Advice For Lovers From Between the Covers… of Books
Enduring classics of literature have endured for a reason — they serve as windows into the values and preoccupations of the times in which they were written, as exemplars of specific literary movements or social and philosophical ideologies, and also, and no less significantly, as explorations of the pompatus of love.
There’s plenty of timeless relationship advice to be found between the covers of works of canonical literature — from The Mayor of Casterbridge’s sage counsel about how getting drunk and selling one’s wife and daughter at a fair may one day negatively impact one’s political career, to Of Mice and Men’s object lesson in why women prefer men with slow hands & lovers with easy touches.
Here, we examine several Great Novels for the romantic wisdom they have to impart. There will be great advice but also great spoilers, so if you haven’t actually read these books you’ve been claiming to have read for years, proceed with caution.
The main takeaway from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is: honesty. For example, if you are already married, whether you have or have not been secretly keeping your crazy wife captive in your attic for a number of years, that is something your ladyfriend should know, preferably from your ownself, in private, and before she’s made any significant commitment to you, NOT from some stranger interrupting your wedding ceremony.
But then, I’ve always had reservations about Mr. Edward Rochester as a romantic figure — an employer dressing up as a gypsy woman in order to suss out his much-younger governess’ potential as a lover in some sort of 19th-century catfish scheme is a red-flag weirdo, IMHO. And the fact that this book’s version of a happy ending is a life tied to a blind, one-handed, horribly burn-scarred man who has been a condescending jerk for 3/4 of the book has always been as baffling to me as Andie choosing Blane over Duckie in Pretty in Pink. #notmyhappyending
WUTHERING HEIGHTS – EMILY BRONTË
Let’s switch Brontës and take a look at Wuthering Heights, which is basically a primer on “relationship blunders to avoid making.” Many of them are common sense to us here in our modern times: don’t marry your romantic rival’s sister just so he’ll be forced to watch you slowly crush her spirit, don’t kidnap your romantic rival’s teenage daughter and lock her in a room with your sickly son in the hopes of coercing a revenge-marriage, don’t be one of those clingy dudes going around opening the long-buried coffin of your deceased soulmate, etc etc.
There is one lesson that readers less… melodramatic than Heathcliff can bookmark, and it’s about the bedrock of any strong relationship: communication. If your beloved is prone to making long theatrical speeches to the help, you may accidentally overhear some hurtful words, but if you’re going to eavesdrop, be a patient eavesdropper and stick around for the credits.
E.g., this speech:
“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”
If you are Heathcliff, and you storm off right after you hear your name just because you’ve been typecast as the Byronic hero and that’s what’s expected of you, you’re going to miss all the good stuff she’s saying about you, in her own excessively hammy way.
But he does. And does he angrily confront Catherine later that evening, the following day, later that week? No. Despite knowing how flaky Catherine is and how often she says casually selfish things without thinking, he runs straight off for THREE WHOLE YEARS because it doesn’t occur to him to take Catherine aside for a little tête-à-tête. Communication is key in a relationship. Before running off to the ends of the earth in a fit of pique, maybe pause to have a conversation first.
TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES – THOMAS HARDY
And by conversation, I mean conversation. A back-and-forth exchange of words followed by an unequivocal confirmation that your words have been understood. A conversation is NOT — and I’m looking at you, Tess Derbeyfield — it is NOT a note slipped under your fiancé’s front door confessing all your seeeeecrets. And an unequivocal confirmation is not an assumption made that, because he doesn’t mention this letter, these seeeeecrets, that he forgives you for not being a virgin. That he forgives you for having been raped, gotten pregnant, giving birth to a sickly baby (although no one could ever forgive you for naming him “Sorrow,” Tess), who conveniently dies after a couple of weeks from some indeterminate nineteenth-century pastoral illness, but he will not forgive you for not disclosing this, your shameful used-goods diminishment on the first date, not until that note slipped under his door which, regrettably, also slipped under his rug and radar.
So, yes, conversation is key. Also key is NEVER dating a man named Angel freaking Clare, whose goody-goody name doesn’t mean he’s not going to be a hypocritical double standard waving jackass, whose own virginity-ending consensual affair was unseemly, but far less disgraceful than being the victim of a sexual assault, Tess.
Although, if you find yourself in a Thomas Hardy novel, there’s no advice that can save you.
ROMEO AND JULIET – WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Extracting relationship advice from Shakespeare is tricky. On the one hand, the ‘stand by your man’ message of Macbeth is relationship strong — a power couple with similar interests and ambitions, clear goals, strong communication skills, and Lady McB so over-a-cliff supportive with all the high fives for regicide, it’s the very picture of helpmeets sharing a life together.
On the other hand, everyone’s dead at the end, so — a mixed bag there.
So many of Shakespeare’s successful courtship strategies rely on unhealthy deceptions like love potions and cross-dressing disguises and assorted duplicities and manipulations. I can’t advocate for these particular ploys — love potions are NEVER okay, fellas, but I think looking to Shakespeare’s couple-failures is more fruitful for modern lovers. Romeo and Juliet, in particular, is rich with lessons. And you may think I’m going to suggest to “maybe wait until you know each other for more than 24 hours before getting married,” but I get the impulsivity of young love. The duel-and-suicide body count is a bit high, but what can you do?
Here’s what: the practical advice is obviously check for a pulse/wait for the M.E. before chugging poison, but again — it all comes down to communication, in this case as it pertains to planning your date nights. Surprises are fun, and it can be a real thrill to be spontaneous and flexible and go wherever the moment takes you, but also definitely communicate these changes to your partner so they don’t end up waiting in front of the wrong restaurant for an hour or killing themselves because they think you’re dead.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS – CHARLES DICKENS
“Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!”
Great Expectations may seem, at first glance, to be dispensing excellent advice about relationships; loyalty and constancy and all that, but before you start taking notes in your love journal, consider the source. A speech entreating someone to nurture their loving feelings no matter what, no matter how little encouragement they receive from the object of their affections, would be more cogent coming from someone for whom this strategy had actually worked, not from someone who has spent the past howevermany years after being swindled and left at the altar moping around in her wedding dress amidst the dessicated remains of their uneaten wedding feast.
There’s a point where self-abnegation stops being cute, and when you are your own symbolic cautionary tale, you don’t get to give love advice.
So the takeaway here is: set reasonable timeframes for your unrequited loves. It’s one thing to wait around for a person to come to their senses and fall for the phenomenal creature that you are, but once your clothes begin to decay off of you, it’s time to call it.
‘Course, tricky Dickens tries to play both sides, as David Copperfield’s Agnes Wickfield voluntarily friendzones herself for like 800 pages, cheering good old Davey on while he plods through his life, oblivious of her feelings, marrying silly Dora and suffering for it, before that rom commy realization finally hits him that he should be with Agnes, who’d at least had the good sense to change her clothes regularly throughout her ‘waiting for the man’ period.
And, of course, it’s easy to identify and snark at the romantic gaffes of fictional characters and say, “Well, I would never turn to a life of crime in order to make and then immediately spend an entire fortune on frivolous parties trying to get the attention of a careless (but not, unfortunately carless) girl I hooked up with one time,” or “I would never fall for a creepy guy who lives in a booby-trapped basement who kidnapped me like a million times and threatened to blow me up with explosives if I didn’t marry him.” People in mirrored torture chambers shouldn’t throw stones, because who knows what we would do in a situation until we’re in that situation? I’m willing to admit I’ve Havishammed on occasion, I’ve kept figurative madwomen in my attic — the trick is moderation, learning from your mistakes and always remembering to get a DNA test before your wedding day, amiright, Oedipus?
