How to Tell Love from Passion From E. B. White and James Thurber's Is Sex Necessary? At a certain point in every person's amours, the question arises: "Am I in love, or am I merely inflamed by passion?" It is a disturbing question. Usually it arises at some inopportune moment: at the start of a letter, in the middle of an embrace, at the end of a day in the country. If the person could supply a direct, simple, positive answer - if he could say convincingly, "I am in love," or, "This is not love, this is passion" - he would spare himself many hours of mental discomfort. Almost nobody can arrive at so simple a reply. The conclusion a man commonly arrives at, after tossing the argument about, is something after this fashion: "I am in love, all right, but just the same I don't like the way I looked at Miriam last night." Or, "Mirabel is a tidy little wench, and in that case why do I waste time composing a quatrain for her, to be sent with a crushed spray of lilac? Why don't I go right over?" One reason a man has trouble telling love from passion is because neither term has been clearly defined. Even after one has experienced love, one finds difficulty defining it. Likewise, one may define it and then have all kinds of trouble experiencing it, because, once having defined it, one is in too pompous a frame of mind ever again to submit to its sweet illusion. By and large, love is easier to experience before is has been explained - easier and cleaner. The same holds true of passion. Understanding the principles of passion is like knowing how to drive a car; once mastered, all is smoothed out; no more does one experience the feeling of perilous adventure, the misgivings, the diverting little hesitancies, the wrong turns, the false starts, the glorious insecurity. All is smoothed out, and all, so to speak, is lost. The word "love" is used loosely by writers, and they know it. Furthermore, the word "love" is accepted loosely by readers and they know it. There are many kinds of love, but for the purposes of this article I shall confine my discussion to the usual hazy interpretation: the strange bewilderment which overtakes one person on account of another person. Thus when I say love in this article, you will take it to mean the pleasant confusion which we know exists. When I say passion, I mean passion. I have mentioned that the question of deciding whether a feeling be love or passion arises at inopportune moments, such as at the start of a letter. Let us say you have sat down to write a letter to your lady. There has been a normal amount of preparation for the ordeal, such as clearing a space on the desk (in doing which you have become momentarily interested in a little article in last month's Scribner's called, "Plumbing the Savage," and have stood for a minute reading the first page and deciding to let it go), and the normal amount of false alarms, such as sitting down and discovering that you have no cigarettes. (Note: if you think you can write the letter without cigarettes, it is not love, it is passion.) Finally you get settled and you write the words; "Anne darling." If you like commas, you put a comma after "darling"; if you like colons, a colon; if dashes, a dash. If you don't care what punctuation mark you put after "darling," the chances are you are in love - although you may just be uneducated, who knows? Now you have written the words "Anne darling" and have put a punctuation mark there. You pause for just a second, and in that second you are lost. "Darling?" you say to yourself. "Darling? Is she my darling, or isn't she? And if she is my darling, as I have so brazenly set down on this sheet of paper, what caused me to take such a long, critical look at the girl in the red-and-brown scarf this morning when I was breakfasting in the Brevoort? If I can be all aglow about a girl in a red-and-brown scarf in the early morning, is Anne my darling, or am I just kidding myself?" Then follows a brief estimate of the comparative beauty of Anne and the girl in the scarf, with the girl in the scarf coming out half a length ahead. This is followed by a short dialogue which you hold with yourself. "What if she was prettier?" you say. "What does that amount to? I'm not a child. I know there's more to the story than mere physical beauty." "What more is there?" you quietly demand, testing yourself out. "Oh there's quality of mind, and community of interest, and chemical attraction [chemical attraction is a term you've picked up recently from reading books on sex and life]. When I get right down to it, if I were to meet that girl in the scarf, I probably wouldn't like her." "No, but you want to meet her, all the same, don't you?" "Well ... I mean ... a man can't; I mean ... " "Yah, you know you want to meet her!" "Aw shut up!" Having got nowhere with that theme, you again bend to the mighty task of writing the first sentence of the letter. A minute or two of quiet brooding and the truth comes to you that you have nothing to say, that you wrote all the news yesterday, that you consider it pretty silly to be writing another letter so soon, and that if anyone were to ask you, you don't really want to write Anne a letter at all. "Well, so that's the way the wind blows!" you say to yourself, contemptuously. "So that's the way things are between Anne and you? Not wanting to write her. So it's come to that. Well, it's about time you got wise to yourself. If you don't love Anne it's certainly high time you found it out, in justice to both Anne and yourself. In other words, you never loved Anne at all - you merely gave in to an infatuation. You were thinking about the physical side of the affair; yes, sir, you desired Anne, that's what you did. You desired her! Why, you dirty, low-down, two-faced old voluptuary you ... " The utter shame of this situation breaks your spirit and you lay down your pen, light up a cigarette, and pace up and down the room. Suddenly you dash to the desk, with a look of woeful determination, seize the pen, and write (after the words "Anne darling," which are good and dry by this time): "I have been wanting to tell you something for a long time. We must look things straight in the face, Anne." You then look things straight in the face for ten minutes, during which you don't write a word, and end by tearing the letter up and quickly dashing off another, which reads: "Anne, I'm awfully tired tonight, nervous etc., and if I wrote you it would just be a bunch of hooey, so think I will wait till tomorrow before writing. Love, Bert." This you mail at the corner and spend the rest of the evening trying to read "Plumbing the Savage," which results finally in sleep - sleep troubled by dreams of savages wearing loin cloths of a familiar red-and-brown material. This vexing disbelief in one's own illusion of love is experienced most alarmingly by persons of literary inclinations. Yet with them the reaction comes in quite the opposite manner. Writing is a form of sexual expression (Zaner goes further: he says writing is sex), and it takes just as much out of a person. Thus, a person with a bent for creative literature approaches the task of writing a love letter with an excitation of the spirit surpassing anything in the realm of pure eroticism. He anticipates it for hours, mulling over in his mind the possible material, enlarging on anecdotes, rounding off pledges of affection, sharpening similes, sharpening pencils; he comes to the writing of it with immense zeal and a rather nice control of lyrical prose; he ends on a splendidly poised and correctly balanced note of tenderness and faith and love; and then, having signed, sealed, and posted the missive, is suddenly overcome by the realization that by the very act of composition he has annulled the allure of the subject herself - cares no more about her, for the moment, than he does for an old piece of butcher's twine, which, all in all, is so alarming a discovery that he usually gets a little bit sick thinking about it, and has to go out somewhere and hear some music. I have seldom met an individual of literary tastes or propensities in whom the writing of love was not directly attributable to the love of writing. A person of this sort falls terribly in love, but in the end it turns out the he is more bemused by a sheet of white paper than a sheet of white bed linen. He would rather leap into print with his lady than leap into bed with her. (This first pleases the lady and then annoys her. She wants him to do both, and with virtually the same impulse.) Uncertainty in the Middle of an Embrace There is no more disturbing experience in the rich gamut of life than when a young man discovers, in the midst of an embrace, that he is taking the episode quite calmly and is taking the kiss for what is it worth. His doubts and fears start from this point and there is no end to them. He doesn't know whether it's love or passion. In fact, in the confusion of the moment he's not quite sure it isn't something else, like forgery. He certainly doesn't see how it can be love. Let us examine this incident. He has been sitting, we'll say, on a porch with his beloved. They have been talking of this and that, with the quiet intimacy of lovers. after a bit he takes her in his arms and kisses her - not once, but several times. It is not a new experience to him; he has had other girls, and he has had plenty of other kisses from this one. This time, however, something happens. The young man, instead of losing himself in the kiss, finds himself in it. What's more, the girl to him loses her identity - she becomes just anyone on whom he is imposing his masculinity. Instead of his soul being full of the ecstasy which is traditionally associated with love's expression, his soul is just fiddling around. The young man is thinking to himself: "Say, this is pretty nice now!" Well that scares him. Up to this point in the affair he has been satisfied that his feeling was that of love. Now he doesn't know what to think. In all his life he has never come across a character in a book or a movie who, embracing his beloved, was heard to say, "This is pretty nice," unless that character was a villain. He becomes a mass of conflicting emotions, and is so thoroughly skeptical and worried about the state of his heart that he will probably take to reading sociological books to find out if it's O.K. to go ahead, or whether, as a gentleman, it's his duty to step out before he further defames a sweet girl and soils her womanhood. The medical profession recognizes two distinct types of men: first, the type that believes that to love a woman is not to desire her; second, the type that believes that to desire a woman is not to love her. The medical profession rests. This young man whom I've just mentioned (the rogue who found himself having a good time in the midst of a kiss) now takes seriously to books. Matters go from bad to worse. Hoping to find, in sexology, some explanation for his conduct which would indicate that, if not decent, it at least was not without precedent, he searches relentlessly until he comes upon a chapter on "The Theory of the Libido." (Note: it makes any young man a little mad to discover that he has a pleasure-principle, but there it is just the same.) On page 464 he finds this paragraph: "The ideal healthy outcome is to find the child in whom the process of repression has been accomplished with no fixations of interest at lower stages of adaptation, in whom the Oedipus complex has passed into a 'normal' phase of the castration complex inhibition, and in whom a free movable libido is developing sublimation in active interest free from paralyzing inhibitions or anti-social tendencies." This brings the young man to the point where he thinks maybe he better lay off altogether. He just wasn't cut out for kissing, he guesses. So he writes his girl a letter apologizing for having been a beast, breaks the engagement, and goes out to Oregon, where he raises fruit fairly successfully and with no anti-social tendencies. I have taken up the question of Man's uncertainty about love and passion in two different circumstances - at the start of a letter, and in the middle of an embrace. It was originally my intention also to show how this uncertainty overcomes one at the end of a day in the country when a man is so tired that he not only can't distinguish love from passion, but has all he can do to distinguish one station on the New Haven railroad from another and often gets out at 125th Street by mistake. I say this was my intention; but thus far I have been so unsuccessful in explaining the difference between love and passion that to go on would be to lay myself open to criticism. The fact of the matter is, it's very difficult to tell love from passion. My advice to anyone who doesn't feel sure of the difference between them is either to give them both up or quit trying to split hairs.