We drove down to Inglewood yesterday to see Corteo, the current Cirque de Soleil production touring the West Coast. One would have to be very curmudgeonly indeed not to find the various Cirque shows riveting, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely.
“Corteo” is based around the story of a clown imagining his own funeral. One of the most magnificent sections of the show comes in the first half of the performance. According to the program:
“In a divine spirit of sisterhood, the clown’s former lovers emerge above him as in a dream.”
Three dancer/acrobats, clad in lingerie, swirled from chandeliers over the head of the clown, who sat on his bed and reached for them. It was a visually impressive sequence, but I couldn’t help but chuckle at seeing such a classically narcissistic male fantasy.
Perhaps twenty-five years ago, in high school, I read Nancy Friday’s collection of male sexual fantasies, Men in Love. I haven’t even seen a copy of the book in years (to my surprise, it’s still in print), but I vividly remember just one story — and it isn’t a sexual one. A man remarked to Friday that his ultimate fantasy would be to sit under a tree on a beautiful day, surrounded by every woman he had ever loved, all of them focused on him, all of them laughing and enjoying themselves. Even when I was a teenager, I remember nodding my head vigorously in agreement that this was, in some sense, something for which to be fervently wished!
Many years later, when I was dating the woman who would end up becoming my third ex-wife, she asked me what I thought heaven would be like. I was in a flippant (yet candid mood), and so I told her: “Heaven to me is all the women I’ve ever loved — my mother, sisters, ex-girlfriends, lovers, friends, ex-wives — all together with me. Everyone will get along, and I won’t be forced to choose among any of them!”
My third ex-wife told me that it was the most “overwhelmingly chauvinistic” thing she’d ever heard me say. I got defensive, trying to pretend that I was “only joking”, but it left a mark. She brought it back up again when we were going through marriage counseling, preparing for divorce.
This is not my fantasy any longer. But truth be told, it was my fantasy — my idea of heaven — for years and years. It wasn’t just my own chronic infidelity and my brief romantic obsessions that made this fantasy so appealing. Especially in my first two marriages, and indeed into my early thirties, I had a hard time setting boundaries with my own mother. Like so many American men (ask their significant others), I helped create a dynamic in which my wife or girlfriend would end up feeling as if she had to compete with my mom for my devotion. Ask around, and you’ll hear lots of frustrated wives and girlfriends talking about how their grown husbands and boyfriends will still “drop everything” to take care of Mama. It took me a very long time to change that dynamic with my own mother, and it’s only now, in this fourth and final marriage, that I’ve been able to keep truly healthy boundaries.
And yes, truly, I loved the idea of all of my exes chatting together, laughing together in what Cirque calls “a divine spirit of sisterhood”, making it clear that they forgave me both my petty and my grand betrayals. (With each passing year from my teens until my mid-thirties, as the number of ex-lovers grew and grew, so too did the imaginary guest list for this heavenly party.) I was enraptured by the vision of talking and joking and reminiscing with all of these women at once, without any hint of jealousy on their part — and without any pressure on me to make a decision among any of them. Narcissistic and puerile indeed! Surely the hallmark of arrested development is the longing not to make decisions, particularly those that bring any one relationship to an end.
Over the years, I’ve shared this “all the women coming together vision” with many male friends; a great many of them nodded enthusiastically when I described what one called “the great love feast in the sky”. Anecdotally, it’s not an uncommon male fantasy. Ask all the guys who still want to “stay close” to their exes while trying to practice real intimacy with their current lovers! (I note, too, that I’ve known a few heterosexual women who embraced their own version of this “heaven dream”, but that in general, there seems to be a sharp gender divide.)
I stopped having this fantasy a few years ago. I didn’t grow out of it on my own, mind you. I had to do a lot of work to confront my own self-centeredness, my own compulsive need to be loved by everyone (especially by women), my own reluctance to have anything intimate ever end. Therapy, prayer, and good mentors all helped. My heaven today has more to do with lions and lambs lying down together than with all of my exes feting me. That’s progress, I think.
But it was amusing — and even a bit disquieting — to see my old fantasy brought to life so vividly yesterday by the masterful acrobats and artists of Cirque de Soleil.
Why is it so bad to want to be loved by all? Isn’t that a fundamental human desire? (though I appreciate the difference between ‘want’ and ‘need’.)
My idea of heaven, as a heterosexual woman, does involve being with the men whom I have really loved in my life, except that ‘choice’ is no longer relevant in that context. Don’t Milton’s angels merge their fire with each other outside the earthly notion of couples? I rather like that idea.
Of course that is not to say that would be a recipe for success in this life. But if there is no sexual connotation, why shouldn’t we wish significant exes and current partners to stay parts of our lives, and to get on with each other, as long as boundaries are carefully drawn, and orders of importance maintained?
Here’s the problem: wanting to be reunited with all of one’s loved ones is not the issue. What’s problematic is that our fantasies at times bleed into our real world. Longing for a world where you don’t have to make hard choices, even in your imagination, can increase your resentment towards the person who in real life is insisting you make that choice. The “orders of importance” you and I both agree our vital are rarely negotiated without pain or disappointment on someone’s part, and for many men who long to be loved and long to never be the “bad guy”, making somebody unhappy in order to set those boundaries is very upsetting.
The way I see this kind of phenomenon play out with women is when a woman might have several men interested in her, but she doesn’t want to “make him feel bad,” by rejecting one or more - even if she’s not actually interested in any of them. I’ve been that girl, and I realize now that it was borne more out of enjoying being liked (like liked!) than real concern for the guys’ feelings.
Or maybe I’m making an association that isn’t there.
As someone who knows your mother( who, as you know, is not a classically clingy Jewish one like mine is) I find this piece of information about her surprising. Not about what part you must have played in it, just hers. Your mom has always coe across as fiercely independent) I can picture you ‘dropping everything’ at that time, I just can’t picture her asking you to.
Say more about that if you don’t mind.
Incidentally, my father got a chance to live out that fantasy. When he divorced his first wife and married my mom, the two of them lived in one house on his property and his first wife and their kids lived in another one. This went on for a year…………….and he thought that all of them having dinner together would make everyone more comfortable with the situation!
I’m grateful no one was killed.
I can see what would be problematic about a dream of heaven where there’s romantic/sexual love between you and all these women, but the general idea of ‘everyone I’ve ever loved, happy and not fighting’ seems lovely. I can happily see heaven as a place where you don’t have to choose between dinner with the kids, a date with your spouse, and cooking for your parents. Sure, it’s “narcissistic” in the sense that it’s all about what would make you happy, without having to give anything up - but isn’t that the idea of ‘heaven’ anyway? And it sounds like the women would also be happy, so it’s not a pleasure built on someone’s suffering…
But of course, in real life there are only so many hours in the day, and we’re all flawed beings, so we have to make these decisions as well as we are able. Maybe the lesson is that the error lies in dwelling on heaven, dreaming about unattainable perfection rather than living the life we’ve got.
I’m not convinced this is so bad. My idea of heaven would involves lots of sexual love with no sexual jealousy (since what’s the need for jealousy there is no pain or stress being imposed on lovers from outside). My question: would it destroy the fantasy if the women got to have all the male partners they wanted, and you were expected to get along with those men? In my experience, this is the point where a lot of men stop finding the fantasy so attractive. To my mind, whether the fantasy is chauvinistic depends on the answer to that question.