Secrecy, Truth, and the Aftermath of First Love | Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions 2.2

In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal continue their conversation about the aftermath of Abigail’s first love and the complicated truth she carried home from Paris. 

Abigail reflects on heartbreak, secrecy, the loss of innocence, and why telling the truth can sometimes distort an experience rather than preserve it.

The conversation explores romantic disappointment, privacy, cultural expectations for women, psychoanalysis, and Abigail’s search for narrative continuity as she tries to understand what the relationship meant and what would follow from it. 

Jerry and Abigail also consider whether women today have enough space to acknowledge the emotional consequences of first love and heartbreak without reducing those experiences to familiar social or psychological categories.

Get a glimpse into next week’s episode as Abigail begins the story of her friend John Armstrong, a fellow Fulbright scholar whose ideals would lead him on a journey with tragic consequences.

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Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically.

Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo

Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated.

Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

Transcript

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:00:15,727 ]What kind of a hand have we been dealt as women today, and how can we best play it? It's a large question that's always lurking in the background, and since the answers aren't obvious, I find women's lives to be immediately suspenseful and interesting. Don't you? Wait a minute. Who am I? I'm Abigail L. Rosenthal. Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and while my advice has always been not to take my advice, I do write a weekly blog I call Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column. And so, dear listener, I invite you to pull up a chair at this virtual cafe table, no matter your gender, age, convictions, or style of life. 

Narrator

[ 00:01:32,827 ]Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions. Part two, continued. Married philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal discuss her newest book  Confessions of a Young Philosopher. In this episode, the conversation returns to Abigail's experience and its aftermath, where the consequences are no longer private but begin to affect how she relates to others. As she reflects on secrecy, truth, and the need to protect the complexity of what happened, the question becomes not just what to say, but whether it can be said at all.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:12,977 ]”Expects a good outcome, continuity, trustworthiness, and has a frightfully hard time dealing with disappointments of the heart.” So that is the Abigail who's not receiving a letter. And then the question is, what are you going to do? You talk about, you might want to say a word about this Dangerous Liaisons novel, an 18th century, has been made into well-known movie under this English title. It seems like the story of a seducer.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:02:48,737 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:50,527 ]The seducer writes letters to his victim and toward the denouement you say a well-meaning female character in that novel “solemnly pronounces the moral. Here's the moral: How any caring person must tremble at the griefs that follow in the train of even one single dangerous liaison.”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:18,817 ]And you're back feeling you can't, you know you're a girl of the 50s. This is not acceptable to have lost your virginity. It's also highly risky, because of pregnancy, the risk every girl always faces, right, to this day. But also, you were now for the first time in your life lying to your parents. You couldn't tell them what really happened.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:03:50,137 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:51,097 ]And so you kind of tell them a fake story or something. Oh, it was nice. you know.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:03:57,277 ]The loss of innocence compounded.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:02,007 ]Yeah.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:04:04,337 ] BecauseI hadn't had a relation of a double kind, a concealed kind with my parents. In those days, you didn't extend adolescent rebellion, you sort of loved your parents. That was the cultural norm. And my parents certainly deserved to be loved. They were unusually interesting and fine people.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:04:39,977 ]My friends from high school or college were interested to know my parents. They were, you know, each one, one of a kind. And my relation to them was precious to me and now...

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:05:01,927 ]it was corrupted, it was marred. And people will say, you know, the healthy and strong-minded kibitzers from the sidelines watching this game will say, "Well, tell the truth. Don't live a lie."

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:05:20,697 ]Yeah, thank you and no thank you. I don't know how to tell the truth. I didn't wish to tell the truth, the truth was mine. You know, I wanted, in a sense to possess the truth and I would be giving it away if I told it, and I would be sculpting it to match something about their worldview that could even hear what I was saying. It would have to be changed in the telling, and I thought it more…

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:05:59,017 ]truth-respectful to keep the truth of this broken heart romance, this sort of liaison dangereuse as it turned out, but I always was aware there was another element in it that didn't match the classic seducer's rakes progress profile.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:06:30,587 ]So it had this doubleness and it was important to respect the truth of that and I thought it'll just get flattened into some kind of confession of a misdeed or victimized innocent.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:06:58,257 ]Or some, stereotypical template into which I would find my story fitted, they would have to put it in one of the other of those places, and if they wanted to know more, that would be an invasion of privacy, and the privacy, though I hadn't sought it, was precious. It had something to do with erotic maturity.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:32,877 ]People who have a meaningful sexual erotic relationship don't go blaring it all over town. They keep it. They want to know, does this portend anything? Does it send vectors in one or another directions? It's a kind of beginning point, the loss of innocence, but the beginning of whatever follows from that loss. That's why I didn't disappear into the waters of the Seine.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:08:10,927 ] I thought something follows from this. And, so for those that medley of reasons, it became a secret, but a secret needs to be replaced by something public that can overlay the darkness in which the secret is living with something in the daylight to cover the time that it took for that secret experience to unfold and whatever the cover story is, it'll be something that isn't true.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:08:53,847 ]So for the first time in my life, I'm lying, as a part of my life strategy, and that's a second loss of innocence. And I don't know to this day, given how things were then, how better I could have dealt with this. Later, it wouldn't have been needed. The culture changed, my parents changed, they had learned the story in another way. But back then, nothing had changed. Except me.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:35,127 ]It sounds as if part of your situation was, well, you still love Phidias.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:09:43,167 ]Yes

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:43,837 ]You hold him precious in your heart even though it was an you know from Paris on, it's an impossible love. But that's an impossible love isn't a non-love. It's still a love and dear. If you'd told it publicly, well, that would have been lost. It would have been, oh, here's the seducer, what a cad, something like that. What else could it have been? As a story for the public. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:10:14,667 ]And you valued the real story, which was still, you might say, a love story that you cherished.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:10:23,317 ]Yeah. Exactly. And there was no one with whom that hidden underlying truth could be shared. No one. Not even women friends. There was simply no conceptual space in which it could live.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:10:47,847 ]and Liaison Dangereuse, this 18th-century novel of cynicism, aristocratic cynicism, would have been the frame into which the truth of the story would have instantly been emptied by anyone who knew of it. And so, the truth would have been a falsification.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:20,977 ]You conclude this um chapter with asking about what was the moral for your situation? Was the moral just, okay, been seduced too dangerously liason, oh my god, trail of tears or something that follows such a thing? Well, you say, no, not exactly.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:47,277 ]”Beneath the surface currents, where all these whirling obstacles floated, another view of the matter could be found. The encounter with Phidias had staked its irrepressible claim on my attention. It would move me to seek a thread through the labyrinth it offered. My time had received its shaping contours.” So this is going to go on.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:12:21,757 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:12:23,167 ]You're going to be following here. You call it a thread. You're going to be somehow following this thread, I guess to see where it led or what it meant.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:12:33,207 ]It's Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth. The way you get out of the labyrinth is you hold of the thread and I suppose she gives it to Theseus who can kill a monster, the Minotaur, but then the question is how can he get out once he slays the Minotaur and she says hold on to the thread.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:12:59,847 ] I'm looking for the Jewish vocation is narrative continuity. And I'm trying to maintain narrative continuity and the elements of the narrative are hidden. They are either hidden because I'm lying about them, because they are a secret, because no one would understand them.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:13:32,857 ]Even if I told the truth, the truth itself would morph into some banal way of constructing and interpreting these events that would have been itself false. It was a big era of psychoanalysis for the whole of the works of Freud, you know, I'll give you a nickel, where this kind of problem is concerned.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:10,737 ] They simply, well where a lot of human situations are concerned, but what the problem of the dominance of Freudian psychoanalysis at that time was it tarnished the search for truth.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:31,907 ]The search for truth became a discovery postulated by this man's hypothesis that every boy wants to kill his father and have sex with his mother, and the girls want to do whatever comes closest to that that a girl can do, and there's no empirical evidence at all that this hypothesis applies to any human reality. It's a myth.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:15:04,997 ]It's a psychoanalysis is founded on a hypothesis that doesn't prove out, that doesn't have any therapeutic benefit or empirical evidence supporting it, but anyway, one of the dangers of telling a hidden truth with a sexual content is that it would be immediately chewed up, swallowed, and you know spat out in terms of a theory that didn't correspond to reality at all and had a sullying function. Whatever was pure, whatever was innocent got to be muddied in a in a mistaken theory.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:04,297 ]So, there was every reason in the world not to publicize this, the difficult reality I was aware of.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:16,647 ]Thinking of our current times, that atmosphere would make it hard for a young woman who's experienced the current version of what you did. A first love and a heartbreak doesn't pan out. You thought it was going to go somewhere and the guy broke your heart.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:38,847 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:39,617 ]And I'm not sure a young woman would find that easy to express these days, you know, where the world lacked a conceptual space for it in one way in your time.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:51,497 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:51,947 ]but it seems to lack a conceptual space for it now or a social space for it now.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:56,647 ]Yes.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:57,217 ]Yeah, it's as if the social pressure is to give as little importance as possible to this classic situation of a romantic expectation disappointed.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:17:17,937 ]It's been, you know, one of the staples of feminine life for a long, long time. You know, with reprisals and punishments in the days before contraception that were, you know, quite life-threatening. But social exile, ruin, that's what it was called. It was a girl was ruined.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:17:50,617 ]But suppose a girl feels emotionally ruined and there's no social space in which that feeling can find its feet, can find its words, can be confided to anybody.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:18:14,957 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:18:17,257 ]The next chapter is titled Vinciremos. We'll find out what that means as we talk about the chapter, but it starts with you say the only friend you've ever had who made the New York Times front page, John Armstrong. And the front page was of John Armstrong and I think three friends or three people in total.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:18:45,137 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:18:46,197 ]Being killed. And you might just share a little of the background. I didn't find a single line that sort of summarized the story.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:18:58,207 ]Well, John was a Fulbright like the rest of us.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:19:03,127 ]So he is in Paris with you.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:19:04,727 ]Yeah, an American young man. He was a little older than the rest of us, and he had, at least on the side that was turned toward me, he had high ideals. For example, you shouldn't spend time in Paris idly. If you got this fellowship because you've made a promise to accomplish a certain piece of work, then every day you spent in Paris should advance that project and fulfill that promise.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:19:44,807 ]And there were all kinds of things big and little. There was still an army store where American troops stationed abroad could buy goods, but Americans civilians ought not to buy there. And John would reprove anyone who wanted to take advantage of the lax surveillance at that PX store. And so on.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:20:22,667 ]And John and I had a… there was a certain kind of clarity talking to John. He didn't go for psychoanalysis. He was literary. He had a…not a believer as a lot of us young Americans were. He didn't think there was any divine element in real life. And he thought Homer's Iliad illustrative of how real life goes. Those guys are...

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:21:01,107 ]are fighting and killing each other on the ground, and there aren't any gods in the sky. That's the whole story. Whole story is what happens with Achilles and his opposite number among the Trojans. And John had decided to test his ideals, his values, by going with a couple of American young men in a rented French car that was given, lent them, in order to prove to be an advertisement for the merits of that car. And they were going to drive from Egypt to the bottom of Africa.

Narrator

[ 00:21:52,747 ]What remains is not only the experience itself, but the burden of holding a truth that cannot be easily shared. Find out what happens to John next episode. See you next episode or sooner at dearabbie-nonadvice.com.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:22:16,247 ]Thanks so much, dear listener. If this added value to your life, I'd be happy if you subscribed. You can find me at www.abigailrosenthal.com. I've written a book called A Good Look at Evil, and if that's not too scary for you, you can buy it on Amazon. Another book is called Confessions of a Young Philosopher, and that's forthcoming soon with illustrations.