HEALTH PLUS:People sometimes choose to love even if they are denied the experience of being loved, writes Marie Murray
"If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me"
- WH Auden
LOVE IS rarely equal. This is often observed but not articulated. Who wants to say that he or she is more loved than loving or less loved in a relationship than the love bestowed upon the other person?
Either admission, even to oneself, is difficult because of the implications for the relationship itself. And relationships are complex enough without feeling that they are unequal in commitment.
Yet in relationships there is often the one who loves and the one who is loved. This disproportion in affection is an unspoken aspect. The idea that love can be measured, that it is equal among couples, that each has identical capacity to feel and to express love for the other person is important to us.
We like to believe that it is so. We like to subscribe to grand passion between people and mutual intensity of regard.
Yet there is little to substantiate that. Egalitarianism of emotions is more an ideal than a reality. There are many situations in which love is unequal. There are many couples who settle for that, knowing that to challenge the delicacy of the arrangement might damage it irreparably.
The "perfect couple" often consists of one who loves more than the other: the person who needs space and the person who gives that space to the other person. In many relationships there is the person who compromises more, contributes more, supports more, facilitates more, expresses more and demonstrates more.
Outside observers often note that one person in a couple is more attached, more concerned, more attentive and more invested and involved than the other person. When couples become aware of this disparity in their own connection, they may deny it, address it, decide to live with it or seek help in understanding the meaning it has for them.
Most, however, seem to behave as if it does not exist because of the danger in acknowledging it overtly.
This is what makes those famous lines from WH Auden's poem "If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me", so intriguing. The choice to be "the more loving one" is an extraordinarily self-sacrificial one. It is a choice made on the basis that the other person would be spared the pain of being loved less.
Such love, such unrequited love, such pure love, such sacrificial love is a deep love to give or to receive. It is unconditional. It is prepared not to receive as much as it gives.
It is prepared to enter into an unequal arrangement so the other person in the relationship will not be hurt. It is a kind of grand passion conducted alone: a secret charity, a special choice in favour of another.
Because it is difficult not to be loved enough. It hurts those to whom it happens. James Joyce in Dubliners final story, The Dead, demonstrates the awful realisation that one person in a couple may come to a realisation about love. Gabriel Conroy in that story realises that while he loved his wife, Gretta, all their life together, that she had never fully, totally, unconditionally and unreservedly returned his love.
As Gabriel hears his wife's story of her past he understands that he cannot compete with the passion that once existed in her life when she was loved by the young man Michael Furey who died of love for her.
Gabriel's understanding that he had never been the primary love in his wife's life is a shattering, silent and profound acquiescence to being loved much less than he thought he was. He has to come to terms with his own paltry position in their life together. Caught between the polarities of loving or being loved, Gabriel realises that perhaps he has never encountered either sufficiently in his life.
This is the psychological crux of the matter: that love itself, in and of itself, is important. That is why the clichés about having loved and lost being better than never having loved at all have survived. That is why people sometimes choose to love regardless of return: so that at least they would know what it is like to love, even if denied the experience of being loved.
Because we are, all of us, in love with love itself, its dominance, its concreteness, its elusiveness, its richness, its depth, its meaning, its joy and its sadness in our lives.
• Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is the director of The Student Services in UCD