On Exhorting Feeling

Sometimes there was only a social custom in mind—as when a person wished to feel sad at a funeral. But other times there was a desperate inner desire to avoid pain. Herbert Gold describes a man’s effort to prevent himself from feeling love for a wife he no longer has:

“He fought against love, he fought against grief, he fought against anger. They were all linked. He reminded himself when touched, moved, overwhelmed by the sights and smell of her, or a sight and smell which recalled her, or passing their old house or eating their foods, or walking on their streets; don’t do this, don’t feel. First he succeeded in removing her from the struggle… He lost his love. He lost his anger. She became a limited idea, like a newspaper death notice. He did not lose her entirely, but chipped away at it: don’t, don’t, don’t, he would remind himself in the middle of the night; don’t feel; and then dream what he could.”

It also presupposes an aspiration to feel. The man who fought against love wanted to feel the same about his former wife as he thought she felt about him; if he was a limited idea to her, he wanted her to be that for him. A courtly lover in twelfth-century France or a fourteen-year-old American female rock fan might have been more disposed to aspire to one-sided love, to want it that way. Deep acting comes with its social stories about what we aspire to feel.

pg. 39, Arlie R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling