Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

Let go of the romantic notion of love, and we also relinquish the protection it purports to offer us against loneliness and despair. Love can’t bridge the gap between us and the world if it is, itself, evidence of that gap—just another fallible human theory, about ourselves, about the people we love, about the intimate “us” of a relationship. Whatever the cost, then, we must think of love as wholly removed from the earthly, imperfect realm of theory-making. Like the love of Aristophanes’ conjoined couples before they angered the gods, like the love of Adam and Eve before they were exiled from the Garden of Eden, we want our own love to predate and transcend the gap between us and the world. In some ways, this strategy seems doomed to fail. As anyone who has experienced it knows, heartbreak socks us not only with the temporary loneliness of lost love, but also with the enduring loneliness of being alive. When we are in its grip, the lesser crisis of heartbreak is not terribly distinguishable from the greater crisis of existential despair. And yet there is a method to the madness. The idea of transcendent love can’t save us from all suffering, but it can save us from perpetual suffering. It makes our moments of disconnect from the universe seem isolated and astounding, rather than ongoing and inevitable. And that, in turn, helps us dismiss such moments as aberrations and forge the necessary amnesia to carry on with our lives. That should sound familiar, because our overall r...