Love & Neglect

“What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call,” (Page 186-187).

The narrator makes the claim that neglect kills love, supporting that with a cohesive list proving this claim. They start by listing the kind actions that people stop doing, and then listing what cruel acts they do instead. They do this using two anaphors for the different sections, first starting their sentences with “Not to…” and then “To…” This choice feels reminiscent of the types of lists we have seen in other writers’ work on normal vs deviant lifestyle and sexuality choices such as Michael Warner’s “The Trouble with Normal” and Eve Sedgwick’s Christmas Effects list in “Tendencies.”  

Here, the narrator is examining what long-term love looks like. They have only experienced short-term infatuation, obsessed with affairs, spontaneous decisions and morally questionable but romantic ideas. With this limited and intentionally stunted experience, it’s ironic that the narrator is pondering what it is to neglect a relationship. Applying these ideas to their relationship with Louise, Louise must be “the neglected” in this scenario because the speaker left her. However, it’s unclear whether they really reached a part of their relationship with the kind of familiarity that this passage describes. Doing the dishes, making the bed, and setting the table are very late-stage acts in a relationship, much farther than the honeymoon phase that Louise and the narrator had reached. The only way the narrator would have any insight into a long-lasting relationship that turned neglectful is through Louise and Elgin’s relationship. I propose that the narrator is identifying with Elgin’s role, feeling that they have fallen into the dispassionate-husband-who-doesn’t-know-how-to-love-their-wife-anymore category. Furthermore, they are critiquing this role, questioning whether a party is to blame for this phenomenon.  

The narrator speaks with an implication of guilt, as if they have failed to avoid this relationship dynamic with Louise. Worse, they have instead neglected her even sooner than Elgin did, by leaving her so soon into their relationship. Perhaps even, since the narrator is pondering these relationship aspects that they did not even achieve, they are thinking about the future they ran from. So afraid of falling into this relationship dynamic, the narrator abandoned Louise under the guise of “for her benefit” before they could reach that phase. This calls into question the inevitability of these roles, and whether the narrator had really escaped the role they were so adamant to avoid. It seems to me like the narrator is struggling with these binaries, eternally frozen with the uncertainty of how to exist outside these roles, but desperate to try.