It’s November 1989 and Sophie is engaged to be married. Nick, her fiancé, has sent his half of the wedding invitations. Her half of the invitations, all 60 of them, remain in a carrier bag under her desk at work. She can’t bring herself to mail them, and she’s not sure why. It’s not that she doesn’t love him—she does, she can’t wait to get married—but still, the invitations stay at the office. Eventually, a friend puts her in touch with the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, hoping that he might be able to tell her why.
During a long and curious consultation, Sophie unpacks her childhood and the ways in which loss—which is, in some ways, another word for “change”—had threatened her family unit. It wasn’t that she was afraid of marriage, per se, but perhaps she was afraid of the losses that marriage might entail.
Because loss, as Grosz points out to me over Zoom some 35 years later, is fundamental to life, and also love. “Development, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is losing something that you don’t want to lose [in order] to have the new thing.” When it comes to making that sort of exchange, some are more reluctant than others. Sophie mailed her invitations the weekend after that initial consultation.
Grosz’s new book, Love’s Labor, recounts this and many other sessions from the past few decades of his work as a psychoanalyst. We’re introduced to people who’ve had affairs; who’ve found themselves embroiled in on-off, off-on relationships; who’ve destroyed their relationships with paranoia; who keep dating different versions of the same person. If Grosz’s first book, The Examined Life, was all about his patients’ personal lives and struggles, Love’s Labor—which is written in a similar way, as a series of case studies—is much more interested in his patients’ approach to love, specifically. Why might we behave in the ways we do, and what might that say about all of us?
As someone who is incredibly obsessed with other people’s personal lives and the minutiae of their relationships, I couldn’t wait to pick Grosz’s brain. Here’s everything we spoke about.
Vogue: Why did you decide to write this book?
Stephen Grosz: This book came to me because I realized that, with my patients, we were arriving at things which were very different from how people ordinarily think about love. People come and tell me stories. That’s how psychoanalysis works, too, because, when my students read case histories, it’s the story-ness of it that really gets you, so it has to be written as a story too. I started thinking that I want to write in this area, in love, and really about the work of it.
You’ve mentioned that, over the course of a marriage, you’ll go through phases of hating each other. Why do you think some people choose to get divorced, while others see it through?
Quite interestingly, I have men come into my room—more often men—who have been remarrying different women, but what they should have done is remarry the woman they started with.
In many instances, [divorce] is probably a good idea—I can’t judge. But sometimes, there’s the possibility of people really changing and breaking through the false narrative they’ve generated around themselves about the other person. And if you can do that, you can then remarry [that same person]. This isn’t how most books talk about marriage, so I wanted to. That’s what I was seeing my patients do. They were teaching me, in fact, about all of this.
So maybe the marriages that last the longest are those in which two people allow each other to change.