually, I wasn't too worried about the fact that the owners might be from the Middle East. Middle Eastern men usually like me because I wear long skirts, am modest, old-fashioned, and sturdily built. One man from Egypt had proposed marriage to me after only a short acquaintance because he said, “You strong! You look like you can lift a goat!”

So I went ahead. And all was well. The Middle Eastern man who greeted me was friendly enough. And the room was clean in all the ways that counted – that is, clean sheet, clean toilet, etc. And there was a TV! (There hadn't been one in the hostel where I stayed in Scotland.) The cable package they chose was an odd, apparently budget one though. I couldn't get any news. Most of the channels carried nothing but 10-year-old Judge Judy episodes.

There wasn't much housekeeping to be done in this little room. Whoever came in daily only pulled the one cover sheet and the one blanket up into place, and that was about it. I didn't get to actually meet this housekeeper until I was leaving. She was up and about, and waited with me at 7:30 in the morning for the bargain cab that the proprietors had arranged to take me to the Airport. As we were waiting, we started talking.

The woman was a small, slim, impish character with appealingly missing/skewed teeth. She told me that she was from the Philippines, but likely would never have enough money to go back there. So here she was, sort of “stuck” in London.

She identified with the fact that I had no cell phone. She said that she really didn't have one either. She jabbered on, telling me how her son had tried to instruct her in the use of a SmartPhone, but his lectures just didn't take. She had tried this and that – but had never gotten anywhere.

I was getting a little nervous standing there with her on the ground floor of this old building. (The English call that “Floor 0” – not “the First Floor). We were standing right in front of a guest room – and the woman was talking on and on quite loudly.

Sure enough – just as I was beginning to wonder if we should be doing this – the guest door opened and a tousled man stuck out his head. He rather angrily said, “Can you please keep quiet out there? Some of us are trying to sleep!”

Lila was surprisingly unapologetic. She nodded at him noncommittally, then when he closed the door, she picked up right where she had left off. She went on jabbering at the same volume.

It was hard to really think of the woman as being inconsiderate or mean. She did it with such a childlike persistence, a naif's innocent conviction of her own right-of-way. However, I very slowly backed us toward the open front door and onto the outside stairway. But even when I finally got her standing on the outside landing by the ubiquitous wrought iron fencing that lines so many London streets – I was sure her voice was still carrying back through the hotel's open door. She didn't seem to have a care in the world.

After she had finished telling me about her trials with a SmartPhone, she did acknowledge the fact that she had been asked to pipe down. But she blamed the guest. Speaking in her Philippine accent, she said, “Why he complain? It past 7:30. He should be up by now! And anyway, all night, till late, his children yelling, yelling, screaming – keeping everyone awake. It not his place to tell anyone to keep quiet. Nya, nya, nya. Keep quiet, keep quiet. It's him should keep quiet!”

Then Lila resumed talking about herself and her life, still in stentorian tones that must have carried back into the hallway and through the paper thin guest door. But the man didn't rise to complain again. And soon enough, my cab came.

By this time, Lila and I had formed quite a rapport. We hugged and kissed good-bye, hoping that our paths would cross again someday. I thanked her for her good service in my room (however much or little work that had entailed). More kissing and hugging as the cab driver helped load my luggage into the body of the cab. (They don't seem to often use the trunks or “boots” there.)

Then as I was getting in the cab, Lila called after me in imitative glee, “And remember – Keep Quiet!”

She laughed merrily, showing her slightly tangled teeth. And I laughed merrily, resonating her jolly mockery. We waved at each other one last time – and I was off, probably never to see London or Lila again.

That will be my last impression of the place – merry, impish Lila standing inside the grill-work gate on Collingham Place, poking good-natured fun at all those sticks-in-the-mud who have such a lack of joie de vivre that they still want to be sleeping at 7:30. Really – when there's a whole world out there waiting for them, waiting for us all.

Falling Prey in a London Fog

I arrived in London fogged in by a cold. Not by the cold, but by a cold/flu I personally had. So for the second time in my life, London reared up in front of me as a rather bleak prospect, a labor to be borne rather than a joy of discovery. I felt the obligation to see some of “the sights.” Every morning, off I dutifully trudged, avoiding people in order to not pass my cold on to anyone else.

Harrods was within walking distance of my hotel, so after I was pretty much well again, I made my way down Cromwell Road as it became Brompton Road. (Every street in London assumes yet another name after a few blocks, making the City an anarchy of aliases.) Mohamed Al-Fayed, disheartened after his son's death, had sold the famous store to a Qatar investment consortium. A guide had sotto voce told us that a large percentage of the prime apartments above and around stores in downtown London were owned by foreigners, principally Middle Eastern potentates. She said she had no prejudice against any foreigner per se, but what she regretted was that these flats were casual toys for outside investors. They were only occupied, at most, a few weeks a year when their owners briefly touched down in the course of making their vacation rounds. That meant most of the properties were left empty most of the time. Indeed, as I scanned the blank windows above the street-level stores, one-after-another, I did get a sense of London as a ghost town.

But in view of Harrods having changed hands, I expected – and found – the place to have changed somewhat in layout and décor since I'd last been to London. But the store still harkens back to Al-Fayed's Egyptian roots. The huge golden sphinx and various Egyptian effigies still preside over the mystical blue ascent of the store's main escalator. You still get the feeling you are going into the ultimate pharaoh’s Casbah as you rise through the store's levels. The famous food court is also as appetizing as ever. I got some very tasty salmon-avocado salad that sustained me through several days in my little walk-up cubicle of a hotel room in the Kensington District.

None of the rest of Harrods' offerings really tempted me though. Much of the merchandise struck me as being high-priced and a bit off-kilter. A simple thing such as the soup ladles in their kitchen department serves as an example. I had misplaced my ladle at home and thought one might be a likely souvenir to get from Harrods. But for the exorbitant price of 30₤ or so, all they had on offer were some plastic things, streamlined, but way too shallow for transferring soup. Almost every item I set my eyes on seemed to suffer from the same drawback. It would have served as a souvenir coming in a Harrods bag. It would have given you the cachet and conversation piece of having shopped at Harrods. But it wouldn't really have served its intended purpose.

So generally, I felt shopping at Harrods could mean paying a lot for relatively little. However, the real rip-off lay ahead of me, outside of Harrods and just down the Road. As I was walking away with my salmon salad in the green Harrods' bag it had qualified me for and which marked me as an upper crust shopper – I indeed became a mark. An effusively friendly young woman standing outside a Vera Vine salon a few doors down the street stepped forward and handed me a tiny sample packet of some lotion. Knowing this was a come-on, I was on the verge of actually handing it back to her and walking gruffly on – when she said to me in a lowered voice - “You're so pretty. All you need is a little help with those bags under your eyes. We have just the thing. Come on in. It won't cost you anything to try – right?”

Well, I had vaguely thought of having a “make-over” while I was in London. Talk about cachet! I could brag I got a new “do” on Brompton Road in London. So I was susceptible to this promise of a more limited make-over. I did have bags under my eyes. That's why I entered the Vine-Vera Salon on the heels of the girl's “Come into my parlor...” Well, you know the rest of that children's rhyme.

She immediately started fussing and fluttering around me, clearly playing off her script of how to “establish rapport.” She asked where I was from, where I was staying. She seemed a little taken aback when I mentioned what I guess is a rather seedy neighborhood in the Earl's Court District of Kensington. But apparently my Harrods' shopping bag overrode any such potential reflection on the extent of my finances. The bag had already made me a millionaire; the mention of the location of my squalid little digs merely made me an eccentric millionaire. So she plowed ahead.

While she elicited cheery details about life in my hometown of Chicago, all along expressing her hopes of going there someday (“I have a cousin who lives on the North side”) - she was prepping a syringe of flesh-colored fluid. Yes a syringe. She eventually squirted a small amount of the fluid under each of my eyes. Then she looked around, apparently in desperate need of something, and finally grabbed a copy of Elle magazine. She started to fan my face vigorously with the open magazine, hurrying along the drying of the fluid so I could appreciate the amazing results.

Well, I suppose the bags under my eyes were reduced a bit, temporarily. (I found the effect didn't last and wasn't cumulative.) But they left me no time to really assess the product's success. The young woman started to snow me with the figures – bargains and discounts and “no tax” and this and that. She finally came up with a price of what would have translated into $775.

I gasped and started to lunge out of the chair. (I had thought $7 would have been more like it.) But the girl gently settled me back and assured me, “No, no, no. That's not what you will be paying. You get the discount, the special rate, the tax taken off...” She went on and on and somewhere in the maelstrom of this heartless sales pitch, I agreed to pay $465 for that few dollars worth of what I suppose is Resveratol, that advertised skin-tightening product. The girl told me to apply it on a regular schedule for two months and voilá – I'd be a new woman.

In the midst of this blizzard of advantage that was being bestowed on me, the girl had introduced me to her associate, someone I had barely noticed at first. He'd been sitting a little distance away, bending over a counter seeming to mix potions like a medieval alchemist. Now he turned his full attention on me. I was transferred to a recliner where the fellow could peer down at me, examining my pores. I felt as if I was a specimen being examined under a magnifying glass, especially since the fellow wore thick glasses. However as he bent in to diagnose my further needs, things reversed. I felt as if he was the one being magnified. His wide, icy blue eyes ogled and enlarged as he came in close. Those eyes were disturbingly incongruous in a face that more generally appeared to indicate the fellow had some Middle Eastern background. There were those lagoons of blue where there should have been brown.

I later did learn that the man came from Jerusalem. But he didn't want to dwell on that. He too was more interested in eliciting my likes, my wishes. He asked about my preferences in music. They could play anything on their sound system. Again I think they were taken aback when I mentioned Willie Nelson and country music. Another puzzling taste for a millionaire society matron to harbor.

But I firmly told them not to bother, that I was NOT staying. Just as well because I don't think they would have been able to dig up any of the déclassé Willie Nelson. However the man had already started to slather some mud-pack over my face, so I couldn't leave. When I protested that I was NOT paying for anything further, he clucked disapproval. “I'm giving this to you,” he soothed. “You don't want to refuse a gift, do you?” This assurance was accompanied by more rapport-building and more compliments. He asked what night cream I used. When I stoutly told him, “None. I don't believe in clogging my pores,” he looked at me more intently than ever and pronounced, “You very smart. You a very, very smart woman.”

Okay. So no lotion was to be advanced on me. But he proceeded with the mud-pack treatment. He massaged the warm clay compound into my cheeks, gently around my eyes, on and on. All the while, he was issuing Mediterranean murmurings of encouragement.

Well, I'll cut this description short, just as I was soon to be cut short. After the mud-pack had been washed away, I made it clear I was leaving. As I stopped at the counter to get my receipt, the man plopped a package of the mud-pack preparation in the bag that already contained the Resveratol syringe pack. He plopped in a few more unidentified accessories after that and started to ring up my new total to the tune of an additional 400₤ or so.

When I almost literally shrieked “No, no – the eye bag remover is IT!” - all the practiced bonhomie was gone. There was no more cajoling conversation. He clamped shut with a clang as cold as a cash register. He took the mud-pack box out of the bag they'd prepared for me and SLAMMED it on the counter. He took the “bonus” accessories out of the bag and slammed them one-by-one down like bullets hitting plate glass – BAM, BAM, BAM! It was a decisive shattering of all all those previous pronouncements of “How pretty! How smart!” I was dismissed with ultimate disdain.

I'd been dispatched from the shop so quickly that the girl, maintaining more of the demeanor of a high school student running for class President – had to come running trippingly after me down the street. There was an addendum to my receipt I needed in order to be able to claim back the VAT I'd been charged. So I'd had been charged tax after all (which, come to think of it, has never been rebated despite the forms I filled out).

So I schlepped back to my lodgings, filled with sour reflections. All the savings I'd made by booking a cheap hotel room had been wiped out with this pointless purchase. I might as well have stayed in luxury at the Connaught. Why, when there is so much honest work to be done, work that could lift people to more joyous, improved circumstances- why then do people waste their own and other people's lives as telemarketers, as scam artists, as high-pressure peddlers of almost worthless goods? Why did I always have such a bleak experience of London? Here was London, presumably one of the most creatively alive cities in the world, yet I always seemed to end up a beaten dog in it. Dr. Johnson had said “When you're tired of London, you're tired of life.” Did all this defeat signal that I was really tired of life?

Most of all though I reflected on why, why, I so often allowed myself to get taken by such hucksters. A few years before, I'd paid five-times any reasonable price to have some laminate flooring installed. After that, I had sworn that I would never buckle to any sales pressure again. And here I was, with my $465 syringe of eye cream. I could even more readily sympathize with people who confess to crimes they didn't commit under pressure from insistent, insinuating detectives.

Why didn't I have the strength to stand firm against these cheesy blandishments? I rationally knew from the first moment that I'd fallen in with a ruthless grab for money. So why didn't I, Nancy Reagan-style - “Just say 'No!'” - to all of it?

Well, like so many of us, I get intimidated. Perhaps I, more than most though, always have the specter of the Holocaust, of all Holocausts, hanging in front of me. I have a sense of how a congenial neighbor one moment can transform into a vicious tormenter the next, if you show the slightest divergence from what they want and expect of you, if you give the least little hint that you are not really “one of them.” Whenever I think I might be paranoid, exaggerating this kind of danger beyond all bounds, I recall how the son of a friend of mine was cruelly ostracized from his school group because his father had sent him with lunch sandwiches on whole wheat bread – instead of the then-peer-approved white bread. At the time, I couldn't believe it, but I've gotten older. On such small infractions hangs the fellowship of the pack.

Although I often suspect such grand justification is really hiding what's just plain cowardice on my part. I'm simply too week-kneed to stand up for myself. But in any case, I don't think intimidation necessarily plays the largest part in my being rooked any number of times.

Some people no doubt get taken because they want to impress the salesperson. They don't want to lose face when the pitchman slyly implies that the goods he's peddling are likely to be outside the range of what his mark can afford. No, for me that isn't a factor. I'm perfectly willing to admit I booked the cheapest room I could find in London, that I drive a 1984 Toyota, and that almost everything in life, financial and otherwise, is in some sense “beyond me.”

For many it's a matter of being liked. They don't want to lose the faux friendship that the salesperson has fabricated. They don't want to prove themselves unworthy and rupture that bond that they've convinced themselves has been formed. But again, I don't think such a motive played a big part in my case. I knew from the first moment that there was no friendliness there, much less friendship – that there was not even any liking that could transpire between us. I would go back home and never see them again. So it didn't matter.

But I've come to believe that the real motive for my buying something that I don't want and that I deep-down know isn't any good – is actually the reverse of the above motive. Instead of my doing it in order to be liked – I do it in order to like. I do it in order to continue feeling positive about these other individuals. I try to hang onto some hope that they are actually trustworthy, sincere people and that it actually would be in my best interests to buy that product they are advancing. I want to prolong that moment of self-delusion. I want to maintain some shred of belief in the essential goodness of others. And so I rush into a “Yes, Okay,” even though I know rationally that I'm faced with a cold, calculating machine. But for that moment I want to blind myself to that truth. I want to approve. I want to say “Yes,” not only to their product and to them, but I want to say “Yes!” to the all of it. I want to be able, in that moment, to render a large affirmation of all of life.

It's probably the same with all those Academy Award winners who gush out a long list of “Thank-you's” to everyone who worked on the movie with them. In actuality, the movie set had likely been riddled with back-stabbing, up-staging, grand-standing, temper tantrums, and every kind of ill-will and misunderstanding imaginable. But in the moment of their triumph, buoyed into positive energy by their victory as high as if they had just drunk a double Starbuck's latte – the world seems a bright and shining place to these winners. They want to capture and hold onto that moment of ebullience. And suddenly, the list of people they felt obligated to thank becomes a list of people they sincerely see in a glow of beneficence. They see nothing but good intent and themselves as the recipients of miraculous gifts of generosity. They want to affirm everyone's goodness in this best of all possible worlds and to stamp the moment as a moment of grace with their overflowing gratitude. They want to issue a cosmic “Thank-you” - a cosmic “YES”

So I have, not an Academy Award, but a $500 syringe (not a tube mind you) of eye lotion on my dresser in Chicago. It sits there, too expensive to throw away, too ineffective to use. It sits there, a thing that vaguely tainted my time in London and that now vaguely taints the atmosphere in my bedroom. It's a reminder of my perennial inability to rebuff what should be rebuffed. It sits there – and I still have bags under my eyes.

Looking for My Father - 100 Years Too Late

For the second time in my life, I visited London, and for the second time in my life, I arrived there with the veil of a bad cold obscuring my view of the City. My arrival this time had been at the end of a long formal tour I'd taken of the Hebrides Islands and then of the English Midlands. So I was fairly ragged from having been shuttling between planes, trains, and automobiles, for several weeks by the time I straggled into London.

I had booked a small room in the neighborhood I'd visited before – off of Cromwell Road in the Kensington District. The room was little more than a hostel-like rectangle in an old, run-down building. But its proprietors were friendly and the location was perfect for my purposes. I was too sickly by then to pursue any of the ambitious touring plans I'd made. Forget about high tea at the Mandeville Hotel. Forget about re-visiting the ravens at the Tower of London, or seeing another court case in the Old Bailey. Forget about trying to reserve a ticket to tour Parliament.

Instead I decided I'd limit myself to places I could walk to and could view casually, withdrawing from if I got a big sniveling, coughing fit. That meant concentrating on the museums that were near me. There were plenty of those, although I was a little disappointed that that was what my precious little time in London would devolve into – because after all, I had plenty of world-class museums in my hometown of Chicago, places I too often neglected because they were always there, available to me.

But museums it was. The first one I queued up for was the Science Museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington. I immediately found something more interesting, more distinctively British than I'd anticipated. The Museum was featuring a special exhibit commemorating the Battle of Passchendaele in World War I. (The Battle is more often known as the Battle of Ypres in the U.S.)

England suffered even more from World War I than America did. A higher percentage of Britain's generation of young men were killed or maimed in battle. It was the defining event for the writers, especially the poets, of that era. It turned the mood of society from the exuberance of the technological progress being made by the Industrial Revolution – to one of melancholy over the loss and cruelty of the world.

A large part of the Museum exhibit was devoted to the prostheses that were developed for injured soldiers. The artificial arms and legs look rickety by modern standards. The different masks designed to cover face injuries gave a Phantom of the Opera aspect to the exhibit. But the glass eyes looked astonishingly realistic. They had a case of them, all staring up at me with different, disturbing angles.

However it was the photographs that I was drawn to – the soldiers getting ready to depart, the soldiers lined up for training, the soldiers in gas masks, the soldiers in the thick smoke and twisted barbed wire of the battlefield, the soldiers lying shattered on the field and on crude stretchers.

I haunt these photos of World War I wherever I come upon them, always trying to find my father among the troops, always trying to garner some scrap of knowledge about who my father was. My father fought in that War. His only ostensible injury was a mangled thumb, which he said had been “shot off,” but which, like Al Capone's scar, my mother and I suspected had actually come from some much less heroic participation.

I knew that my father had gotten horribly sick overseas, almost dying from something that was vaguely diagnosed as “pneumonia.” It's only been in the last decade or so that I have come to realize he probably had the flu – the infamous influenza that caused the nearly worldwide epidemic of 1918, killing millions. It's been said that early victims were soldiers fighting in Europe, who then, on their return, brought the plague to American shores and to their other native countries. We have a picture of my father looking impossibly pale and frail and young in his uniform, unrecognizable as the stocky, whiskey-coarsened man I knew.

The only other information I had about my father's wartime experience was that he served in the Signal Corp and was assigned to the Dog Training Unit there. I have two further pictures of him from that period, showing him sitting rather bemused, surrounded by a mix of German Shepherds and Rottweilers. We always joked that it looked more as if the dogs were about to attack him rather than any enemy.

This London exhibit did provide me with some additional insight into what my father's dog training activities might have involved. I'd always assumed that dogs would only have been used to attack enemies or to carry messages. But I found that they might have been given a much larger role to play. It was explained that dogs were trained to go out in the field and rip certain insignia off of the uniforms of fallen soldiers and bring those swatches back base camps. They'd tear off one identifying swatch if the soldier was still alive – a different serial number swatch if he was dead. That way, rescue and medical care could be attempted for those who might still profit from it. It was sort of macabrely humorous to think how a man's access to help might depend on a dog's diagnosis of his condition. But in any case, the names of all those left out in the field, living and dead, could be known.

I spent most of my time in that exhibit though searching through the sepia faces of the soldiers. Of course most of the photos were of British troops, but photos of troops from America, Canada, Australia and other countries, were also inevitably included. Once again, I wished I had a magnifying glass to see the bygone faces better. Would I know my father if I saw him, one among that sea of stricken visages? Why would it matter?

No, I didn't see any trace of him, but I will look again, at other World War I photos as they come my way. That's because I know almost nothing about my father's life before I was born. He would never give any biographical detail. Whenever I'd ask him anything – about his history, his opinions, his philosophy – he'd make some coarse joke and walk away. He was about as far from being “verbal” as a person could get. And that, more than anything else, is what I held against him. While most young people chafe at how strict their parents are, or how controlling, or how misunderstanding – my brief with my father was that he was no raconteur. To me, one of the prime reasons for family is the opportunity it offers for an intimate exchange of each others' lives. I lived to wrap the events of my day up in a package and come home and present the package as a gift of myself. I waited to hear my parents do the same. But in my father's case, it was never going to happen.

So I've been left to hunt for him through street scenes of Chicago of the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's – hoping to catch a glimpse of where he might have been, what he might have been doing in those distant days. And before that, I scour pictures of the soldiers of World War I. I thought how fading and futile and somehow ironic it was to be standing there - in the dimness of a London museum, one hundred years after the fact – searching for clues to my father.

A Love Letter from Fromm

When I was in high school, Erich Fromm was all the rage. A serious psychologist and philosopher, he did, for a short time, enter popular culture and become the man to read for “relationship” advice. Girls were delving into his book, The Art of Loving, seeking some affirmation of their feelings. Boys could also occasionally be found paging through the book, but clearly because they were misled by the title into thinking the book might be some modern Kama Sutra.

I was grateful for the book because it was the only writing I ever found that articulated my distaste for all the assumptions that people were bringing to the dating/marriage scene. Unfortunately, Fromm didn't seem to have much impact on how people actually behaved when seeking a mate. And now, his wisdom seems to have been forgotten altogether. I never hear any modern relationship gurus even remotely acknowledging his insights. In fact, most of the advice currently being dispensed on how to find a man, a woman, a soul-mate, etc. - actually ends up flying in the face of all of Fromm's recommendations.

Current relationship counsel is often based on how to more effectively act on attraction. Most of our discourse seems to legitimate attraction as the primary motive force in establishing a relationship. But it was precisely this kind of involuntary attraction that Fromm made a case against.

When I was a child, I was fascinated by a set of magnetic dogs my aunt had on her knick-knack shelf. When you positioned the dogs a few inches apart, facing each other, you could feel the space between them taking on a strength of its own. As you brought the dogs closer – WHOOSH! Their pull towards each other overcame my feeble attempts at keeping them apart. They mashed together, nose-to-nose. However, when you turned one of the dogs around, you got the opposite feeling. It was as if there was an invisible fluffy pillow between the dogs, rounding them, spilling them away from each other.

It's just that sort of force that people use as a criterion for engaging romantically with someone else. If that feeling of attraction is there – they approach. If it's not “Don't waste my time.” They feel attraction as something pushing them from the outside. It happens to them. They have nothing to say about it. “I can't help it. I like bad boys.” “And there she was. I saw here across the room in that tight red mini-skirt – and I was gone.”

People declare these reactions proudly, as if it were laudable to be out of control. They entertain, encourage, and lose themselves to these transports. They are driven and are not the drivers. They revel in being relieved of all responsibility for the outcome. They “fall in;” they “fall for” - as if love were a ditch they skidded into. But that kind of compulsive, addictive response was the very thing that Fromm fought against our using as the basis for long-lasting relationships, for real love.

Yes, it's true that we perhaps can't really help whom we are initially attracted to – for whom we feel a frisson of excitement, whether it's sexual excitement or the excitement of inspiration – or just a plain feeling of WOW! But then after that first moment of involuntary thrill, something more wholly at our discretion should operate. Contrary to the often-heard powerlessness of the statement, “Well, you can't help who you fall in love with” - there should come the empowerment of a recognition that you CAN help whom you love. Even more to the point, you CAN help with whom you maintain a loving relationship.

I never had much patience with the “I couldn't help myself” approach. I was especially puzzled by the kind of involuntary abandonment I heard people idly effecting in the wake of their pronouncements that, “I'm sorry. I just don't love you any more. I'm sorry, I've just fallen out of love with you.” I have even gone so far as to be puzzled by people of one sexual orientation leaving a partner in order to “hook up” with people who match some newly liberated sexual quest.

So what if you're not sexually attracted to someone? That doesn't mean you can't thrillingly, profoundly love that person. That's because love, according to Erich Fromm and according to my sense of things, is not a compelled response to sexual excitement or to the excitement generated by a charismatic character. It's not a response to any kind of compulsive force acting outside ourselves and beyond our control. It's the opposite of the kind of involuntary action featured in romantic fiction and assumed in TV/Internet counseling sessions. It's not being swept off your feet. It's not getting hooked or having your attention grabbed. It shouldn't be like the plot of one of those horror movies in which a hanged criminal's hand is transplanted onto a good man's arm and then takes over the man's personality – maniacally pulling its new possessor into frenzied displays of genius and diabolism – pulling him to commit murder.

Along with Fromm, I revolt at the notion that love is a switch – snap it on – snap it off. I rebel against justifications such as, “I just wasn't that into her” - “He just didn't turn me on” - “He just didn't grab me” - “She just wasn't my type.”

In other contexts, being a type is recognized as something undesirable. Actors bemoan their fate when they have been typecast. Once that happens to them, they can't any longer portray a full range of emotions. They are forever confined to producing duplicates of the man you love to hate, of the sex kitten, of the smart-Alec, of the ditzy blonde, of the loner – of whatever type brought them to their first fame. Similarly, it's recognized that being stereotyped or, in turn, of stereotyping people is a bad thing. But strip these words of their prefixes and suffixes and you are left with “type.” Then somehow it becomes, not only acceptable, but understandable, and even advisable, to operate on the basis of types.

But having such specifications is not only superficial, it can actually be the perverse of love. When you look beneath the assembly line surface of these specifications, you often find what are in fact, not only prejudices, but the even more confining strains of fetishes. When I read the love-match ad of a man looking for that “sassy brunette who will challenge me and put me in my place” I catch a whiff of someone who is bound to bondage. The woman who writes “I'm looking for an exciting, take-charge guy” seems bound to be someone who won't have the freedom to walk away from abusive, demeaning treatment. She'll be stuck there, pegged to the excitement, unpredictability, and drama, of whatever awaits her.

However, having said all this, I do have to acknowledge that there can be an argument made for following one's impulsive, compulsive attraction to someone. A study done years ago found that marriages triggered by some instant attraction to some superficial feature – lasted as long or longer and were as happy or happier than marriages that had followed long, laborious explorations of compatibility.

I hear about marriages that resulted from that sort of instant Romeo and Juliet attraction all the time. These types of relationships are most often instigated by men who, as the cliché goes, fall in love with their eyes (while women fall in love with their ears). For men, it's often a mere glimpse at a distance that does it. It's the sight of a Bo Derek 10 that captures them. So I hear over and over again some version of, “I saw her walk by wearing one of those fuzzy Lana Turner sweaters that were so popular back in the day – and I knew she was the one for me.”

My own grandfather was launched into marriage by just such an attraction. He owned a market in Chicago and would look out his big plate glass window at the people on the street. Once, twice, he saw a girl walk by on her way to work. (As it turned out, she was going to her job as an assistant to Oscar Meyer, who was just then starting up the ladder of success to what became his meat processing empire.) This was well before the era of Lana Turner sweaters. My grandmother was walking along in an ankle-length dress with a foundation of crinoline. She was always starched and laced and frilly. My grandfather saw this vision of “the perfect lady” wafting by his store window. Without ever having said a word to her, he pointed and declared to his workers, “That's the girl I'm going to marry!”

And so it was. Their way of getting together is considered a romantic idyll, an allowing of an instant, fated moment to take hold. In actuality, while I think they had a happy enough marriage, I sense it was one of separate lives. My grandmother fulfilled her role, cooking and cleaning. My grandfather came home from his meat market and sat in the parlor smoking his cigar. There was a certain prescribed estrangement to their relationship. However, one could call it a “good” marriage.

Many couples have gotten together based on such instant presumptive decisions. There are famous couples whose lives together clicked in one such moment of initiating attraction. One example that stands out in my mind is that of Will and Ariel Durant, the couple who “made” history together, collaborating on writing prize-winning history books for almost five decades. On a talk show late in his life, Will Durant confessed that it had been love at first sight for him. He was a teacher in a New York middle school when he'd been taken by one of his students. She was fourteen, he was twenty-seven. She sat in the front row of his class looking up adoringly at him. But it wasn't so much her adoring presence in his class that had first attracted him. He had seen her walking across campus, lithe and long-legged, like the “Ariel” he eventually re-named her – and wearing a fetching little red cap. It was those legs, that cap that had snagged him.

The two were married the following year, with the girl's mother standing by to attest that she'd given permission for “her child” to be wed. Today of course that sort of relationship would be deemed highly inappropriate, tantamount to pedophilia. But the union became one of the most enduring and inspiring ones on record. Will and Ariel collaborated on their writing and on making a life together for over sixty years.

So yes, I have to admit, such involuntary attractions can be successful – if the one to whom a person is attracted turns out to be relatively sane and congenial, and if the one who was attracted is similarly on an even keel, and if both have the ability to stick by that initial attraction and make it the spark that lights an eternal flame (if I might be allowed a bit of purple prose).

One of the positive aspects of acting on and sticking to some such initial attraction is that it isn't the result of a chain of assessments that then drags on into the indefinite future. It isn't judicial, causing the person to sit on high and issue an unending series of opinions about the case the person is presenting as a potential mate. Someone who has truly been ignited by some detail of another person doesn't behave like the people in the Seinfeld sitcom.

I enjoyed the Seinfeld series more than anything, but it's true that most of the time, the Seinfeld gang were assessors. They would constantly register the pros amd cons they were finding about people they dated, delivering a ticker tape update on their findings. “Well, she's pretty, but she eats her peas one a time! I can't be with someone like that.” “Or, she's smart, but she has such big man-hands!.” Or “Can you imagine? She actually likes the Docker commercials!”

By contrast, the Will Durants of the world are all-in from the start. Will had been instantly, irresistibly taken with that little girl with the red cap, and that was it. Case closed. What's appealing and positive about that approach is that it's unconditional. It can come closest to being like a mother's love – a love that says you're mine, and therefore I love you, no matter what – forever.

Ariel Durant's legs surely stopped being so long and unblemished as she approached her nineties. And she likely never wore a red cap again in her later years. But it didn't matter. That first image of her walking to her classes was indelible in Will. It was the lighthouse that stood over all the cragginess of decades of marriage, shining out over the waters, calm and rough. (A bit more purple prose.)

The Durants' way of getting together was more like Joe E. Brown's unconditional enthusiasm in the movie Some Like It Hot. The classic last line of that film illustrates the appeal of instant attraction. There's nothing Jack Lemon could do to kill Brown's ardor for him. Even after Jack Lemon said that he smoked all the time, smoked like a chimney, Joe E. Brown wasn't fazed. Even after Lemon sighed that he “could never have children – Joe E. Brown wasn't dissuaded. Finally, when Lemon delivered what he considered would be the coup de gras to Brown's ardor, when Lemon revealed that he was actually a man – Joe E. remained breezily, blithely committed, because after all, “Nobody's perfect.”

How wonderful to be married to someone like that – someone who couldn't be moved off the mark of their affection, no matter what - someone whose first impression had locked them in. So, I guess like a proper Oxford debater, I have prepared a case for both sides of the issue. Conscious decision versus chemistry. That instant chemistry side of the debate is certainly appealing, with all of Hollywood backing it as the way people should get together.

And yet, and yet, my heart still sides with Fromm – with self-determination. I want the freedom of nurture to win out over the force of nature. I want a slow growth of affection to win out over the unreasoning rush of Romeo and Juliet.

As per the title of Fromm's book, I feel love should truly be an art. It should be a decision we consciously make, not a reflexive reaction. Take the example of a painter. We wouldn't want his works to be the result of uncontrollable spasms of his arm. We want and assume his creations to be the result of some thoughtful, controlled expression of himself. Through training, skill, practice, and talent – we want him to give tangible form to some emotion or thought that was profoundly personal but previously inchoate.

So like Fromm, I want love to be an active process, not passive submission to some impersonal force such as magnetism, propulsion, or gravity. I agree with Fromm that true love is a decision that is within the power of each of us to make and to maintain. Without meaning to sound too Nietzsche-like about it – I want love to be a supreme act of the will.

I want love to be based on an art we develop rather than on an artifact that arrests our development by snagging our attention – an artifact such as a red cap on a passing teenager. Loving is best when it's a matter of listening, taking an interest, discovering a person anew each day, taking pains with her when she needs help, affiliating with him because of a reasoned, whole-hearted commitment to his essential goodness and to the goodness the two of us can build together.