Thoughts on Love 4: Cool Kids

“See, that is the thing with you Plastics: you think that everybody is in love with you, when actually, everybody hates you.”

Mean Girls (2004)

Thanks to *drew on Wikipedia for the image, which remains
© 2004 by Paramount Pictures, all rights reserved.

Do Mean Girls’ Plastics really think everybody is in love with them? I’m not so sure. Recall, if you will, the end credits of Disney Pixar’s most recent masterpiece, Inside Out, when, having spent the vast majority of the film focussing on the mind of protagonist Riley, we are now entertained by a series of glimpses into the thought processes of various minor characters.¹ What struck me most was that, in the brain of the girl who had earlier so intimidated Riley with her eyeshadow-wearing coolness, the dominant emotion, the one heading up operations from the centre of the control panel, is Fear. “We’re a total fraud!” she panics. “Do you think they can see through us?”

Similarly, in Mean Girls, being a Plastic is all about the cultivation of an exterior image. It’s not just about wearing pink on Wednesdays: the main character, Cady, gets to a point where she deliberately lies, deceives, and manipulates in order that others will think about her in a particular way. “I had learned how to control everyone around me,” she monologues in voiceover.² What Cady believes isn’t that she’s so amazing that everybody must be in love with her, but that, if she plans her actions carefully, she can portray herself in such a way as to manoeuvre others into a position where they think well of her.

It isn’t an attitude reserved only for Plastics, mean girls, and other cool-kid types, either. Don’t we all deliberately put ourselves across to others in such a way as to gain their approval? Isn’t that blindingly obvious, in fact? To be admired, I must be admirable; to be valued, I must be valuable; to be loved, I must be lovable. Surely that’s just basic, undeniable logic?

However, those of you with good memories may remember that, last week, I concluded that love has far more to do with the lover being loving than the beloved being lovable – and, in God’s case, this was undeniably proven when Jesus gave his life for the sake of his enemies. God is going to love me whatever state I’m in. I don’t have to lie, deceive, manipulate, or wear pink on Wednesdays to make that happen, and, indeed, he would see right through me if I tried.

But what about other people?

The trouble is, other people aren’t like God. They don’t have his omniscience or his glorious depths of mercy, and I simply can’t rely on them to love me whatever happens. Still, I might just be able to coerce them into offering me something that at least looks like love by portraying myself as some kind of desirable asset. In fact, doing so is the only measure of control I have when it comes to others’ opinions of me – and, as ever, I have a tendency to cling resolutely to any form of control I have, because a lack of control is frightening. Like Cady, I do whatever I can to control the people around me, and like the cool girl from Inside Out, I do it out of fear. I do it every time I allow my actions to be governed by a desire that other people will think well of me. And, in all honesty, that’s very frequently indeed.

But here’s the thing: if love is dependent on the lover, not the beloved, then anything I obtain as a result of portraying myself in as lovable a fashion as possible isn’t really love at all. It’s not even ‘luvvou’, or φιλέω.³ It is, at best, peanut-butter-milkshake love: appreciation of something which brings benefit. It’s the kind of love Cady obtains from the general populus at her high school with her deceit and manipulation. If real love – the ͗αγαπάω kind – is unaffected by its object’s failings, then it wins me no love, it does me no good at all, to make any kind of grand effort to be lovable.

Now, that isn’t to say I shouldn’t have concern for the way my actions affect other people – quite the opposite, in fact. My actions should not be dictated by wanting to be loved by other people, but rather by wanting to love other people. “A new commandment now I give you,” said Jesus, as recorded by John in the thirty-fourth verse of the thirteenth chapter of his biography of him, “that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” Later in the same conversation, he said it again: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”⁴ I think we can be pretty clear on the fact that Jesus definitely wants us to love one another – but more than that, he wants us to love one another as he has loved us. That means deeply, furiously, and entirely unaffected by the flaws and failures and irritating habits of those we love.

In other words, we are to love in such a way that those we love know that they don’t have to put on a front and behave in a certain way and appear as lovable as possible in order to manipulate us into displaying love towards them. We are to do our best to rid them of that fear. And we are to do it as a response and a signpost to the all-surpassing love of our God, who did the same for us.

Footnotes

¹ If you’d like a reminder, or haven’t got round to seeing Inside Out yet (it did only come out this summer, after all), you can watch the scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMQT-Mv92x0.

² Some kindly soul has made a complete transcript of the film available here: http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/mean-girls-movie-transcript.html. This one I’m assuming you’ve managed to see at some point in the decade since it was released. If not, do please see it at the next available opportunity, if only so you’ll understand references like, “She doesn’t even go here!” and, “You go, Glen Coco!”

³ See my post from two weeks ago for context here. Or just watch Series 3 of Miranda and stick the Greek into the Perseus Digital Library Word Study Tool, either works.

⁴ All right, so I gave you the full reference for the first time he said it, but I’m sending you on a treasure hunt for the second. Hint: it’s somewhere in the book of John, after 13:34. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2013&version=ESV.

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.