What couples pay attention to
A new parent watches their child’s gaze, waiting for the moment the child sees them. The infant also learns to watch their parent’s gaze and pretty soon they begin to track one another’s gaze; what do you see? What is that thing? Who came into the room? It is one of the earliest games a parent and infant play. There is a powerful satisfaction in attending together with a loved one. This is a developmental process but one that is developed dyadically, in great intimacy. I have written here about how intense our responses to a loved one’s face and in particular, their eyes, can be. But I have been thinking recently about the degree to which shared attention is a part of the life of a couple.
As well as being a meditation on identity and writing, D.T. Max’s piece, Magic Realism, in this week’s New Yorker is an amazing portrait of a marriage. After the writer H. G Carrillo died in 2020, his husband, Dennis vanEngelsdorp discovered that, except for his birth date and that he had four siblings, everything that his husband had told him about his life growing up was a lie. Carrillo was a fabulist or - less kindly - a compulsive liar.
But in Max’s telling vanEngelsdorp isn’t angry or even very hurt by his late husband’s lies.
He recalled that Carrillo had once told him he’d sold a vase they’d bought together for a big profit, but never produced the money. Shortly afterward, vanEngelsdorp found the vase in a dresser drawer. He described the terror on his husband’s face when he saw him making this discovery: “It was just so clear. There was panic in his eyes.” He decided then that he could tolerate some myths. “If you need me to believe that you sold the vase - I mean, why wouldn’t I give that to you?”
Every relationship involves some degree of selective attention. What is this vase doing here? Why wouldn’t I look away? A successful relationship involves some degree of mutuality in regards to attention; see in me (and in the world) what I want to be seen by you and see it the way I want you to see it, or at least don’t see it in a way that is injurious to me.
Lies particularly create the possibility to be the focus of negative attention, but most people who have been in a long-term relationship, even those who aren’t prone to lying, know the feeling of terror that they are about to be revealed to their partner as ugly, disgusting, contemptible. Many of us know the feeling of relief and gratitude when our partner tastefully looks at something, anything, else. That isn’t so different from the times in early courtship when we show our new love something we delight in and find that they too are interested (or at least willing to play along).