Pain and Pleasure

Is it possible to embrace both?

By Alana Lopez 

Graphic by Rhiannon Li

At the end of my sophomore year, I hit rock bottom. Of course, there was a man involved, and of course, it ended poorly. The only thing I could do, besides be a total baby about it, was write about it 24/7. I recently reread those first drafts and realized something important: I did indeed write about it—the feelings of pain—but I did not write about him. There are too many ways to describe pain. You could compare it to a drop in one’s stomach, a slap to the face or a kicked dog who keeps coming back. But now I question my own authorial perspective: Did it really feel like a slap to the face? Like devastation? Over him? 

Yes, I find it way too fun to wallow in my own pain. Thank you for asking. I know very well how to write about love that maims and love that fails. I know how to point fingers and say “You hurt me and never said sorry.” I know how to give it eternal life in my leather-bound notebooks. I know how to make that playlist with “Liability” on it, go to the Coolidge and sob in a darkened theater, and wish on stars for things to change and then wish again when they don’t. 

It’s been a year and half since then, so it’s safe to say I’m over it. I’m even in love with someone else, but I do not write about it. There’s no problem to solve or ambiguous actions to decode. He does not find another girlfriend without telling me (like the last one). He’s kind and he's smart and he loves me (unlike the last one), so why would I complicate it?

When I had been heartbroken, my best friend and I looked for movies where “they don’t end up together and it’s ok” to console my disparaged ego and wounded heart. Those films answered my most pressing question, which was (uninterestingly): Is everything going to be okay??? 

When I think about that pressing question, I do receive an answer of sorts. With pain comes the aching need for comfort. When we need comfort, we seek affirmation of so many things. We want to know we aren’t alone. So now, another question: If art about pain is meant to provide consolation in times of despair (in whatever sordid form that is), when—if ever—do we naturally gravitate towards art about joy? 

I’ve always loved romantic comedies because there is no genre as contingent on a happy ending. It’s constitutionally dependent on wish fulfillment. If there is any paramount image of valuing joy, it's the feeling of loving and being loved back. For that, I think the genre has been unnecessarily degraded as though there is decidedly more moral relevance or narrative potential in suffering than there is in joy. 

There is always an integral narrative pillar that redirects the principal relationship right before we reach the end: the third act breakup. Miscommunication, missed connections, misfires on either side— these provide a distinction between the tragedy of what could be and the bliss of what is.

Triumphancy, here, is stimulated by the highly-saturated possibility of a potential loss. When the guy gets the girl at the end of the book, we are given satisfaction from the near-miss (1) and the reconciliation (2).

So which one do we choose? Joy or suffering? Pain or pleasure? One of those Serious Literary Types once quoted Nietzsche in a seminar when I made a slightly flawed point about the necessity of optimism in Candide. “In pain, there is as much wisdom as in pleasure,” he’d said to me. We were both partially right: suffering and joy take up equal, opposite and necessary spaces in life. One is put into context by the other. It was, for me, a worthwhile attempt to try and look away from the crash site, away from my anthologies of suffering. Perhaps to focus on joy is to hold a hand over one’s eyes even knowing that the pain will still be there.