True Love: After reading The Lady with the Dog and The Trick: Notes toward a Theory of Plot

I have never had the fortune of being in love. Of course, I had my fair share of childish crushes but I have never actually felt love. But after reading The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov and The Trick: Notes toward a Theory of Plot by Marilyn Abilskov, I got a glimpse at what being crazy in love is.

In both stories, the characters find meaning in their otherwise meaningless lives with their love. Both Dmitri and Anna were never in love before meeting each other. Dmitri is married to a wife that he is secretly afraid of and doesn’t care if he is unfaithful to her. “He had never once loved …. And only now when his head was grey he had fallen properly, really in love –for the first time in his life.” To Dmitri, meeting new women was a search for excitement and life. And his search ended when he found Anna. Anna became the center of his universe, unable to live his life without thinking about her, her existence haunting his mind. “In the evenings she peeped out at him from the bookcase, from the fireplace, from the corner – he heard her breathing, the caressing rustle of her dress. In the street he watched the women, looking for some one like her.” Dmitri can’t stand being away from her, the life and freedom he found so late. 

Anna is inexperienced and married to a “flunkey”, who she doesn’t even know what he does. She lives inside the confides of “a long grey fence adorned with nails” that “one would run away from”. She too came to Yalta to live. She too found life when she met Dmitri, indulging in their sinful love that makes her despise herself. She is unhappy without him, “have thought of nothing but [Dimitri] all the time…. [Lives] only in the thought of [him]”.  She is concerned about the consequences of their loves but cannot stay away from Dmitri regardless, lying to her husband to go to Moscow to see him.

Marilyn barely has a life before meeting him. She “was forty-two years old” and “lived alone for many years”. She “lived an uneventful [life]”, “didn’t have any friends”, and “wasn’t interested in fun”. After meeting him, her life revolved around him. She “called him every night” and visited him at the hospital every week. She was devoted to him, spending her life caring for him. Her love towards him was the only meaning in her life, even something as simple as him asking how she was meaning everything to her.

However, in both stories, their love does not ensure a happy ending. Although the ending of The Lady with the Dogis ambiguous, it is hard to expect a happy life for them. The obstacles they have to overcome, “the necessity for secrecy, for deception, for living in different towns and not seeing each other for long at a time”, are hard to completely overcome. Their love might not be able to last the “long, long road before them”. The distance and time between them is only the start of their battles, having to deal with their spouses and the social perceptions of their love. Especially for Anna, who has more to lose in such situation, can’t help but think about the sins they are committing, and how far they are deviating from the “pure, honest life” she loves.  Reading their tale and imagining their future, one begins to wonder if it would have been better if they had never met each other before, not fully living but also not feeling the pain resulting from their love.

In The Trick, Marilyn doesn’t end up happily living a life loved by him. In fact, although she was crazy in love, unlike in The Lady with the Dog, it is hard to say that Marilyn was truly in love with him. She never loved him, rather she loved the idea of being in love. The only reason Marilyn loved and cared for him was because it was convenient. She “always knew where he was … where he was yesterday, and where he would be tomorrow, and where he would be the day after that and the day after that. [She] did not worry about him meeting someone else”. Marilyn felt “romance as charity. Romance as service project. Romance as the plot that makes the world go round.” She cared for him not because she loved her but because she expected him to love her back, expecting him to be grateful “to the woman who’d called every night, the one who’d waited so patiently, the person who’d seen him through his darkest hour.” Marilyn didn’t love him as an individual, for who he was. He is “anonymous”; his true self doesn’t matter to her. He never loved her either, which is why he was interested in Isabel and why he wasn’t devoted to Marilyn after being released and having no reason to depend on her. The love inThe Trickwas only an illusion.

I have never had the fortune of being in love, but after reading the stories, I don’t feel eager to be crazy in love.