Thoughts on Love 3: Susie Rabinovitch Syndrome

“When he looked at me and said, ‘I kind of view you as a son,’

And, for one second, our eyes met, and I met that with the question:

‘Do you know what you are getting yourself into?’”

Relient K, ‘Getting Into You’, Two Lefts Don’t Make a Right … But Three Do (2003)

Last Tuesday (20th October), coincidentally, marked the fifth anniversary of the death of Eva Ibbotson, a quite brilliant novelist responsible for several stories I remember enjoying immensely as a child: particular highlights for me include The Secret of Platform Thirteen (whose involvement of a doorway to a magical world hidden at King’s Cross station could probably have got J. K. Rowling into serious legal trouble if Ibbotson had felt moved to press charges of plagiarism); Which Witch? (featuring a series of amusingly less-than-spectacular attempts to woo an evil wizard with displays of dark magic);¹ and Monster Mission (which I always remember for its delightful conclusion where all is made well by consulting the dictionary for the definition of the word ‘kidnapping’). Today, however, I mean to talk about one of Ibbotson’s adult books – although the version I read recently was one rebranded under a different title for the young adult market – namely The Secret Countess, formerly A Countess Below Stairs.

Ibbotson, Eva, The Secret Countess, London: Macmillian Children’s Books (2007).

The basic plot is that Russian aristocrat Anna, having fled to England following the 1917 revolution, finds employment as a maid in a grand house taking on extra staff to assist with preparations for the impending return and wedding of the estate’s heir. It perhaps doesn’t sound like the most thrilling storyline when I put it like that, but the real triumph of the book – and it is utterly a triumph – is in the details. Comparatively minor characters are all afforded distinct personalities and motivations, which are tied together beautifully in the ultimate denouement, and even the prose itself is joyously ornamental, without tipping over into floridity. Take, for instance, lines like “Professor Fitzroy nodded. He was a tall man, sepulchrally thin, with a tuft of grey hair which accentuated his resemblance to a demented heron.”

And, in the spirit of the details being the greater brilliance of the book, the principal love story, though pleasing enough, pales and fades next to that of the secondary characters Tom Byrne and Susie Rabinovitch. The following is from pages 278-280:

“Susie,” said Tom, and she saw that he was in an unusually grim and serious mood. “How many times have I asked you to marry me?”

“I think, seventeen,” said Susie in her quiet, pedantic voice, looking up at him and wishing yet again that he wasn’t quite so handsome. “But it may only be sixteen; I’m not completely sure.”

…

“Susie, are you really going to ruin our happiness because of your parents’ wretched religious prejudices? Even though I’ve told you a hundred times that you can bring up our children in any way you like?”

Susie hesitated … “It’s not that. My parents aren’t so orthodox any more. They’d moan a little, but there’s no question of them disowning me or saying a kaddish over me. They’re far too kind and too concerned for my happiness.”

Tom stared at her, amazed. “But why, then, Susie? Why do you keep on saying no?”

Susie studied him carefully. “Tom, have you ever looked at me? At me? Not someone you’ve made up inside your head.”

She stepped forward so that the overhead light shone full on her face. The gypsy dress, as she well knew, was extremely unbecoming to her and she was flushed and mottled from the heat.

“I’m plump now,” she continued in her level, unemotional voice. “In ten years I’ll be fat, however much I diet. I have a hooked nose; most of the time I need glasses. My hair is frizzy and my ears–”

“How dare you!” Tom had seized her shoulders; he was shaking her, hurting her. The famous Byrne temper, scourge of his red-haired ancestors since Doomsday, blazed in his eyes. “How dare you talk to me like that! You are insulting me!”

“What do you mean?”

“How dare you suppose that I don’t know who you are or what you are? That I don’t understand what I see? Do you take me for some kind of besotted schoolboy? It is unspeakable! You could weigh as much as a hippopotamus and shave your head and wear a wig and it wouldn’t make any difference to me. I never said you were beautiful. I never thought it. I said that you were you.”

Susie loosened his hands. Then she smiled, that tender, wise smile that made nonsense of her ugliness and said, “Well, in that case we must just hope that our children don’t inherit your awful temper. Or my nose.”

Hands up who’s ever pulled a Susie Rabinovitch and believed that professed love couldn’t be genuine, because its professed object was simply too unlovable. There must be some mistake; you’re not seeing me as I really am; you couldn’t possibly love me – no one could.

 

That’s it, right in the air. You know who you are, Susie-Rabinovitch-Syndrome-sufferers.

The trouble with this perspective is that it stands all responsibility for love on the beloved – I have to be sufficiently appealing in order to be loved – and wholly dismisses the factor of the lover’s capacity for love. This seems particularly odd when you consider that the object of the sentence, by definition, doesn’t have to do anything to have the verb performed upon it; if the subject is capable of the verb, that’s all the action that’s required for the sentence to be true. Still, it isn’t, perhaps, particularly romantic to talk about this in terms of grammar (fond as I am of grammar, it probably comes under the peanut-butter-milkshake category of love),² so I’ll give another example.

Earlier this year, I stood in an enormous tent in a field in Somerset at an event called Momentum,³ and told God I still somehow couldn’t believe he really loved me. Maybe, my mind conceded, he did once, before year after year of failure and relapse and disappointing complacency; maybe he was prepared to tolerate me in his kingdom for the sake of keeping a promise – but surely, mess of wrongdoing and weakness and hypocrisy as I was, he couldn’t love me.

It was a little while before I heard his ‘how dare you’. Not condemnatory, not another accusation laid at my door, another reason to scuttle into the corner and curl up once again bewailing my own shortcomings – but firm, gentle, and entirely fair. How dare you – you are insulting me; how dare you suppose that I don’t know who or what you are, that I don’t understand what I see?

Did I really believe that God hadn’t read the small print, that he was so short-sighted as to agree to the cross without knowing every corner of my fallen heart better than I do myself? Or did I believe he was so irrationally petty as to change his mind on the matter once presented with my failings first-hand? Or did I believe his love was so flimsy and ineffectual, so easily able to be smothered, that I could do so simply by not being perfect?

The cross pours scorn on any suggestion that God couldn’t possibly love such people as you and me. God the Son trades heavenly power and bliss for a criminal’s death; God the Father directs his entirely fair and justified anger at all that’s wrong in the world against the one human being not responsible for any of it, his Son; the two are wrenched apart for the first time in the history of everything, and all for the sake of sparing the very people who rejected God time and time again, even to the point of arranging his execution – us, humanity.⁴

Words fall short, frankly, but my point is that what happened on the cross had nothing to do with us being lovable, and everything to do with God being loving. His love is without flaw; capable of loving even the least appealing person, it can never be diminished by any failing of its object; it has no weaknesses to be exploited. I insult God – I claim that he is less than he is – when I believe otherwise.

The thing about Susie Rabinovitch Syndrome is that, like so many wrong ways of viewing the world, it ultimately comes down to a focus on the self. I believe it is my characteristics that govern the feelings and behaviour of other people towards me, and leave no space for theirs to have any bearing. And I reckon that, often, the best possible cure for the Syndrome is, actually, a shake round the shoulders and a ‘how dare you’ and being put firmly in one’s place.

The end of the Relient K song I quoted above? “You said, ‘I love you, and that’s what you are getting yourself into.’”⁵

Footnotes

¹ Apparently, an animated film based on Which Witch? is being made by the Jim Henson Company, http://movieweb.com/which-witch-movie-billy-crystal-jim-henson-company/, but I’m wary of getting too excited, based on the number of times I’ve come across books that were apparently being made into films, but don’t appear to have ever actually emerged from the chrysalis.

² I’m referencing a post I made two weeks ago, just to be clear. There is, as ever, a link in the box on the right, if you happened to want to read it.

³ Also known as Soul Survivor’s older sibling: http://momentum.org.uk/. It’s a crazy, challenging, inspiring few days, and I’d probably recommend it if you don’t mind camping.

⁴ In a way, I’m not sure where in the Bible to point you on this matter, because it’s kind of the whole story. Still, try Philippians 2:5-7 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philippians%202&version=ESV), Colossians 1:15-23 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=colossians+1&version=ESV), Isaiah 53 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+53&version=ESV), Mark 15:25-39 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+15&version=ESV ), and my old favourite Romans 5:6-11 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+5&version=ESV) just to get you started.

⁵ Go on, have a listen – the lyrics are much better sung than written down, and some kind human has even made a lyric video with snazzy transition effects and totally inconsistent font and colour and everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0urB9mnCx-A.

Thoughts on Love 2: Luvvou

“Now, as this suggests, Mike is not what makes your heart skip. I mean, you love him, but you’re not in love with him. That’s why you can’t say it. I’m right, aren’t I?”

Miranda S3 E5, ‘Three Little Words’ (2013)

Thanks to Vampirelover19 on the Miranda Hart Wikia for this delightful, if perhaps prematurely festive, image.

‘Three Little Words’ was definitely a highlight of the third series of Miranda Hart’s eponymous sitcom: the unnamed customer-turned-emotional-workshopper continually explaining Miranda’s problems to exactly the wrong person; Penny attempting to accost Raymond Blanc by disguising herself as a coat-stand; Miranda finally overcoming her pushy-mother-itis and acute Englishness-ness-ness to admit to Gary that she’s head-over-heels in love with him.¹

Reaching this conclusion takes something of a process. Miranda realises she is unable to tell her boyfriend Mike that she loves him: in response to his ‘I love you’, she stammers: “Well, I, um, I, er, I – eyes are to see with, noses are to smell with,” before throwing a look of horrified confusion – what am I doing?! – at the audience. Workshopping the issue with her best friend Stevie and the Unnamed Customer, she is forced to admit that she isn’t in love with Mike after all. However, later in the episode, she is easily able to say casually to her old friend Gary as he leaves her shop: “I wouldn’t laugh; it’s one of the reasons I love you.”

“Er, what did you just say?” interrupts Stevie.

“I just said ‘I love you’ – but, I mean, just flippantly, like I say it to you,” replies Miranda.

“Well, that’s where you’re mistaken, my massive friend²,” returns Stevie. “We say it in a silly way. Tell me you love me.”

“Luvvou,” says Miranda.

I suspect we all have our own ‘luvvou’ equivalents. I sometimes go as far as ‘wuvvou’ with my sisters. Even sticking some kind of plural addressee on the end of the statement – “I love you all,” or, “I love you guys,” seems to make the phrase stick in the throat less. I happily write, ‘lots of love from Anne’ in birthday cards or at the bottom of letters, but ‘I love you’ looks odd on the page. And I do wonder whether Miranda might have struck something rather significant as to the reason: what if, sometimes, when we find it hard to say we love someone, it’s because, to some extent, we don’t really believe we do? Or, at least, not in the way we feel is expressed by the statement.

Last week, I suggested that, when it comes to saying that I love something, changing the object of the sentence can imply a change in the meaning of the verb: the statement, ‘I love peanut butter milkshakes,’ doesn’t, or rather, shouldn’t, suggest the same relationship as the statement, ‘I love God.’ Now, I propose that another way of implying a change in meaning of the verb ‘love’ may be by modifying or framing the statement to make it sound sillier, more inclusive, or less personal. Does ‘luvvou’ mean the same as ‘I love you’? Or does it describe a different quality of love?

Of course, English is rather disadvantaged among languages in this respect: elsewhere the queen of synonyms, she nevertheless struggles to find verbs equivalent to any of the multiple meanings of ‘love’. Ancient Greek, by contrast, has three very commonly used verbs usually translated into English as ‘love. ̕εράω (eráō) refers to loving sexually, being in love with, desiring passionately; φιλέω (philéō) refers to regarding with affection, treating affectionately (often by outwards signs like kissing), being fond of; and ̕αγαπάω (agapáō), while having in many authors a similar meaning to φιλέω, is also used to refer to being pleased or content, prizing, or having regard for³ – and out of this grew a rather particular additional meaning when the translators responsible for the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures) settled on it as their favoured way of referring to loving relationship between God and humans. It’s the verb used in, for example, Exodus 20:6, Deuteronomy 6:5, Hosea 11:1, Malachi 1:2, and Psalm 146:8.⁴ This meaning was then carried over into the New Testament and other Christian texts.

So those working on an English translation of the Bible hit a bit of a sticky spot when they come to passages like John 21:15-19.⁵ It’s probably a familiar enough story: Jesus asks Simon Peter whether he loves him and Simon Peter responds, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” What you don’t see in the translation is that when Jesus poses the question, he uses the verb ̕αγαπάω – but when Peter answers it, he uses φιλέω.

I think what Jesus is essentially asking is, “Do you love me, value me, respect me, in a way appropriate to the relationship between God and his people?” And I think what Peter is essentially replying is, “Yes, Lord, you know that I … am really very fond of you.” In other words, Peter meets Jesus’ “Do you love me?” with the equivalent of “Luvvou.”

This happens twice. Then, when Jesus asks for the third time, he too uses φιλέω – at which Peter becomes upset. Bearing in mind it was only a few days ago that he publicly denied Jesus three times,⁶ he’s probably feeling like something of a failure. He can’t bring himself to use ̕αγαπάω, because it just doesn’t sound true – his love doesn’t feel good enough to merit the term – and he knows Jesus knows it. And I suspect that Jesus’ switching to φιλέω on his third asking just makes Peter’s sense of failure stand out to him all the more painfully – as if Jesus were noting that Peter evidently isn’t up to the task, and stepping down the difficulty level accordingly.

But Jesus isn’t frustrated, or disappointed, or critical – and he isn’t stepping down the difficulty level. He gives a reply along the same lines as his previous two: “Feed my sheep.” Jesus’ response to Peter’s feeling his love is inadequate, is to task him with the immense responsibility of looking after his people.

The poem I posted last week began, ‘“I love you,” and, frankly, it sounds like a lie’ – and indeed, we’re not capable of love of the quality really appropriate to a relationship with God. But God doesn’t seem to view that as a problem, or something that disqualifies us from doing work for him. He’ll work with what we’ve got – φιλέω is clearly a perfectly acceptable starting point.⁷

That means that, when we realise that our love for God isn’t of the calibre appropriate to that relationship, the last reaction we should have is Miranda’s upon realising her love for Mike wasn’t of the calibre appropriate to that relationship. God knows we’re not capable of love like his, and sees it as no reason to break up. In fact, he wants our reaction to be to draw even closer to him; that’s the only way we’ll ever learn to ̕αγαπάω.⁸

Start with ‘luvvou’. Work up.

¹ Miranda Hart has actually posted the whole episode on YouTube – splendidly nice of her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm0W2ll9_aY.

² The running joke is that Miranda is 6’1’ tall – which is, coincidentally, the same height as me. I have a sneaking suspicion that Big and Long, the fictitious shop regularly mentioned in the sitcom, may be based on Long Tall Sally, http://www.longtallsally.com/, which is the only shop I’ve found that stocks 36” leg jeans.

³ I am greatly indebted to the Greek Word Study Tool offered by the Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/search. (Ask any Classics student – we would be lost without Perseus.)

⁴ I checked these using Elpenor, http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/default.asp. Isn’t the Internet a wonderful thing?

⁵ Read the whole passage here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+21&version=ESVUK. Go on, you know you want to…

⁶ The episode is included in all four gospels, but John recorded it three chapters earlier: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+18&version=ESVUK.

⁷ I owe the basic idea of this explanation to a previous issue – I can’t remember which one – of Word 4 U 2Day, which is an excellent devotional magazine with a cringingly awful name, published by United Christian Broadcasters: http://www.ucb.co.uk/word4u2day.

⁸ Check out 1 Thessalonians 3:12, for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Thessalonians+3&version=ESVUK.