Love Triangles
From our infantile bond with Mother through the Oedipal struggles of childhood to the temptation and pain of adultery, the play between pairings and triangles is lifelong
Stories of triangles generate almost as much imaginative power as do tales of two lovers. Some of us have pondered Rose Kennedy's reaction to (or apparent lack of one in the face of) the long-standing affair between her husband, Joseph Kennedy, and Gloria Swanson, or Ingrid Bergman's abandonment of her husband in favor of Roberto Rossellini. We may have been deeply affected by the disclosure of Franklin Roosevelt's unfaithfulness to Eleanor, or obsessed with one or another triangle of which we chanced to hear. The intensity of the response to Gary Hart's alleged infidelity to his wife is not unusual; it's simply more vivid because the incident is more recent. We may be fascinated, horrified, even threatened, as we relate such episodes—seen from the viewpoint of any one of the participants—to our personal situation, and imaginatively play out the possible future scenarios in our own lives.
We have an immense curiosity about triangles. And why not? Given our developmental history, this should not be surprising. Triangles are intimately connected with our early lives, and are imbued with profound desires and fears. Our first triangular (Oedipal) involvement marks the end of an excessive infantile dependency on Mother, our entry into the world as independent contenders. The love dialogues of development take us froth the blissful mother-child pairing of infancy through the triangular Oedipal complex, which is reactivated in adolescence and resolved only when we achieve the glory of first love and thereby have restored the psychological centrality of the original love connection. In fact, the play between pairings and triangles, whether enriching or depleting, realized or fantasized, is lifelong.
Romantic love has been described as a religion of two, but love pairs can be infected by triangles and may even be wholly contaminated by them. Or, more positively, triangles may sometimes help love along: Some pairings first crystallize in the context of a triangle. Others, especially those of older, more established couples, may be re-energized by a triangle. And, as we know, many of the most celebrated lovers were adulterous: Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere, Paolo and Francesca. Moreover, some triangles are not mere way stations into or out of love, nor are they intended to protect against intimacy or revive intensity, but they are themselves the main event: the lover is fixated on triangles and can achieve some of the gratification of love only within a triangular configuration.
Walking alone, seeing the world go in pairs, one can abruptly feel bereft, lonely, and disconsolate. One may feel afflicted by some unnamed deficiency. "Why not me? Am I the only one alone?" One senses that one's full potential and pleasure can be realized only in love. If one is a partner in a perfunctory couple whose union never blossomed into love or whose love has long since faded, one may feel more than envy. One may feel hopelessness or a bitter rage at having life's possibilities perhaps permanently thwarted.
Envy runs deep in the psyche; it is the twin of desire. Perceiving or imagining that two other people are together sexually or romantically incites us to find a love of our own. Reading or watching a love story, we are imaginatively engaged: we want that story, or one like it, to happen to us. So it was with Francesca and Paolo, who was the brother of her husband. Descending into the second circle of Hell, Dante inquires of Francesca how she came to fall in love with Paolo, and she replies,
On a day for dalliance we read the rhyme
of Lancelot, how love had mastered him.
We were alone with innocence and dim time.
Pause after pause that high old story drew
our eyes together while we blushed and paled;
but it was one soft passage overthrew
our caution, and our hearts. For when we read
how her fond smile was kissed by such a lover,
he who is one with me alive and dead
breathed on my lips the tremor of his kiss.
That book, and he who wrote it, was a pander.
That day we read no further.
Lancelot evoked the imaginative possibility of love for each other in Paolo's and Francesca's hearts.
For the fortunate, desire is awakened in response to the characteristics of the other, and a pairing comes into existence without any direct reference to a third person. But for many, as for Paolo and Francesca, desire is mediated through the perception of oneself in relationship to a couple. In other words, we desire what another like us has, or what a couple appears to share. But envy and emulation may take another form—literally to want what another has rather than simply to crave something similar. Then our desire erupts as the impulse to cut through an envied couple and to replace one of the protagonists. At such times desire seems almost to have been created (or intensified) by the fact that its object is already spoken for, desired by someone else. The aim may be to capture the beloved, but a competitive element also appears to be at work. In such cases we may say that love's purpose is dual: erotic longing for possession of the beloved is coupled with the wish for triumph over a rival.
Many professional women have noticed that they seem to become sexually and romantically more appealing to their male colleagues after they marry. Part of the reason for this may be that some men feel protected by the new built-in limitations. But, just as important, the husband-rival is always in the background, and through him the desirability of the beloved is established. Women may appear more alluring in this light, though sometimes they are little more than prizes that establish the challenger male's priority in a "phallic narcissitic" competition.
Moreover, in such a situation any rebuff of the would-be lover can be rationalized away. In Anna Karenina, Vronsky, at the stage when he is still lovesick over Anna and not yet successful in his pursuit of her, reflects on his own rather disingenuous apologies to a friend for what must seem the ridiculousness of his passion for Anna:
He was very well aware that he ran no risk of being ridiculous in the eyes of Betsy or of any other fashionable people. He was very well aware that in their eyes the position of an unsuccessful lover of a girl, or of any woman free to marry, might be ridiculous. But the position of a man pursuing a married woman, and, regardless of everything, staking his life on drawing her into adultery, has something fine and grand about it, and can never be ridiculous. . . .
The strength of the impulse to desire what is someone else's, and its competitive implications, are revealed in a common adolescent male taboo. Although young males may share sexual exploits, they usually respect one another's territorial rights and do not have sex with one another's girlfriends. However, some men appear to be fixated at the level of defying this taboo; for them, such competitive behavior continues throughout adulthood, the real goal in such cases being destruction of a rival male. Men who respect the taboo have replaced competition with identification; they have accepted the laws of rightful possession. For many of them, however, the sense of loyalty to their male friends transcends loyalty to their wives. Although horrified by the thought of sleeping with a good friend's wife, they may feel quite comfortable with the idea of sleeping with their own wife's best friend. Their moral code is fundamentally tied to male solidarity (a code I believe to be a resolution of fears engendered in the childhood Oedipal rivalry with Father).
Alma Mahler, who was married to or had romantic liaisons with any number of famous men, including Gustav Mahier, Walter Gropius, Franz Werfel, and Oskar Kokoschka, may have been the beneficiary of male sexual rivalry. Either she was a great femme fatale or the passion she inspired in each of her lovers was mediated by the images of her previous lovers, which were reflected in her and thereby defined her worth as an object of desire (or perhaps both propositions are true). One is reminded of the husband of a woman who had been Lord Byron's mistress, who hung a portrait of Byron in his drawing room. The husband thus elevated himself through his indirect, triangular association with Byron.
Some people can fall in love only with someone already involved with another. Among single women the taste for married men seems to have reached almost epidemic proportions—that is, if the number of magazine articles dealing with this problem are any clue to its frequency. This appetite is sometimes misunderstood as simply the self-defeating wish for someone unattainable or inappropriate and is lumped together with such misguided penchants as those for alcoholics, failures, or men who fundamentally dislike or fear women. But this overneat formulation ignores the specific, natural, and very real preoccupation with triangles as such. Of course, the lover may be drawn to the beloved by her qualities, without any reference to a triangle, but the longing for her may be intensified by knowledge of a rival.
The rival may not even exist in the present; he may simply be fearfully anticipated in the future or vividly imagined from details leaned about the beloved's past. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, Dick Diver, burdened by his marriage, is romantically drawn to the young actress Rosemary. By chance, one of her suitors confides in Dick that she is not as innocent or as physically cold as he might think. In fact, she and a young man once locked themselves in a train compartment and drew the blinds, in order to engage in some furtive lovemaking, but they were interrupted by the conductor. Hearing of this incident causes a profound reaction in Diver:
With every detail imagined, with even envy for the pair's community of misfortune in the vestibule, Dick felt a change taking place within him. Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary's cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret warmth within.
From the moment he learns of Rosemary's interrupted tryst, Dick's romantic reveries about her begin with the conversation he imagines in that distant train compartment:
"Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?"
"Please do. It's too light in here."
Even in realized love, lovers may have attacks of jealousy in which they minutely scrutinize the past for evidence that an earlier love was grander, fresher, or deeper. Questions multiply: "Do you love me more than you've ever loved anyone else?" "Do you still think of her?" and so on. What is puzzling, if we fail to take account of the stimulating effect of triangles, is that the wrong answer, the answer that fails to reassure us, may intensify our love, our longing, and particularly our sexual arousal. The threat of triangulation, is a jog to passion, whether it is past, present, or merely in the conjectural future. One must also accept that behind one's doubts about the beloved's reliability lurks one's own penchant for wandering. Frequently enough, the impetus to jealousy is not any observable threat on the part of the beloved but a subliminal self-knowledge. Put simply, jealousy is sometimes merely the response to the projection of our own prurient feelings onto the beloved.
The link between desire and envy becomes especially clear in the long-standing Western preoccupation with adultery. According to Tony Tanner, an English critic, Western literature begins with The Iliad, a tale of war precipitated by an adulterous act, and "it is the unstable triangularity of adultery, rather than the static symmetry of marriage, that is the generative form of Western literature as we know it." Indeed, adultery has remained a prominent theme in Western literature: it is a major theme, Tanner points out, in Shakespeare's last plays and in Restoration drama, and many of the great nineteenth-century novels touch on it. Among these, one thinks immediately of Madame Bovary, The Red and the Black, and Anna Karenina. In these novels the theme of adultery dramatizes issues of authority and transgression not only in individual psychology but in the social order as well. When the adulterous impulse is enacted, it violates the rules of possession in both the private and the public sphere, most often with unfortunate results.
The inexorable pull of the triangle exerts constant pressure throughout the cycle of love. Triangles are often entered into defensively. Either lover may be tempted to introduce a third person to escape the intensity of love, to fend off the threat of self-obliteration implicit in a desire to surrender to the beloved. Some people, too frightened to risk a full-scale loving attachment to another person, restrict their romantic liaisons to a regular series of cameo appearances in triangles.
Triangulation may be used to punish a disappointing lover or to even the score. A husband may believe he has forgiven his wife after she has confessed an affair, only to feel himself drawn into a love involvement of his own shortly thereafter. Triangulation may also be used to reestablish a sense of gender adequacy when one's femininity or masculinity has been damaged by a defeat, erotic or otherwise. For example, a man who has received a shattering blow at work may be more than usually vulnerable to the ministrations of his adoring secretary. Alternatively, triangulation may be used to change one's image in a lover's eyes, by piquing one lover's interest with the existence of the other, in order to coax fading love back to full intensity through the agency of jealousy.
Triangulation may even be used as self-punishment. A lover who is radiantly happy in love may experience guilt at his great good fortune, and may embark on a triangular liaison as a means of destroying this happiness he does not think he deserves. (Embarking on a triangle is often felt to be a crime and, because of the anguish it brings, a punishment as well.)
Our culture is so saturated with Freud that when anyone mentions triangles our thoughts immediately go to the most basic of all triangles—the one that gives rise to the Oedipus complex. Because sexual longing first emerges in the early Oedipal period, we can appreciate why desire may be readily elicited by triangles and why the secondary triangle of husband-wife-lover is easily viewed as derivative of the primary triangle of mother-father-child. But love in the face of any taboo, whether of class, religion, race, or family relationship, is, at least in part, a reworking of the original Oedipal taboo. Indeed, all love bears some relationship to the Oedipal.
However, while all triangles may be Oedipal in some basic sense, we must distinguish between two fundamental perspectives. Depending on a person's position within the triangle, it may be either "rivalrous" or "split-object." The distinction reflects important psychological differences. In the rivalrous perspective, the protagonist is competing for the love of the beloved. In the split-object perspective, the protagonist has split his attention between two objects. Any person may find himself or herself in one or the other of these situations at some point in life, and may even be in both kinds of triangular arrangements simultaneously, as I will elaborate later.
Each of the protagonists in a triangle will, obviously, have distinct hopes, anxieties, and preoccupations. The meaning of the triangle in the psychological life of each will be different. While all these meanings can be related to the Oedipal complex, they represent variants of it. Consider, for example, one of the simplest triangles—a marrieded couple and the lover of one of the spouses. Let's say that an unmarried woman is in love with the husband. From the perspective of the woman (and of the wife, if she knows of the triangle), the tension in the triangle revolves around a rivalry. This is a straightforward "rivalrous triangle," a reincarnation of the Oedipal triangle of early life, and the major emotions accompanying it are jealousy and, sometimes, anger.
From the husband's point of view, however, the triangle has an altogether different makeup. For him, the triangle is a split-object triangle and not a duplicate of the Oedipal triangle of early life. The main tension he experiences is the division in his emotional life between two women, and the principal emotion most often is guilt. The split-object triangle may have multiple purposes, one of the most frequent being to serve as an escape from intimacy. Sometimes triangulation is a late derivative of the child's propensity to play his parents off against each other; seen in this way, the split-object triangle is a power maneuver. And sometimes it is nothing more than the product of the lover's dissatisfaction with his lot and his insatiable quest for ever-elusive perfection.
But the husband's triangle may turn out to be what is best described as a reverse triangle, a specific subcategory of the split-object triangle which has a particular motive behind it. (The term "reverse triangle" was coined by Otto Kernberg, a psychoanalyst.) It is meant to undo the humiliation of having once engaged in (and lost) a rivalrous struggle (whether Oedipal or more recent). In other words, though the form of the split-object triangle and the reverse triangle are the same, the reverse triangle always has a very specific unconscious meaning. Whereas the split-object triangle is meant to be a solution to a current problem or conflict of some kind, the reverse triangle bespeaks lingering resentment at having been an Oedipal "loser" in the past and is an attempt to redress that injustice. The reverse triangle actually reverses the configuration of the Oedipal triangle: one is no longer in competition with a rival but is the object of a rivalry. The underlying dynamic motivation of the protagonist would determine which term—"split-object" or "reverse"—might best apply. In the case of a lover whose erotic career reveals a preponderance of split-object triangles, one must suspect that he had some underlying resentment at "losing" the Oedipal struggle and was prone to enacting scenarios of reversal and revenge.
The vagaries of love may lead to a constant movement from couple to triangle, and back. Some people, owing to their psychology or psychopatholoy, have a tendency to seek out forbidden triangles or to regard any established pairing as incestuous. Others resist the constraints of one-on-one love and seek escape in triangles. Still others are comfortable only in the illusory power position of the reverse triangle. Then, too, some people transfer (or project) their Oedipal fixations onto others, creating triangles with two members of another family. This is a special form of a reverse triangle and might well be regarded as a "displaced incestuous" triangle. Each of the major kinds of triangles generally has certain specific features attached to it. But, as we shall see, a lover may move out of a rivalrous triangle and into a split-object triangle, and vice versa.
In the early stages of romantic liaisons in which the loved one is either married to or significantly involved with someone else, the lover's obsessive preoccupation is nonetheless the same as that of other lovers, consisting primarily of thoughts about the beloved. But in such rivalrous triangles (as these are by definition) an obsessive preoccupation with the rival may gradually come to compete with the erotic longing for the loved one. Both desire and competition play important roles in this erotic configuration, and the lover's relationship with his rival has its own significance.
In the beginning of adulterous relations the claims made on the beloved may be modest: "You may make love with him. I understand you have to. But please, do anything except the very special thing [whatever it may be] that we do together. That is ours." Even so, reveries of love may come to be replaced by jealous fantasies in which the beloved is pictured with the rival. As time passes, the lover becomes consumed with jealousy, visualizing the beloved in the rival's embrace, and he comes to resent the rival. The lover's obsession gradually shifts from the beloved to the rival: what the rival has, over and against what the lover can claim for himself, becomes the focus. That the beloved loves him (or says she does) is not enough, because the rival can claim endless time, holidays, material possessions, and social priority.
The lover's obsessiveness may also take the form of invidious comparisons between himself, or herself, and the rival. The female lover fears that she is not as pretty as the wife. The male lover doubts his ability to look after the beloved as well as her husband does. The lover has a dread of being compared with the rival. The lover may become consumed with self-depreciation and envy of the rival. The lover's unremitting suffering and self-doubt, his jealousy and envy, are sometimes so exaggerated as to suggest that he is masochistic. Indeed, simply to reach for what is someone else's may elicit the fear of retaliation, with ensuing guilt and self-punishing rumination.
If the betrayed spouse knows of the existence of the triangle, he or she, too, experiences jealousy and envy. The spouse may wish the disloyal spouse dead rather than contemplate losing her, or him, to the hated rival. Generally, however, the rival becomes the target for all hatred, so that positive feelings toward the beloved can be preserved.
The mutual jealousy and hatred of lover and spouse can survive even the death of the beloved. For example, a betrayed wife may forbid the appearance of her husband's mistress at his funeral. Such, for example, was one of the unhappy events in her past life that Maggie confides to Quentin in Arthur Miller's After the Fall. Her liaison with a judge was ended by his death, and the family closed her out of the mourning process. And such vengeful feelings can be carried to extreme lengths. One beautiful young woman's rivalry with the other woman outlived her erotic longing for the lover. Preparing to attend a professional convention, where she anticipated seeing her former lover, she groomed herself with unusual attention in order to look particularly stunning. A year before, while passionately in love with him, she had discovered an infidelity, and after a heated confrontation they had split—he to move in with the other woman. Ever since, she had harbored a fantasy of revenge. She no longer wanted him back, but she wanted to do to the other woman what had been done to her. The other woman, not her former lover and betrayer, had become the object of her hatred. She went to the convention and engineered her triumph. She slept with her former lover in his hotel room and managed to pick up the phone when his girlfriend called. The girlfriend acted on cue: she broke off her relationship with her lover. The result the young woman had fantasized about for so long—the end of the detested bond between her old lover and her rival—was achieved. But she had no further ambitions with respect to her former lover, not wishing to resume their love affair or even to have a sexual relationship with him, and also having no conscious wish to hurt him. Her passionate commitment to revenge had outlived her love. However, she did damage her former lover. Though this was not her conscious intent, it may well have played a role in her unconscious motivation.
What generally happens in rivalrous triangles when the lover emerges victorious? If the lover has plucked the beloved from another pairing, he may feel all the expansiveness and exhilaration of an Oedipal victory, and often he lives happily ever after. Such a victory may be easier to enjoy when the love has not been evoked by the triangle per se—that is, when the triangular complication is incidental to the lover's motivation. But on occasion an Oedipal victory may precipitate self-defeating or even self-destructive behavior. This happens most often when the lover has a penchant for triangles, and thus, probably, some fixation on an Oedipal conflict. Such an unconscious fixation when it is coupled with a tendency toward masochism, leads some people to construe love as triangular even when, objectively, it is not. The following quite typical vignette illustrates the link between love invariably construed as triangular and masochistic suffering and self-degradation.
A woman, drunk and almost incoherent, called her beloved, with whom she had quarreled, falsely accusing him of being with another woman. Fearing that she had taken an overdose, he hurried to her apartment. When he arrived, she was still drunk, but her speech was less slurred than it had been on the phone. Now, instead of being confused and incoherent, she became aggressively erotic, pleading with him to make love, begging him to do anything he wanted to her. She was ingratiating to the point of self-humiliation, resorting to crude language and gestures, wheedling and abject, but she was also coercive. Her behavior fell into the narrow range between utter self-degradation and emotional blackmail ("I cannot live without you!";).
Similar episodes repeatedly punctuated their lives together. Always in the background was her sense of being threatened by other women—his former wives or his previous girlfriends. She was obsessed with comparisons. Was his previous girlfriend prettier, more accomplished in bed? She invented triangles where none existed, demeaned herself as she compared herself with past or imaginary rivals, demanded all and promised all, yet pushed her lover away by the nakedness of her hatred of her "rivals," the depth of her need, and her rage at him. In the end, having succeeded in destroying the relationship, she felt abandoned, rejected in favor of his old ties, and was completely unaware that it was she who had undermined the relationship.
In relatively stable triangular relationships, the lover appears to love the beloved without ambivalence, and his resentment and hatred are restricted to the rival. Nevertheless, such a balance is tenuous. What follows is a classic story of adultery triumphant, but embedded within it is a cautionary tale of sorts. This story is not apocryphal; it has been enacted with variations by any number of players.
An aspiring female executive had a long-term relationship with her married boss. They traveled the world together, while his wife was apparently oblivious of their affair. He was loath to get a divorce before his second son went off to college and the mistress grudgingly accepted her lover's decision to continue a split life. He was sincere, however, and when his youngest child went off to college (some five years after the inception of the affair), he left his wife and immediately married the executive. She seemed extremely happy, especially when they had a child. But she was a proud woman, and a troubled one, and she never truly forgave him for the humiliation she had suffered as the other woman. Her underlying resentment and rage surfaced abruptly and took the form of berating him and finding fault. Her anger, which had previously been focused on her rival, was now directed at him. Her ultimate revenge took the form of starting an affair with a man for whom she eventually left her husband. (Her revenge for feeling humiliated in a rivalrous triangle was ultimately to punish her husband by putting him in the same situation. In other words, she moved from a rivalrous triangle to a split-object triangle.) And despite herself, she relished the idea of separating her husband from his new child, remembering how he had put his consideration for his other children ahead of any sympathy he might have felt for her plight as the other woman.
The abandoned husband was dispirited. It is unclear what path his love life would have taken subsequently, for he died within a few years. His first wife, whose hatred had been aimed not at her ex-husband, whom she saw as having been ensnared by an unscrupulous woman, but at the executive, appeared almost radiant at the funeral. She was reborn as the widow, and thereafter regarded herself as such, no doubt convinced that her ex-husband (with whom she had re-established a cordial relationship) would have returned to her had he lived.
Derivatives of Oedipal rivalry can be observed even where there is no overt erotic rivalry. In stepfamily rivalries the intensity of the resentment between stepmother and stepdaughter, or stepfather and stepson, may be so intense and corrosive as to alienate the affections of the husband, or the wife, or to destroy the lover's own feelings. I believe this form of Oedipal rivalry is a major source of conflict in second marriages (a conflict often played out in terms of the allocation of financial resources). In stepfamilies we can see the overt expression of tendencies more often kept covert in "natural" families. In general, people who experienced intense Oedipal struggles with their parents are apt to duplicate these struggles with their stepchildren—or their own children. Not Just Oedipal rivalry but pre-Oedipal envy is commonly expressed in Oedipal terms. One woman I know ultimately divorced her husband because of her conviction that he favored his sons (her stepson) over her. The quarrel was centered on the allocation of money and time, not eroticism.
Now, as I have already said, many people will find themselves in rivalrous triangles at some time in their lives, either through longing for someone who is committed elsewhere or as the hapless spouse or lover of someone who, while still manifestly committed, embarks on a love affair. But for most people these rivalrous entanglements, painful as they are, are transient episodes—though sometimes crucial ones—in their erotic histories. Even where triangular involvements are the enactment of unresolved Oedipal conflicts, these conflicts may be worked through in their very enactment or, alternatively, experienced as so cruelly painful that they are henceforth assiduously avoided.
In contrast are those people whose entire erotic careers, or, at least, long parts of them, consist of triangles. Such was the case with Ivan Turgenev. Paramount in his personal life, the triangle also found its way into his fiction, where it appeared as a major theme—a parallel eloquently demonstrated by the scholar Leonard Schapiro, in a critical essay about Spring Torrents. In 1843, when he was twenty-five and not yet an acclaimed writer, Turgenev met Pauline Viardot, twenty-two, already famous, married, and making her operatic debut in Russia. Despite all that was to happen between them, Schapiro wrote, Turgenev "loved her deeply and all-absorbingly for forty years, literally until his death." In the beginning all was well. He fell in love with her at first sight, and she responded; they loved each other for some seven years. But then she broke away and effected a reconciliation with her husband. Apparently Turgenev and Viardot never resumed their relationship at the same level of intensity, but except for two years (1857-1859) he was always in touch with her. In 1863 he took up residence in Baden-Baden to be near her, her husband, and their children, and from then on the Viardot household was his main emotional preoccupation. Viardot is thought to have been the dominant force in their relationship; she seems to have possessed the will to command that he so admired (apparently first in his father) but that he lacked. Despi