Love & Delusion
I’ve spent much of my career beating a drum for rationality and reason. It’s clear our species’ greatest achievements were made possible by our big brains and our powers of logic and discovery, and if we are to survive on this small blue planet, we will need reason and evidence to get us through. But gradually over the course of several decades, I have come to appreciate that there are some aspects of our psychology that are both beyond reason and clearly beneficial. These useful delusions crop up in many areas of life, but some of the most endearing involve the people we love.
I have a fondness for grief memoirs. Often, as in the cases of Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, they are about the death of a spouse. Others, like Calvin Trillin’s About Alice are not so much grief memoirs as memorials to a great marriage or, as in the cases of Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home and Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty, to deep friendships.
You might think these books would be morbid or depressing, but they never are. Often, I am moved to tears while reading, but most of the time, what I am feeling is not sadness at the author’s loss. More often, it is a swelling that comes from an appreciation of the author’s love for the subject of the book. Long before her death, Trillin had written humorous and loving books and essays featuring his wife Alice, and after her death, he received many letters of condolence. One that was typical of a group he received was from a young woman who said she sometimes looked at her boyfriend and thought, “But will he love me the way Calvin loves Alice?” I love reading grief memoirs because they are about love.
Loving someone who loves you back is one of life’s greatest joys, but it is not without risk. In The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon wrote one of the most beautiful openings of any psychology book:
Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.
If there is a constant about bereavement it is that there is no constant. The classical view was that the process was uniform. There was “grief work” you had to complete, and there were stages you had to pass through.
The modern view is that everyone handles the despair of loss differently, and much depends on the nature of the relationship in life. Complicated relationships remain complicated after death, and deep connections often last beyond death.
Among the many responses to the sudden death of a parent or partner is the belief or hope that the loved one will come back. During her year of magical thinking, Joan Didion kept her husband’s shoes in the closet because he would need them when he returned. She was a completely rational person who had arranged for the cremation and the interment of the ashes, but for a time, she was convinced her husband would come back.
Other people have a sense of ongoing presence of the deceased that can continue for years after the loss. Novelist Julian Barnes summed up the nature of his continuing relationship with his wife this way: “The paradox of grief: if I have survived four years of her absence, it is because I have had four years of her presence.”
People cannot be simultaneously living and dead, and there is no evidence that Barnes or Didion was confused on this point. Those who respond this way to loss seem to have a kind of double consciousness. On one level, they know their loved ones are gone, but on another, they believe they are not. This kind of response is not strictly rational, and not all bereaved people show it. But for those who do, it seems to help. In Didion’s case, her year of magical thinking lasted a year. Her husband died at Christmastime, and by the following Christmas she had come to terms with the loss: “I also know that if we are to live ourselves, there comes a time when we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”
Love and rationality are often at odds. Consider the act of falling in love. Is it ever a completely rational choice? In his novel, The Only Story, Julian Barnes wrote:
Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead, but it isn’t love.
Emily Dickinson, Woody Allen, and Selena Gomez have all expressed variations on the theme that “the heart wants what the heart wants.” So, we have it on the authority of several artists that falling in love is not rational, but as a scientist, I am not prepared to assess whether that is a good thing or not. However, there is clearer evidence that certain kinds of unreason can be of value within an ongoing relationship.
There was a theme in the psychology of the 1960s, that complete honesty and clear-eyed self-understanding led to a good life. Encounter groups, where strangers came together and shared their most intimate thoughts and fears, were employed to strip away defenses and reveal the person within. But in a classic paper, psychologists Shelley Taylor and Jonathan Brown provided strong evidence truth was not always the best guide. People dealing with illnesses and psychological challenges often coped better and had healthier outcomes when they were buoyed by what Taylor called positive illusions. Pure rationality about their condition was not the best strategy.
Similarly, in the realm of marriage and intimate relationships, truth may not be the best policy. In his book Love and Lies, philosopher Clancy Martin suggested that occasionally lying to your partner is a necessary ingredient to a healthy relationship: “If you want to have love in your life, you’d better be prepared to tell some lies and to believe some lies.” But lies are rarely irrational. They are based on a cost-benefit calculation that any economist would understand.
Stronger evidence of beneficial delusions in romantic relationships can be found in research by Sandra Murray and others that overwhelmingly shows that partners who hold unrealistically idealized images of each other are happier. Similarly, people who egoistically see themselves in their partners and believe they share a special bond have more fulfilling relationships. So far, the evidence does not show a reduction in the probability of divorce, but rosy delusions about your partner bring measurable benefits in everyday life.
These forms of irrationality do not work for everyone. For reasons of heredity and experience, some people might be just as deeply in love with their spouses as Didion and Barnes and yet never imagine that their partners would return after death or be present beyond the grave. People manage the despair of loss in ways that are consistent with their natures, and magical thinking is not an option for some.
Similarly, some people may not be able to idealize their partners. As much as they may love their partners and want happiness in their relationships, unrealistic idealization is not part of their repertoire. It would feel dishonest or inauthentic. But for those who are capable of these delusions, the evidence suggests they benefit.
In his essay, “The Pragmatic Method,” American psychologist and philosopher William James said, “To develop a thought’s meaning we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole meaning.” When it comes to these beneficial delusions, it seems clear that James had a point. As we have seen, some people have thoughts about their loved ones that are not entirely rational, yet the conduct these thoughts produce is beneficial. They may be perfectly sensible people in other areas of their lives. But they engage in these delusions of love, and their lives are better for it. Who are we to say they should do otherwise?
If you enjoyed this essay, you might like my most recent book, The Uses of Delusion: Why It’s Not Always Rational to be Rational. Although not an excerpt, this article was drawn from some of the ideas presented in the book.
Stuart Vyse is a psychologist and writer. He is a contributing editor at Skeptical Inquirer magazine where he writes the “Behavior & Belief” column. He is an expert on superstition and irrational behavior, and his most recent book is The Uses of Delusions: Why It’s Not Always Rational to Be Rational (Oxford 2022). He has taught at Providence College, the University of Rhode Island, and Connecticut College and is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
