Columns Rites of Passage
There Are Things No One Can Tell You About How to Live
I had a sense, unvoiced, that living well and loving steadfastly were one and the same. I translated that sense into certainty: Marriage would make me Good.
The man I almost married, nobody could tell him anything.
This impressed me, then.
He was a libertarian, a self-professed virtue ethicist, a capitalist, a Californian. He had been raised evangelical, homeschooled in splendid isolation in his sprawling garden, somewhere between his family’s tennis court, his family’s gazebo, his family’s pool. His name was Biblical. It suggested humility. He spoke often, longingly, of changing it.
He had been raised, he said, to walk humbly, to accept authority unquestioningly. His parents had hoped that he’d become a prophet. He’d worried, as a child, that his natural pride might render him instead the Anti-Christ. He knew better now.
He’d gone to college, discovered Tai Chi, discovered Jordan Peterson. He’d learned to code. He knew you could hack your brain into feeling a sense of wonder about the universe, and so it wasn’t God, exactly, that made you feel that there was something out there bigger than you were. He’d read the Bay Area Rationalists, he told me, those transcendent and libertarian men. He’d even engineered some of their New York meetups. They hadn’t been able to tell him anything, either. He had, rather (he said) come to all his ideas about Virtue and the Good independently, through his own personal and extensive study of the Western philosophical tradition. Nobody had given them to him.
His life’s dream was to build an app that would use his research into human psychology in order to tell people how to live their lives. People would type in their problems—educational, financial, theological. The app would tell them how to live.
I wanted him to tell me how to live.
I made my trade in uncertainty. I had a doctorate in theology, and ten years of inquiry had left me no surer of Good than when I’d started. I had been raised in the mires of moral relativism—my mother, an Upper East Sider who was culturally Jewish and socially Episcopalian, encouraged me to choose a church based on what prestigious preschools it would get my future children into, and worried frequently that my choice of degree would leave me bereft at cocktail parties, “when other people look over your shoulder to talk to someone more important.”
It is the most unbearable thing of all to be alone, and not to know if you are alone before God or just alone in the world. I fetishized philosophical commitments. I’d dated, and half-idolized, a British Catholic for nearly a decade: my love for him, and my inability to ultimately marry him, both inextricably rooted in the fact that he seemed certain about the world and I was not certain about anything.
I met the Rationalist and converted to Christianity around the same time, after a few splendidly messy years in New York. The Rationalist’s moral certainty, and my newfound faith, seemed inextricably linked. We discussed Good together, always in that vague and capitalized way. We discussed Philosophy, and Virtue, and How To Live.
The Rationalist would come with me to church. He had, he said, been considering converting back. He’d even specified on OKCupid, before we met, that he wanted a girl who believed in God. He would take notes on the sermons. He would follow along with the Bible readings. We would spend our Sunday afternoons walking through Hell’s Kitchen talking about God, and whether he really had become incarnate, and what that meant, anyway. I thought that because he cared so deeply about this question, he would help me care about it too.
He proposed three and a half months after we met.
“I want to be Good with you,” he told me, in the speech he made upon his knees and sent me, in writing, the morning after, “and to help you be Good, to be Great with you, and to help you be Great, to be partners in Virtue together.”
I said yes.
I had failed to be Good, after all, with anybody else. The Rationalist reminded me of this often. I had lived too poetically. I had been selfish. I had valued illusory and aesthetic things. I had been a coward in relationships; a liar, sometimes. I had gone to Trieste with the wrong men.
I had a sense, unvoiced, that living well and loving steadfastly were one and the same. I translated that sense into certainty: Marriage would make me Good.
But the Rationalist and I signed up for church events together. We befriended our priest. We always sat towards the front of the church, with our other requisite church friends. We had the same pew every time. Sometimes, when my mind drifted during services, I would look at the absence in the front, toward the altar, and I would imagine myself there, in a wedding dress, in a cathedral veil, five pounds thinner and finally Good.
Of course, Goodness was hard. The Rationalist had principles, about Goodness, and sometimes following them was painful.
Like the time we went to England for my friend’s wedding, at which my Catholic ex, a lay chaplain, said a blessing over the meal, and the Rationalist made himself vomit it up in the hotel room because it was not Good to consume food sacrificed to false idols, and my Catholic ex was not Good because he was Catholic, and Catholics valued submission over creative freedom, and if I thought he was a Good man then I did not understand Goodness, and therefore, the Rationalist could never discuss philosophy with me ever again.
Like the time I asked him, in tears, why telling him that something bothered me, was important to me, mattered to me, wasn’t enough, why I had to write a philosophy paper to convince him to do or not do something, and he told me it was selfish and lazy not to, then threatened—as he often did—to leave me. I wrote a two-thousand-word apology in the form of a philosophy essay explaining why he should discount my emotions before he finally forgave me.
Like the time, he decided that I was spiritually dishonest for attending a Persephone-themed Mayfair dance party, and refused to speak to me for much of the night, and called me a pagan witch when I left my party in tears to find him, so drunk I thought he’d been roofied, at a Lower East Side bar. That night he broke my window screen.
It wasn’t that he wanted to intimidate me, he said. It wasn’t that he’d ever gotten violent. It was only that I’d betrayed him, that I’d broken his heart, that I’d shown him that we were no longer partners in Goodness, the way he had anticipated that we’d be when he proposed. He was only trying to jump out, he said, to die. I lived on the second floor.
The next morning, I told him again what he’d done.
“You must have deserved it,” he said and fell back asleep.
“There are no such things as jokes,” he told me. He told me this often. Everything had meaning. I believed that. I had to believe that. If there was a God in the world then everything was meaningful, and if everything was meaningful, then who was I to transgress by going to a pagan party, by asking my fiancé to place my emotions over Goodness.
There was such a thing as Truth. I knew that much. I believed in Truth. I believed in Truth and I believed in Meaning and I believed in all things capitalized, so, when he told me that I had missed the mark, I believed in him.
This was bad theology. I knew theology. I had a doctorate in theology. But that, I came to think, didn’t matter. The Rationalist didn’t accept Authority, he said, and the academic establishment was a form of Authority, and besides, he knew more about most things than most people with PhDs. I came to believe I didn’t know anything. I did not know how to be Good or how to be a Good Partner.
I was the sort of person who drank too much and cried in the corner at parties. I was the sort of person who felt too deeply and got flustered at the enormity of my love. I was the sort of person who could not so easily condemn all the Bad People in my life that the Rationalist wanted me to condemn because I did not have the clarity of sight he had: that uncanny knowledge of what was evil and what was good.
We stopped going to church, of course. He didn’t think he wanted to become a Christian, after all. It wasn’t Good to submit to authority, he said; it wasn’t Good to let other people tell you things, and in any case, he wanted to start his own religion, one that was “platform compatible” with the generic tenets of all major world faiths.
It was, I thought, my own fault. I didn’t understand how to be a good partner, a good person. My Christianity—increasingly something he derided as a spiritually lazy phenomenon—was proof that I was too spiritually submissive, unable to look as he did into the philosophical Void. (He wept for hours, once, because he could not bear the loneliness that came from being so much more spiritually evolved than I was. I held his hair while he threw up).
The logic was impeccable: If I could only be Good, then we would be happy.
“It’s the strangest thing,” one of my bridesmaids said to me, pretending she was not concerned, three months before the wedding. Whenever anyone said anything, I looked first at my fiancé’s face to see how he’d react, before responding. When I spoke I would look first at his face, and flinch.
This was, he often said, a sign of what was wrong with me. If I were really Good, I would have faith in Truth. If I were really Good, I would not be so afraid of him.
Little by little, my friends stopped accepting invitations to our house, to the parties we threw. (More and more of them, by this time, were not Good). I lost weight. I stopped talking, in case I accidentally said something Unvirtuous or else let slip something true and ignoble about him.
To “air our dirty laundry,” the Rationalist told me often, was a form of betrayal. To talk to a therapist about our problems, he said, was a form of betrayal. There are certain things, he explained, that you cannot tell anybody else.
On this, he was right: There are things nobody can tell you, and how to live is one.
*
It is the most unbearable thing of all to be alone, and not to know if you are alone before God or just alone in the world—the possibility that there is no meaning to anything or that there is meaning, but you have got it all wrong. That every Unvirtuous Thing you have ever committed has grieved the bleeding heart of the Structure of the Universe. Nobody tells you this, because nobody can tell you how to live at all: There is nobody you can love that will make you not alone where it counts, before a God who might or might not exist.
The man I almost married, he was right about this one. There was no Goodness in my fear.
I prayed to be made Good enough for him to love me again. When I prayed, I was ashamed by the thought of what I would look like, in a wedding dress, taking communion, two months away , because I still believed that I could not know what it was to be Good unless it was mediated through a man who could explain it to me.
What I had yet to learn is that nobody can tell you that there are things nobody can tell you the way they need to tell you to make you believe. You just have to jump, and pray, and pray, and jump, and you cannot follow, jumping, anybody on this earth.
I prayed for a sign, two months before my wedding, in the Caucasus on a business trip. I prayed in village churches in Armenia and in Georgia. I prayed in my hotel room. I took a lot of Xanax. I drank a lot of vodka. I lit candles. I prayed some more.
A sign came. I will not tell you what it was. There are some things nobody can tell you. I prayed for a sign, alone, alone with myself, alone with God. And it came and it came for me, alone.
I called off my wedding over the phone. We broke up in the taxi from the airport on my way home.
I had been cast into the darkness, he told me a few weeks later, when I came to pick up the last of my things. Nobody in my life knew me. I did not know myself. Only he knew me, he said. He grabbed my cup of tea out of his hands and threw me out of his apartment and told me he never wanted to see me again. I’d seen the Light when I was with him, he said. No longer.
He was, he told me, so deeply disappointed in me.
It was a revelation to discover I did not care.
I went from his apartment to church. They were performing Handel’s Messiah that night because by then, it was almost Christmas. I sat in the pew, in the darkness, and I did not watch the altar for the ghost of that wedding dress, but I listened, and I prayed.
The man I almost married, he was right about this one. There was no Goodness in my fear. There were so many other people in that church, next to me, alongside me. They did not lead me. They did not follow me. They did not tell me anything or say anything to me at all, but together we sang the words that had been written for us. Comfort, comfort ye my people, we sang, from the book of the prophet Isaiah.
That particular story we sang about was this: There is one God who is king of kings, and nobody else has that authority over you, nobody else can tell you how to live, and maybe nobody can tell you even that, exactly, although Isaiah tried, although I am trying to tell you now.
O Lord, open thou my lips, the Psalm says, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise.
I am not telling you that this man I almost married was wrong about everything, although it would be so much easier if he were. I am not telling you that there is no such thing as Truth, or Goodness, nor that there is no hope for us in things capitalized. That too, would make things simple, and rather straightforward to explain.
All I am telling you is that none of us have tongues to tell it. Not him. Not me. Not you. That does not mean it is not there.
You cannot write it in a manifesto to make a man stay. Whatever you say, if that is how you say it, it will be a lie. You cannot say it, wearing all white and a cathedral veil, submitting to the image of what you think you want. You cannot say it, so your woman will act like your thought of a wife. You cannot tell stories like that. Words have bodies, as do you.
Those bodies, those are what you can say. Once , I tell you, there was this man who believed in Truth and did not believe in jokes. Once, there was this woman who wrote an essay about emotions in philosophy for the wrong reasons. Now, there is an apartment on the Upper East Side whose eastward window still does not have a screen.
All I can tell you is what happened, and make space to make sense of the rest.
All I can tell you is here I am ; and once, I was there.
