It’s November 1989 and Sophie is engaged to be married. Nick, her fiancé, has sent his half of the wedding invitations. Her half of the invitations, all 60 of them, remain in a carrier bag under her desk at work. She can’t bring herself to mail them, and she’s not sure why. It’s not that she doesn’t love him—she does, she can’t wait to get married—but still, the invitations stay at the office. Eventually, a friend puts her in touch with the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, hoping that he might be able to tell her why.
During a long and curious consultation, Sophie unpacks her childhood and the ways in which loss—which is, in some ways, another word for “change”—had threatened her family unit. It wasn’t that she was afraid of marriage, per se, but perhaps she was afraid of the losses that marriage might entail.
Because loss, as Grosz points out to me over Zoom some 35 years later, is fundamental to life, and also love. “Development, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is losing something that you don’t want to lose [in order] to have the new thing.” When it comes to making that sort of exchange, some are more reluctant than others. Sophie mailed her invitations the weekend after that initial consultation.
Grosz’s new book, Love’s Labor, recounts this and many other sessions from the past few decades of his work as a psychoanalyst. We’re introduced to people who’ve had affairs; who’ve found themselves embroiled in on-off, off-on relationships; who’ve destroyed their relationships with paranoia; who keep dating different versions of the same person. If Grosz’s first book, The Examined Life, was all about his patients’ personal lives and struggles, Love’s Labor—which is written in a similar way, as a series of case studies—is much more interested in his patients’ approach to love, specifically. Why might we behave in the ways we do, and what might that say about all of us?
As someone who is incredibly obsessed with other people’s personal lives and the minutiae of their relationships, I couldn’t wait to pick Grosz’s brain. Here’s everything we spoke about.
Vogue: Why did you decide to write this book?
Stephen Grosz: This book came to me because I realized that, with my patients, we were arriving at things which were very different from how people ordinarily think about love. People come and tell me stories. That’s how psychoanalysis works, too, because, when my students read case histories, it’s the story-ness of it that really gets you, so it has to be written as a story too. I started thinking that I want to write in this area, in love, and really about the work of it.
You’ve mentioned that, over the course of a marriage, you’ll go through phases of hating each other. Why do you think some people choose to get divorced, while others see it through?
Quite interestingly, I have men come into my room—more often men—who have been remarrying different women, but what they should have done is remarry the woman they started with.
In many instances, [divorce] is probably a good idea—I can’t judge. But sometimes, there’s the possibility of people really changing and breaking through the false narrative they’ve generated around themselves about the other person. And if you can do that, you can then remarry [that same person]. This isn’t how most books talk about marriage, so I wanted to. That’s what I was seeing my patients do. They were teaching me, in fact, about all of this.
So maybe the marriages that last the longest are those in which two people allow each other to change.
Well, there’s love, there’s friendship, there’s surrender, there’s the capacity to see the opposite point of view, to even start with that and say, “Yeah, maybe she’s right.” I’ve had patients say that they were in the middle of an argument and then their analysis breaks in and they [realize] that they want to listen. That’s incredibly moving to me, when people can internally start seeing the other person’s point of view.
When you’re seeing a patient, can you tell when their marriage is going to end in divorce?
These psychologists, the Gottmans, talk about the “four horsemen of the apocalypse” [criticism, contempt, stonewalling, and defensiveness]. And what’s interesting about that is that you don’t need to listen to hours of a couple talking to each other; you can take this micro-slicing of a few minutes and hear in people’s voices the contempt. You can even get undergraduates at university to listen and rate the contempt, and it’s a predictor of divorce.
But what’s interesting, and I think sometimes people don’t understand this, is couples [don’t want to get divorced] because they’ve been fighting. It’s often because they don’t like the person they’ve become. They look at themselves and think, God, I’m shouting, I’m mean, I feel guilty, I don’t like being like this. They divorce because of the person they are.
Would you say that’s the reason a lot of people cheat on their partners, as well? They want to experience a more fun version of themselves?
Good question. I think it’s infinite. Sometimes [cheating] has helped the marriage. Both marriages have difficulties, and then there’s this other relationship that allows these people to stay in these marriages. If you drew a line and added it up, the husband and the boyfriend equal one pretty good husband. The boyfriend’s really sexy and loving and listens, and the husband’s really stable and good with the kids. I’ve seen people be stable for many years in these relationships. Why people do this [differs]. Some people do it out of anger, resentment, but it can be many different reasons, honestly.
One of the things from my book which surprises people is that I’m not really interested in helping people—what we’re about is trying to understand. Modern psychoanalysis isn’t concerned with who you’re in love with, or it being good or right. We’re interested in understanding why your desire is shaped the way it is, why you’re doing the things you’re doing, your relationship to pleasure, your relationship to suffering. Many people have a profound attachment to suffering and staying in unhappy relationships and so a lot of my work is trying to figure out why. It can be familiar and therefore “safe”—that’s very common. If a friend came to you with something terrible, you might want to help them get out of that relationship. But they might get into a worse relationship, something even more terrible. My job as a psychoanalyst is to understand what they’re doing and why, so it’s down to them, the choices that they make.
To what degree can we rewire our brains? How elastic are we as people, in your experience?
It’s a great question and it’s so variable. Right now, my youngest patient is 19 and my oldest is 97, so I see a lot of different kinds of people. People can be very elastic. Sometimes just a couple of hours with someone, or several short meetings, can really get someone moving in a different way. There are other people who are really fixed on something, even something very painful, because it’s familiar, because it’s safe, even though they consciously see it’s a terrible thing to do.
Sometimes people surprise me: they’ve been a certain way for a long time and an event happens and they change. And you realize that there was one thing, an unwritten or unconscious thing, which was the key that would release them.
One thing I find super fascinating is how our childhood experiences shape how we approach love. How far back are we talking? Can our experiences as babies still be felt today?
I look at life, as an analyst, as a series of losses. One of the key themes of the book is how loss is at the core of love. You give up the womb to have the breast, you give up the breast to have solid food, you let go of the warmth of your mother to go to nursery school. Development, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is losing something that you don’t want to lose [in order] to have the new thing.
If you really love someone, you’re either going to separate and divorce or die. It’s a sure thing. It’s not like there’s some other way out, a Hollywood ending where love is everlasting. Love is so powerful because it’s weaker than death. It’s not that it lasts forever—it doesn’t.
But do you think that sometimes an awareness of that can be too present? Like, I don’t think that love is going to last forever, I think that every day is another day closer to death.
That’s probably why you write. Most of the writers I know are really sensitive and alert to that. Writing is taking moments in time and recording them. What you’re doing is interesting from an analytic point of view. But in my experience, that helps us to live better.
Helen Vendler wrote this wonderful book called Last Looks, Last Books, where poets look at their life and their personal extinction, and she has this view that holding those two in mind creates some of the greatest poetry. That the capacity to be aware of your mortality and be aware of your life, those things together help us to love better, live better, see the world more realistically. To see ourselves and the people we love, the world we love, more clearly. It leads to feeling grateful.
Your whole book is about love. Love is a strange thing to define. How do you define such a word?
I like what [novelist and philosopher] Iris Murdoch said: “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love is the discovery of reality.” To me, the great task of love, the great task of life, is to see ourselves clearly, and to see the people we love clearly, and that’s really hard. We’re wildly self-deceiving—we tell ourselves stuff all the time that isn’t true—so it’s a big job. That’s what the book is all about: undoing that self-deception.
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