Love that Costs Something

I just finished a short little book by Anna Gavalda. A fellow rabid reader recommended her to me about a year ago and I finally got around to reading Someone I Loved. The copy I have includes both the English and the French text, which means I felt like I read about twice as many pages as I did. That was nice for my sense of accomplishment. I also enjoyed trying to find the French pages that corresponded to the English pages I was reading and figure out why the translator wrote, for example, "beeeeeeuuuuuuutiful!" instead of "beautiful." (As it happens the French word was equally stuffed with unnecessary letters.)

This book amounts to a conversation between a woman, Chloe, and her father-in-law, Pierre. It continues over the course of several days, and when it ends the book ends. Chloe's husband, Adrien, has just left her for a younger woman. Chloe decides to take her two young daughters out of the house for a few days, and Pierre offers to escort them to his family's vacation cottage. While the girls sleep, Pierre and Chloe discuss, among other things, the roots of Adrien's unfaithfulness, Chloe's temperament, and, especially, whether or not Adriend is justified.

Pierre tells the story of Mathilde, a woman he met while working years ago and carried on a long-term, multicontinental affair with. He never left his wife, so Chloe is aghast to find this out and to learn that he could do such a thing. He seems generally unhappy with himself, but for this particular act he offers few apologies. His argument and, it would seem, the book's, is that there is some moral ambiguity between staying with your family out of honor and leaving them for your own happiness. For all of Pierre's explanations and insistence that she made him so happy and his own life did not.

Where did we get this idea that our life's goal is happiness? Or better yet, why do we define happiness as the ability to have everything we want all the time? I'm as susceptible to this attitude as the next guy, but I recognize it as a wrong one and I try not to measure my life based on it. If I have everything I want, other people necessarily won't. It's impossible for a society to exist on a foundation of collectibe self-indulgence. Even traffic laws are based on the idea that I must give up my right to do whatever I want for the interests of others. I don't understand why people accept that this is true in the most legalistic sense, but in the deepest parts of our lives we reject it in favor of our own whims. I don't mean to sound judgmental because I know that I have innumerable blind spots and that I must be living under this assumption in a variety of areas of my life, but infidelity seems to be the most appalling manifestation of it.

On my book list for this year is Real Sex, by Lauren Winner. Today I heard her speak at my church and I think what she had to say is pretty relevant to what I've just read. She talked about the fact that the reason the world believes unmarried sex is better is because our culture has come to accept that what makes sex good is when it's exciting and unexpected. The very ordinariness and stability of sex within marriage is what the world recoils from. Winner's point was that sex was mean to happen inside a stable framework because that's when it's a picture of Christ's fidelity to the church. This isn't something I understand very well, but it made a lot of sense when she said it, and it made a lot more sense than Pierre's idea that leaving his wife would have been better because then he would have been happy.

Conclusion: Someone I Loved was a good, short read, but I didn't care much for its message.