There’s a scene in the 2012 movie Francis Ha where Francis, the loveable epitome of a quarter-life crisis, delivers a monologue while sitting with a group of friends, a part of them, apart from them.
“It’s that thing when you’re with someone, and you love them and they know it, and they love you and you know it… but it’s a party… and you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining… and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes… but – but not because you’re possessive, or it’s precisely sexual… but because… that is your person in this life. And it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end, and it’s this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about. It’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us, but we don’t have the ability to perceive them. That’s – That’s what I want out of a relationship. Or just life, I guess.”
I adore that movie. It is a shameless celebration of the unbearable lightness of youth. Francis begins her movie diffused into her relationship with her best friend Sophie, whose abrupt departure forced her into a confrontation with her bleary sense of self, her general aimlessness in life, and a fleeting youth. The story ends, as good stories often do, with Francis still searching for her secret space.
That secret space that exists only between two people is what makes love of any kind a floundering, elusive, tantalising thing. Real life is rarely so satisfying as a movie. Real world intimacy is fuelled by a tension between warmth and distance and rarely coalesces into form.
There is a time in our early life when we learn to let people know, just how much we need and like them. It begins during the formation of our sense of self, with our parents’ gentle and unceasing assurance that we are loved, and there’s no preconditions for our being. While we shed personalities as our infant bodies outgrow clothes, we are reassured: no matter what you become, you are loved.
But what happens when that pledge of affection was made conditional on us being a certain way, or worse, what if it was never received? We may learn, perhaps, that a bid for closeness without recompense will be punished by aloofness and rejection. Over time, we may even become convinced that we are simply underserving of love. We may even learn to be ashamed of our unending need for assurance and consolation.
The world is rather unsympathetic towards the plight of the unloved child. They’ve come up with many labels for it so as to deploy a warning sign for others against the trappings of our insecurity. They begin relationships with us charged by a repository of patience, which is depleted little by little with each reassurance in response to our tentative, timid request for pronouncements of love. But the shame and fear within our psyche is unyielding.
The Secret Place is an antidote to that shame. It is a return to the earlier times of complete surrender. It is a place where our vulnerability and fragility are met with tenderness and sympathy. It is what gives substance to love. To the world we may act impatiently, defensively; in that place we take off pretences and shed our shells and never feel the need to pre-emptively strike against heartbreak.
It is an act against entropy. Our lives don’t often correspond. They ebb and flow in parallel, weaving, intersecting, but not always overlapping. Love is effusing. Left to its own devices it will become diluted, which is why closeness must be actively fostered and created in that shared world.
It is an affirmation of our sense of self. The world pulls us to roles, to change, to compromise, and to pieces. But our sense of self is restored in the unconditional acceptance of that Secret Place, in which two individuals do not meld into each other and lose their integrity but are instead unrestrainedly together in their otherness.
#00117F 