Relationships • Breaking Up & Heartbreak
The Sorrows of Love
If we happened to pass this painting in its home – a crowded room in London’s Wallace Collection, that grand palace of art just north of Oxford Street into which we’d popped, with some misgivings, for half an hour to shelter from a spring storm – it would be unlikely to detain us long. The artist’s name would surely mean little to us; the style alienatingly aristocratic and fussy, probably an occasion for a pedantic lesson – another tedious artefact from a distant age, indifferent to our pressing confusions and longings.
But if we were to linger for a moment, we might just spot the title: Les Malheurs de l’amour or The Sorrows of Love. And here, perhaps, just perhaps, something might change. We might pick up on an unusually confident tone, resolutely universal in spirit, stepping without hesitation over the gulf in time and space (all the changes in clothes, manners and languages) in order to address us, me and you, human to human, in the here and now. Not ‘my sorrows’ or ‘your sorrows’ but ‘The Sorrows’ – as if everyone grown up knew what these terrible things were, as if all sensitive people understood that the business of love had its unremittingly agonising dimensions that deserved public rehearsal and commiseration.
The painting might not know about your particular griefs: the mess that followed N’s departure, the weeping in the bathroom, the unsent texts, the stillness of the weekends, the repeated sense of loss. But it’s unbothered by such local details. It feels able to speak heartbroken lover to heartbroken lover without getting bogged down in the minutiae of the 235-year age gap. It assumes we have all been shattered on similar rocks in comparable ways and always will; that we have all cried more or less the same tender, furious, bitter tears.
This is helpful precisely because – so often – our suffering is deepened by a sense that we are unusual and cursed to be feeling it. ‘It’ll pass,’ friends say. ‘Fall back in love with yourself,’ Instagram advises maddeningly. We seem to be the only ones crying beyond measure, the only ones mired in immature torment who can’t get this area of life right, the only ones who can’t recover our poise, even though it is now almost six months since they left. The painting starts somewhere else: all sensible and good people have come unstuck here, it’s no grounds for shame, love is simply nightmarish at moments.
Like the greatest pop songs, the painting heads straight for the emotional nucleus. The lover has received some appalling news delivered, as is usually the case, with murderous politeness (‘I thought perhaps we might best honour our bond in a friendship going forward…’). And nothing will ever be the same again. Fuck him. She collapses into the arms of her best friend; we can almost hear the wailing above the hubbub of the gallery.
We might smile, not because we don’t care, but because we feel so much less alone. It’s a delight that she’s so unremittingly upset. It’s so nice that she, too, is in such a mess. It probably began so nicely – as it tends to. He would have complimented her on her taste in poetry and suggested a walk in the gardens. The kind, polite ones are always the most dangerous. And then he was invited to a party and it all changed. There’s no more need for a stiff upper lip now. Under the painting’s aegis, we can throw off our normal reserve and maturity. This deliciously histrionic work – completed in a more earnest and emotional age – has no need for smart aleck irony or neat therapeutic resolutions. It’s happy to indulge in the full awfulness of the breakup without the slightest impulse to appear knowing or wise. It says: why not let the moment be as dramatic as it feels, why not give complete and proper license to the chaos, why pretend it isn’t exactly as dreadful as it is?
The painting does what all great art should do (and perhaps we can stop calling it great art and just think of it as useful art instead): it makes us feel less alone. It puts an arm around us and says, in effect, ‘I understand’. It’s our friend in the bleakest moments. It meets us in our sadness. There’s little more we could want from a picture. It might be the most helpful thing we’ve come across in a very long time.
