My boyfriend and I were going nowhere, so I did what any self-proclaimed gay academic would do: I re-read Roland Barthes.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
I was introduced to Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse by a good friend I was sleeping with. We'd just had brunch and sex when he told me, "Read it." I found his edition of the book on his bedside table. The yellowing pages were soft against my fingers as his own traced figures on my skin. "It's right up your alley."
"Why's that?" I said.
"You're like the book." He planted kisses down my spine with each word. "Intelligent. Gorgeous. Romantic..."
After another orgasm, I got a copy that very afternoon.
We weren't, nor would we ever be, "boyfriends." He was in a long-term open relationship (now marriage) and I was living in New York for just a few months. So I didn't expect much. But his warm brown eyes were engaging. We'd walk around Manhattan and talk about books. We'd go out to dinner and talk about writing. And we'd kiss and turn snowfall into rain.
We weren't sure what to call ourselves. He was older and established — my mentor, in a sense. So we played with the term "lover." How French, I thought. I could do French. But for Barthes, an actual gay Frenchman, being a lover was a different ordeal.
Barthes wrote A Lover's Discourse in 1977 as a collection of notes on amorous language. "Figures," he calls them, gestures of the lover at work. He says his goal is to present scenes of language wherein the lover might recognize himself. The whole thing reads like a dictionary of a lover's desire, an exercise in defining every move made, thought shared, word said. Or unsaid.
"Waiting," for example, Barthes describes as "the tumult of anxiety provoked by waiting for the loved being, subject to trivial delays (rendezvous, letters, telephone calls, returns)." He talks about waiting by the phone for his loved one to call. He dare not attempt to find him or call him lest he miss him. Barthes reports how his feelings ricochet between dread and anger and sadness, all while seated by the telephone. (Imagine if he had iMessage.)
"Am I in love?" he writes. "Yes, since I am waiting. The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits."
Barthes uses words to make a lucid mirror out of Discourse. But it was only two years later, when I looked into it again, that I recognized myself. This happened, predictably, when I found myself "a boyfriend."
We began using the word when we were having real estate problems in New York. I needed to move out of an apartment I couldn't afford and his landlord refused to renew his lease. After he texted me with this news, I called him.
"I think we can do it," he said. I could hear his crooked smile through the phone.
Between breathy laughs, I said, "I know we've only just met."
We'd already gone on four dates within nine days, so the intimate act of telephoning was permissible, among other suggestions. "We could live together."
The fact I could sit in silence with him, gaze into his steely blue eyes for hours, I willingly mistook for comfort. We'd walk around Brooklyn and stare at the pavement. We'd go out to dinner and chew on our food. But we'd kiss and turn the rain into steam.
He was beautiful and said the same of me. He'd text me good night and good morning. He was my age and single. These things, I decided, were good enough. And thus, I became the lover at work.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
adorable / adorable
Not managing to name the specialty of his desire for the loved being, the amorous subject falls back on this rather stupid word: adorable!
Via Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
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