"Good day for ducks, isn't it?" "Why, yes, the men are well-dressed..."

Friday, cigarette #1

The Abyss has done some comparative marriage theory, drawing a distinction between Iris Murdoch & John Bayley, who wanted "to preserve their singular lives within their shared space, like 'two animals in a field,'" and Sheldon & Jean Vanauken, who "wanted to become one person."

She quotes this passage from Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy:

For use in company we had a whole range of signals that didn’t depend on catching each other’s eye or contorted faces. They were, in fact, mostly innocent questions, such as asking, “Did you bring the English Ovals?” And they meant such things as “This person is boring me out of my mind: do something!” or “Let’s get out of here!” or “Keep your eye on the one I shall glance towards!” or “The one that just spoke is lying” or “When we go, let’s ask the person (or couple) I shall glance at to come with us.” These and many others, some more subtle and complex, along with the appropriate responses, in all of which we were well drilled, enabled us to carry on fairly elaborate conversations with privacy in a roomful of people.

The Abyss is not charmed:

I find Vanauken’s and Davy’s relationship-model deeply undesirable. Insofar as they ward off “creeping separateness,” they erect an ugly power structure against relationships with other people: their code language, and their sense of themselves as the last bastion of courtesy in a world of “whispering mockers of love,” reminds me of Erich Fromm’s concept of “égoisme à deux” in The Art of Loving. Their model of relationship is thus crippling to community, and I would take a rich, sustained community over an intoxicating relationship any day. . . All this is to say that I find the Bayley-Murdoch model enormously attractive and the Vanauken-Davy model enormously repellent.

I understand how a private code might seem to imply a rejection of everything else that isn't your lover, but when I've had relationships where the two of us had this ability to carry on secret conversations in public (I'm thinking of both friendships and romances) I never found it isolating, and here's why: it isn't as if I sat down with Housemate Dara some Thursday morning and drafted a Helen & Dara Secret Codebook. Secret signals develop over time, and most of them have some kind of story attached. They aren't a rebellion against living in a wider community, they're an expression of it.

If your secret language comes from a fantasy world, then the Abyss is right and what you have is probably bad. But most relationships' catalogue of secret signals comes from the fact the two people have good stories, which they wouldn't have if they'd retreated into some anti-communitarian isolation.